EP32 - An (Overly) Honest Review of The Tiny MBA with Brendan Hufford

Alex Hillman: What is up brick stackers! Welcome back to a brand-new episode of Stacking the Bricks. As always, I’m your host, Alex Hillman and this is yet another edition of The Tiny MBA Podcast Tour. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been visiting podcasts all across the internet, talking with entrepreneurs and creative people, just like you.

These folks though, have already had a chance to read a copy of my new book, The Tiny MBA, and in each of these conversations, we get a chance to go deeper into their favorite lessons from the book to help you get an even better understanding of how they might be valuable to you.

In the last episode, I sat down with Ken and Becca from Chariot Solutions to talk about their favorite lessons from the book. So, if you haven’t had a chance to check that one out yet, make sure you tune in when you’re done listening here.

In this episode, I visited with Brendan Hufford on the SEO for the Rest of Us show, which you can find on both YouTube and anywhere you get podcasts. Brendan and I talked about how The Tiny MBA was kind of a surprise for him, but in a good way, why building trust at scale is actually a better way to think about building an audience, and how to get over the fear of just putting yourself out there on the internet.

With that, I hope you enjoy this in-depth conversation that I had with Brendan.

Here we go!

Brendan Hufford: It’s the closest thing I’ve found, and I mean, this to be complimentary not to be comparative, to a book that I read from Paul Jarvis called Everything I Know, because, I was reading this recently that there’s a lot of beginner, how-to content out there, where you’ve got to give people the step-by-step. But if you want to write for high-level marketers and executives, just give them a framework. They’ll fill in the data details with their own reality. I noticed that about Paul’s book - and this was probably like, four or five years ago. And it was very like transformative for me.

I feel the same about The Tiny MBA, because there’s enough in there to give you something very concrete, but also enough that it’s not so prescriptive on certain things that you can’t fill in your own details.

Alex Hillman: Yeah. Well, and the truth is, is like I’ve been teaching the how-to stuff long enough to know that even when you do prescribe it, people fill it in with their own details anyway.

The intent is, it’s written at a different level, very much on purpose and it was fun to get your response. It’s similar to some things I’ve read from other folks that were the first few people that read it saying, ”I know you said I could read this in 30 minutes but I felt like I wanted to sit with each page for at least a couple of minutes and be like, what does that mean for me though?”

In a good way. The other comparison that one of the first people who read it says this reminded them of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies deck, which wasn’t a book, but it was a bunch of prompts that are meant to make your brain go, hang on a second, in a constructive, positive way.

Brendan Hufford: A very important question, we’re going to start out with this. Question one, what is this typeface and why do I love it so much?

Alex Hillman: Which one is that?

Brendan Hufford: The one that you use in the arts and on the cover. And I’m just like, I love it. Like, I want to get tattoos of this.

Alex Hillman: Credit goes to the designer of the book, Hannah Litvin. She’s extraordinary. I’m pulling up the file here…

Brendan Hufford: We’ve got to get out some files here! Sorry, I made you take into it! While you’re looking that up, I’ll also say on the cover – this will definitely get people to at least check out the cover – it says The Tiny MBA, but ‘the’ is a sticker that reminds me of, just so much nostalgia and childhood for me of going to - ironically because you’re from Philadelphia – but I’m from upstate New York and we had a store there, a chain of stores called Philadelphia Sales. And I feel like every store there, all those stores use that exact same sticker. As soon as I saw it, I was just like, “Oh, that’s so wonderful!”

Alex Hillman: Cool! So, I’ll get back to the font vis a vis this story. When Hannah first asked, especially on the cover, which we designed before we did some of the typography artwork inside, she said, “what do you want in terms of inspiration for the book?” And I said, “you know, part of me wants to compare it to the classics”, How to Win Friends and Influence People; The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey; Speed of Trust. They all have an aesthetic to them that is extremely type driven and definitely of a different time period. At the same time, I kind of wanted to parody them. So, I was like, I want it, but I don’t. So, I don’t know if that’s useful to you at all. And somehow, she nailed this kind of retro…almost a parody, but still really, really kind of seductive. So, the cover font, Tiny MBA is a font called ‘seventies’. And the other one that you love is called ‘mamba’. We’re going to have to add to the website, like a little production color form that includes those because multiple people have been like, “what are these fonts? They are fantastic!”

Brendan Hufford: It’s so good. It’s so funny, I have my 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Literally has the pricing sticker on it, I bought it used off Amazon because this is like the 19 whatever version of it when it first came out, but it has a price sticker that somebody scribbled out and I just loved it. And I love that too. It also made me look really close and read what it actually says on there, which it’s the chef’s kiss. And I love it.

I also want to give you kudos – you told us a story towards the beginning about sitting in a principles of macro-economics class that I have also, we weren’t in the same class - but we were in the same class - and it made me laugh so hard that I was like making dolphin sounds. If you’ve been there, you’ve been there. And you’re like, “I paid $96 for this book on macro-economics, and this class is awful. When am I ever going to use this?” That is what you mentioned about the antithesis kind of thing that this is not that.

Alex Hillman: Yeah. Well, specifically in that story, I mean, I took that class and things like that class caused me to drop out of school and perhaps for at least a moment, think maybe business isn’t for me. And I think that’s another thing, a lot of folks - I’ve so many friends who were like, I would hate running my own business. I’m like, I mean maybe, but based on what? The things that they are often based on are these sorts of sometimes out of date, but always kind of tropey and weird and not quite really attuned to the reality. There’s lots of things about running a business that are hard, but the things that freak people out, I think are just not the things that are going to ruin your day most of the time.

For as miserable as I was in those classes, having that experience definitely pushed me in the direction of, I think I understand what my priorities are now. It’s important to understand these concepts, but 10 weeks of class about it?! I don’t know about that!

Brendan Hufford: I wanted to also just pull this thread a little bit more and come back to the whole beginning of content, advanced content kind of thing. Because I wasn’t prepared for what I read in the book, I thought it was going to be very standard. I have an expectation of when people say I’ve written a book, what it is going to be, and this was very different. This was very, again, I mentioned Paul Jarvis, and it’s very what I meant. When you read books by Seth Goden and you’re like, I thought I knew what a book was, and this is not that. I mean that as a compliment. This is from watching – I’ve probably watched inception 50 plus times, but I’m very fascinated with the idea like I mentioned earlier of they give them the dream, and then they fill it with their own subconscious. The book when people see it for the first time and they see the pages or they read the review that I’m writing and everything, they’ll see some of it. It’s not long winded, there’s not the business book tropes of like, we’ve got to tell you five stories about every single point so you can remember it. There’s none of that. It’s very short. It’s very punchy. And I love that. Tell me, why did you decide to make it like this?

Alex Hillman: So here’s the fun part, is that I didn’t decide to make a book that way. This book, the core of this book started on Twitter. I saw a tweet that a few people had shared of Patrick McKenzie (Patio11) shared it. My friend Saul up in Toronto shared it, and the Tweet was basically a challenge that said, “post a tweet like this that offers one opinion or perspective or piece of advice per ‘like’ in a field that you know, or have experience in, and treat is as an idea generation tool. There’s not a narrative to it, you’ve got to generate a hundred of a thing”. Well, it wasn’t even a hundred of a thing. I set the 100 cap. It was however many ‘likes’ you get and I was like, I’ll do one per ‘like’ up to a hundred. I did this on Christmas Eve of 2019, it started on Christmas Eve and it took about two and a half days of sessions of sitting down to do a few things, and there’s a couple of things at play. One was Twitter itself and having the character limit forced me to take an idea and say, what is the clearest expression of that idea in 280 characters or less? And that’s kind of the magic of Twitter at its core used to be 140 characters. Now I get a little more room to play.

The other thing that was kind of interesting was I sat down, I wrote the first 10 and I was like, all right, I’ve got to come up with a framework. And so, I started thinking in vague themes. As you read through it, stuff kind of shows up in these clusters. They aren’t perfectly strung together. Although the order they’re in the book is the order that I wrote them. They have not been reordered at all. We talked about reordering them and maybe breaking them into section. I was like, no, they came out of my head in a certain order and I feel like there’s something about that.

I don’t know what it is, but I feel that adding too much structure to them will actually take away from some of the way that they get perceived. So, I’d set out to write 10 points on setting prices for instance, or on the challenges of business partnerships. I would get to one and I was like, okay, there’s my point. We would get to number two, number three…three’s kind of big, I’ve got to break that into two or three more and that’s just kinda how it evolved.

So, I wrote that and got a really positive response to it - a bunch of people saying “I’ve recently read business books that were less valuable than this thread”. And I was like, interesting. Then six weeks later, tweets were still getting retweeted, shared, commented. I’ve never shared anything that had that kind of staying power. I wonder what it would look like if I turned this into a book and then had a few people say like, “shut up and take my money”. The quintessential thing you love to hear. And I was like, all right, I’m going to think a little bit about that. And then that was when I made the decision, if I’m going to do it, I kind of want to do it right. We’ve never done a physical product, Amy and I, we’ve published other books, other small books, the book that she wrote in a very short period of time, Just Fucking Ship, has been very successful in its own right and we intend to do a second edition. But we have never gone through the process of actually doing the book design, production, figuring out all the pieces of it. So, I was like, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to base it on those core tweets.

Brendan Hufford: I want to talk about order really quickly. The first page says “most people pay way too much attention to things that do not matter to their customers. Things like press, awards, drama, and hype, try auditing who and what you’re paying attention to then cut two big things that you’ve let distract in the past”. Why was that the first thing that came to your head?

Alex Hillman: That’s a really good question. I don’t know because I don’t remember exactly what was going on in my head, but what I will say is I think it’s one of the most prescriptive things in the book. If I think back on the moment, I was given this challenge of write a hundred, very small things. And because of the business that we run in and the work that I do, it made sense for me, the jump into like, what’s a piece of advice I give all the time or a piece of advice that I think a bunch of people need to hear? And I started there, but I also think I kind of realized pretty quickly, if it’s all that this is gonna be really hard, so it doesn’t need to all be the lessons.

I think that book marks where my brain went to when the challenge was issued, but also the moment that I departed from the challenge and saying, in order for me to write a hundred of these, this isn’t going to be a series of how-to’s.

Brendan Hufford: You reference Cal Newport, which is a book that I’ve only listened to recently, because I thought I got it from the title. I was like, Oh, be so good they can’t ignore you. I get it. I don’t need to read this. I thought it was another business book where you get it at the title, and you don’t need to read it. And then I started listening to the book on audible and I’m like, Oh, this is what I needed 10 years ago.

Talk to me about that. I ruined my passion for Brazilian jujitsu that way by building a business out of it and ruined a lot of relationships. And now I’m a big proponent of this, just get super good at it. Tell me more about that.

Alex Hillman: Well, I think there’s two parts to it. One I want to touch on something you just said, which is how easy it is to ruin a thing that you love. Whether by treating it as a business or just trying to extract something from it. I think the reason that business ruins passions, it’s not necessarily the fault of business, but it’s the fault of the broken mindset that people have about business, that the book really talks about, which is extraction is the default. The default mindset in businesses is how do I extract value from things, rather than how do I create value for things? When you extract value as your primary mode of doing things, you are also going into something with a scarcity mindset, that there is only so much of it that there can be.

So when we talk about the things that we are passionate about, whether it’s trying to turn them into a business, just try turning them into something more than they really are or need to be. It is very easy to run the risk of extracting the very thing that made you love it in the first place. Versus - think about where passion actually comes from. There’s no universal answer for that or that’s kind of implied, but there are a few consistent tools and paths that I think most people are wired for, especially creative people are wired for, and learning and improving is the big one.

Another book that is referenced is Badass by Kathy Sierra. I think Kathy’s work that predates Badass – such a good book – is really all about the underlying psychology of the user being on a path of improvement. And when we feel bad about ourselves and our work, it’s usually because something is there preventing the feedback loop of believing that we are improving. Whether that is not getting good enough, fast enough, and therefore not being able to see the improvement, or in a work environment, having a boss that doesn’t tell you that you did a good job or you’re getting better at it. That kind of feedback loop can undermine the intrinsic feedback loop that you have like, well, maybe I’m not getting good at it?

I think those kinds of things are unfortunately really kind of wired into a lot of the work economics. I think the antidote is learning to find passion in getting better at something which requires – and this is the hardest part, especially for people that are maybe later in their career or are already quite good at something – is how hard it is to go back with a full beginner’s mindset . If it’s been a long time since you’ve been an actual beginner, not like learning an adjacent thing, once you’re good at one programming language, you can kind of jump to another programming language because you understand the fundamentals. Once you understand one kind of writing or design or photography, there’s always some transferable something, but to go from one skill set to “now I want to learn how to juggle”. I have no transferable skills to juggling. Juggling can really screw with your head because it’s been so long since you were bad at something that you internalize “I’m bad at this” to, “I’m bad”.

I think that psychology really breaks people’s work when in fact the opportunity, like “I’m bad at that”, that’s an opportunity to get good at it. That’s where passion can be generated. That kind of passion, the generative passion, is the infinite fuel that people see creative people who continue to pursue actually running on.

Brendan Hufford: Yeah, a few points in the book, you kind of transition kind of back and forth between getting really good at things and then how to move past. Like, I’m good at things so now I’m exchanging time for money and how to position that. There is some really tactical pieces in there – not tactical pieces –every single page of the book, for the most part, is what I would call the bridge, where I know I’m here and I know I want to get here, but I don’t know that path. It’s not prescriptive enough to be like, here’s a script you need to use in your positioning statement. None of that sort of thing but instead being like, here’s like a couple of the issues that people have when positioning their time as being a value, you talked about what time are you saving them? And what are their priorities?

One thing I really want to touch on is you talked about earning trust at scale and I think that aligns really well to the point around Kathy Sierra of making your users awesome instead of just making your product awesome or being awesome yourself. I know that I’m trying to build and grow SEO for the rest of us and all of the brands in the digital marketing space that really frustrate me are ones where their only success story is how good they are at teaching digital marketing on their digital marketing blog. So as soon as possible, I was like, I need success stories. I need customers. I need clients – and not testimonials, but full case studies. I want 10% of the marketing to be like, how good I am at this and 90% to be at about other people. I think that helps scale a little bit, but I would love to hear you talk more about like earning that trust at scale.

Alex Hillman: The main thing that comes to mind, and I think the inspiration for that particular unit of the book was how flipped out people get when they think about audience building and marketing. I think there’s a lot of things that contribute to that. Some people are drawn to it and therefore they maybe have inherent advantages of being an extrovert or a really talented communicator or whatever it might be. And because not everyone has those things, some people think that they can’t or won’t be good at reaching people because they don’t have those built in abilities. And while those built in abilities can be advantages, they can also be disadvantages depending on the audience you’re trying to connect with. But in all cases, they’re not really the point. They’re just tools or expressions.

The point that I try to get people to break it down – and maybe it’s even more appealing back one more layer is, a big part of my business is relationships and community building. Almost 15 years with Indy Hall, and even the way we’ve run Stacking the Bricks has been a very human relationship-driven business even though we’ve grown into a reasonable scale.

The thing that I think folks look at, Indy Hall, for instance, they go, “what an amazing experience and awesome community, how do I build a community like that?: But they’re seeing the end product, the end result. They’re not seeing that the majority of the work at the beginning and even still now, today is one-on-one.

It’s individual and the hard part about making the individual thing work is when you start reaching scale. So that’s where that point came in. And so, when I look at audience building and I look at the mechanisms that people, I say, “what are you going to do to build an audience?” “Well, I’m going to start a blog and I’m going to start an email list. I’m going to sign up for Twitter.”

Those are the tactics and the tools, which is great, but okay, cool. “What are you going to do with them?” “Well, I’m going to write articles” and then about what? And as soon as you ask the about what question – you’re dead.

You’re putting the focus on what you’re going to write about, not who you’re going to write for and why you’re going to write for them. It seems really, really subtle, but it’s the thing that I think flips people out the most when they’re thinking about audience building, who out there needs to hear what I need to hear? What hasn’t already been said? And I said, well, why does that matter? And the only reason it matters is because you’ve got sort of a messed-up mindset around what an audience actually is.

It’s not people that need to hear a thing, it’s that they want to hear it from you because you’ve earned their trust through those one-on-one interactions. Or my favorite technique and the simplest, the one that everyone has the ability to do, is helping people in public. Coming on a podcast is probably not the place you’re going to start, but it’s something you can do, going into forums and being active and present in the comments, and not just there to drop a link to your article or product every time, but to be a member of that online community that’s there to contribute. Show up and ask your own questions from time to time and be like, “hey, anybody know anything about this?”

You have to be a member of a community before you can be a leader in a community. And I think that that translates to you need to connect one-on-one with your audience and there are absolutely ways to scale that. Towards the ends of, once you’ve built that initial relationship, it gets a lot easier to write a thing or publish a thing and have them feel like it’s coming directly from you to them because it’s entirely built on that foundation of trust.

Brendan Hufford: Yeah, it was very freeing for me when I read some of Joseph Campbell and Hero’s Journey. I realized all the most popular movies from Avengers all the way back through Star Wars and Indiana Jones, every movie that I’ve really ever loved has been the exact same script and I didn’t realize it. All of a sudden when I realized that and I’m like, oh, okay. Inception, Lord of the Rings…it’s all the same script. Then all of a sudden I felt very free, being like, what if none of those things happen because somebody already did it. You know, Joseph Campbell wrote a book about it in the sixties or something, so we can’t make movies based on this. We wouldn’t have all those great treasures, so yeah. I totally agree.

I want to touch on one more point as we kind of wrap up here. Towards the end of the book you said, “if done well, teaching and marketing can be nearly indistinguishable from each other.” You also talked about if you’re new to something, build in public. I would love to hear more if somebody is watching this or listening to this and they’re like, “hey, I’m just getting started. How do I teach? How do I build in public?”

Talk to me, for you or for anybody else, what do you think that looks like?

Alex Hillman: Well, I think there’s sort of two components. There’s outsider view and insider view. We’ll start outsider view because I think that’s the important place to start. you know, where are your peers? Where are the people like you?

This is probably the hardest part to do for two reasons. One is the internet is really big and it’s not always super obvious where to look. I have an article, if you search ‘Alex Hillman, can’t find audience’ I think, you’ll find this sort of a guide to some things, you can type into Google and find articles, forums.

It’s like, how do you find people that are doing the thing that you’re doing? Where they may be? The internet is so big, so if we can’t imagine a place that we’ve never been, we’ll never find the places that we have yet to go. Finding those folks and changing the approach from walking into a room and trying to impress people, to trying to be yourself first and foremost, that’s all you can be and not be a liar, be yourself.

That includes sharing what you’re working on that day, what you learned that day, where you learned it from. I think a lot of folks, especially beginners are like, “I don’t have anything new to say, who the hell am I? Why would anybody listen to me?” One of the easiest ways to get started is to share your favorite sources. Be the person who’s always got an awesome article or podcast to recommend. And that’s not a place where you want to live forever, but it is absolutely a valuable place to start where you can be seen as somebody who goes out and does the research, finds really valuable insights and, and resources and assets, and the amount of trust that you pick up along the way of being a good curator is definitely a valuable tool.

Again, I think the most common mistake there is people get stuck being the curator. So that’s where the inside you part comes. And I think the practice to cultivate there is to start looking for patterns and seeing what are the common patterns across the things that you are learning and doing that either light you up, light up other people. If I think about it as remix or jazz music, how can you fuse together two ideas to create your own original or even semi-original expression? People are really quick to discount what they’re saying is too similar, it’s not novel, therefore I shouldn’t say it. That’s your point about every freaking movie ever where the vast majority of them, I would say. The practice of synthesizing stuff together and coming up with your way of saying it, that includes your own stories, your own expression, your own experience. If you read something and don’t get it or disagree, that counts too.

You don’t have to go on the internet and be a jerk about it, but you can say “I read this and it’s a little different from the way I experienced it so I want to talk about the way I experienced it.”

So, if you view everything as something to riff on. I think that’s a really good way to approach these public spaces. The book itself was, I mean, very few of the things that I wrote in here, I have never written before, but each of them was a new expression based on things even I had written in the past.

I think the meta-lesson here is give yourself the challenge to say a thing, even if you don’t think it’s original.

The last thing that I’ll say on this point, I don’t remember if it’s actually referenced in the book or not, is an article by Derek Sivers called ‘Obvious to you. Amazing to others’. sivers.org/obvious - he’s very good at making shareable domains. The article kind of explains itself, there are so many things that don’t get shared because people assume that everyone else already knows this, and if they say it that they’re going to look like a dummy.

The flip side of that is I was in a really interesting leadership brainstorming session last week with a bunch of folks from across the Philadelphia region. We were talking about ways that we, as a community can come together to help reverse a lot of the inequities in the world right now, when it comes to access. The group that I was in was focused on how do we help people, particularly the minority and underrepresented populations in our region, have better access to mentorship and professional development.

One of the topics that came up with somebody who was like, “I got into consulting and I was in a meeting and I said a thing, I did a thing, and then after the meeting, somebody pulled me aside like, ‘hey, you can’t do that. You just gave away $15,000 worth of work in that meeting’”. And he was like, “well, how am I supposed to know that, who’s going to teach me that?” So all these unspoken things you know, you don’t even, maybe even know where you picked it come up. Or if you do know where you pick them up, the odds of everyone who needs to know them, or read them, or understand them, or have them resonate with them simply because you have a lived experience that’s different from everyone else or many of the other people who’ve already said it.

Don’t discount your lived experience being the expression of the thing that has been said a thousand times. The expression that needs to be said in order to get in the head of somebody who desperately needs it, because they’re quick to ignore everyone else who doesn’t look like them, think like them, have their lived experience, things like that.

One of my favorite ways to kind of play inception in people’s brains is if you are hesitating to share something that you know that could help somebody else, because you’re afraid of what someone else is going to say, try turning it around and realizing how selfish it is to not share that thing with that person who could benefit from it today, tomorrow the next week, next month, whatever it is. Realize that by not sharing it, but by trying to preserve your own fear of something that might happen – but also probably won’t – you are denying an unknowable number of people an opportunity to learn that thing in the moment that they need to learn it.

So, don’t be selfish and put yourself out there. I just wrote a new article on Stacking the Bricks. It’s a StackingtheBricks.com/confidence about that specific thing, putting yourself out there. Whatever your mental hang-up is, this article will kind of break you of whatever you think you’re not doing it for. I hope a bunch of people have said it was really helpful. So maybe that’s a good note to wrap that thought up on.

Brendan Hufford: Yeah, of course. And at the very least buy Tiny MBA and start tweeting about it. Read a couple of things, share your reactions, share your experiences. I feel very strongly that there’s so much of this book, there were so many things and I want to give people permission as they’re reading the book, if you read something and you’re like, “I’m not ready for this yet”. That’s okay. There’s a couple of things where I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m in the thick of it”. And there’s a couple of things that I’m like, “I’ve been through that. That was a mess”. We’ve already talked about those today. And there’s a couple of things where I’m like, “that’s going to happen in the future. I don’t want to forget this”.

I think that this book – one of the things I love about it, it can be a fast read, and what I mean by that is you can read it once a year without feeling like you’re not reading the Bible in a year. I can just say like, “all right, every so often, every year I’m gonna read Tiny MBA”, because I know there’s going to be something in there that’s timeless that’s going to apply to me wherever I’m at, whether I’m managing people or building my business, or, you know, I don’t have any partners yet, but I know that at some point, if I ever work with a partner, I need to review. So I love that about the book. I appreciate you being generous enough to not call it quits with the tweets and be like, “yeah, I put it out there and got a bunch of retweets, probably helped a bunch of people. I did my thing”. Keeping it going, putting it into this format was very likely an immense amount of work, so I’m very grateful for that.

Thanks for taking the time to talk about it. If people want to pick it up, at the time we were talking right now, you know, that might not be possible, but when I publish this it will be, so where can people go to get it?

Alex Hillman: The website is Tiny.MBA and that’ll give you the ability to buy a physical copy. Physical copy comes with a digital copy as well, so you’ll be able to load that on whatever you want to read it on, your tablet or whatnot. If you just want a digital version, you can also buy that from Tiny.MBA or if you want to buy direct from the Kindle store on Amazon, you know, the direct delivery model we were doing Kindle on Amazon as well.

Brendan Hufford: I love that. I’ve just started using Readwise. Have you ever heard of Readwise? It takes your Kindle highlights and just emails you your highlights every month. There’s a lot of things. It can be like an Evernote and all this other stuff, but I saw Dave Gearhart uses it a lot and a couple of other people and I was just like, “Oh, that’s cool, I would love to see what I highlighted four years ago that it decided to surface”, you know, and learn those lessons again and retain things. It’s like five bucks a month or something. It’s cool. I would encourage people, obviously you can see if you’re watching the video, shelves of books here. I love actual paper books, but getting the Kindle as well…

Alex Hillman: I’m proud of, and as we talked about the design, but it’s also, I mean, you can kind of see it in my hand. It’s a small book. It’s short in length, but it’s also like the physicality of it. I’m sure other people who have published books have had the exact same experience I’m about to describe, I have created a lot of things on the internet. I have never held in my hand, a book that I wrote and it feels really cool. The book, the physicality of this book feels awesome. So as artifact, a thing to hold in your hand to put on your shelf, share with others, I’m really proud of what we came up with.

If you enjoyed that episode, and I hope you did, I’ve got a couple of quick things before you go. The first of course is making sure that you have your very own copy of The Tiny MBA. If you haven’t ordered it, I’d love it if you did, and you can grab a paperback or ebook at Tiny.MBA.

I also hope you’re subscribed to this show. We’re going to be releasing more episodes like this one with other creators and entrepreneurs, just like you and I’m going to be talking with them about their favorite lessons in The Tiny MBA, learning what’s going on in their world and sharing it all with you. You can search for that by looking for Stacking the Bricks wherever you get podcasts.

And one last thing, check out the Stacking the Bricks website, we’ve got a great newsletter with new articles coming out every week or two following a lot of the same topics and themes that we talk about right here on the show. You can do that by going to StackingtheBricks.com.

I hope you have a great rest of your day and don’t forget to keep on stacking those bricks!