March 2023

March 2023 Topic: What is your favorite (business) book? And why?

By Sharon Loduca, Real Estate Professional in Ontario, Canada

At that moment, whatever book I’m reading happens to be my best book.  What makes them my fovourite is what I can learn from them, how they motivate me, how challenged I am to apply that knowledge, and how easy it is for me to understand. The most recent one was Your Next Five Moves by Patrick Bet-David.

I also believe that ‘business’ and ‘personal’ are intertwined. Mainly that’s because, whatever we offer in our business model, will still be infused with our individual make-up. It is what separates one business from another. It’s what allows our thumbprint to be on our business, sealing it as ours.

Patrick Bet-David flees the Iranian Revolution and lives for a time in a refugee camp en route to building his life in the US. You can be sure he learned a lot during that stage of his life. He starts his book with an understanding of chess players’ next moves. He quickly moves it from there to our next moves in life. our next moves in business. I know nothing about chess. I do understand that personal growth and business growth go hand-in-hand.  I need to understand tackling challenges and face fears and test solutions in my personal life in order to be able to apply them in my business strategies.

Bet-David’s five moves, you can read about for yourself, but here are the reasons why they connected with me:

1. Master Knowing Yourself:  This rings true to my understanding that our business strategies reflect who we are as persons.

• Master The Ability To Reason. Do you know where it is hard, really hard, to reason? Yes – in our personal life – with those who are close to us! But if we can learn to reason in our personal lives, what skills will we have acquired for business applications?

• Master Building The Right Team. It is imperative we have the right people around us to support us. We need the strength and support of our people. We will also find our best selves as we also learn to find our own strength and wisdom to support them. The right team reinforces us to be our best, strongest, wisest, brightest, and most authentic selves.

• Master Strategy to Scale.  What is this really, at its core? Learn to Grow. Then apply what you’ve learned to grow more.  In business we may hear those words as exponential growth, growth investment, raising capital & creating systems. This can seem overwhelming and beyond our knowledge skillset, particularly as entrepreneurs. However, the first 3 moves above set us up well to tackle move #4 🙂

• Master Making Power Plays. How we “power play” will determine our reputation and future business. It’s how we build our name. It’s how we tell the public whether they can trust us to honour our word and to stand behind our product or service. It’s how we tell them about our reliability and our stability. 

A lot of this is played out today on social media. So please, always think about your post and how you will respond. Always be thinking about how it will reflect on you. If you can control your narrative, social media will reflect it for you, worldwide, forever out there. This is powerful.

So back we go to Move #1 and dig in a little deeper. And, always, love what you do. 🙂

“The only thing separating us from greatness is a vision and a plan for achieving greatness. When you’re fighting for a cause, a dream, something greater than yourself, you will find the enthusiasm, passion, and joy that make life a great adventure. The key is identifying your cause and knowing who you want to be.” ~ Patrick Bet-David