The Ultimate Nonprofit Summer Reading List

It's time to talk books! 📚

In this episode of the Petrus Development Show, Andrew and Rhen swap their usual fundraising advice for something a little more relaxed:  their all-time favorite non-fiction reads.  This episode offers a summer reading list from two people who've actually put these books to work — in their professional lives and in their personal lives.

From effective business and marketing strategies to personal growth game-changers, Andrew and Rhen share details of how their favorite books made a difference in their lives.  Settle in with your coffee and a pen and paper and make a list of books to add to your summer reading list.  There's something for everyone!

🌟 And, if you're looking for structured, summertime professional development, check out Petrus's newest coaching option, our Summer Coaching Sprint.  Join us for 3 months of coaching calls and access to Petrus resources, and you'll end spring with your fall fundraising plan ready to go.  For more info, click HERE.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

00:01:47.42 Host Okay. Well, howdy everybody, welcome back to the Petrus Development Show. I am Rhen Hoehn from Petrus, and joining me today is Mr. Andrew Robison, owner and president of Petrus. How's it going, Andrew?

00:01:59.72 AROB Howdy, Rhen. I am doing well. And your voice sounds remarkably familiar. It's like I've heard you somewhere on an award-winning fundraising podcast. Is that you, Rhen Hain?

00:02:11.19 Host Ah, that is me.

00:02:14.42 Host That is me. It is — oh, go ahead.

00:02:16.12 AROB We were — as I was saying, I was joking about that because at a RAISE event earlier this spring, you told a story about somebody who recognized you from the podcast, yeah?

00:02:27.78 Host It is a weird feeling. I've had it happen a few times this spring — somebody recognized my voice from the podcast.

00:02:35.80 AROB You do have a very nice, soothing voice. Something about it.

00:02:38.86 Host I'll take it.

00:02:39.64 AROB Yeah, there you go.

00:02:39.79 Host I'll take it. Definitely. Now we know what it's like to be you, I guess, huh?

00:02:43.25 AROB I don't know about that.

00:02:43.83 Host Excellent. It's been a few weeks since you've been with us. I know Jenny was with me for the last couple of episodes while you were traveling. So today, where are we at? It's coming up on the end of the school year. We're well into spring. It's been a couple of weeks since I've had snow in my yard.

00:03:00.41 Host It did actually snow here last week, but we're almost to summer. How is the end of the school year treating you?

00:03:08.38 AROB Good, but it is busy, man. My wife was lamenting the fact that Mother's Day is in May, which is, I guess, a very common complaint by mothers about the timing of Mother's Day, because May is just so stinking busy, man.

00:03:16.66 Host Mm-hmm.

00:03:25.74 AROB If you have kids — which you're presumably celebrating Mother's Day because of — the end of school is just nonstop. Field trips, and I don't know about your kids, but my kids have field trips, end-of-year testing, end-of-year parties — just everything they couldn't cram in all school year, they cram into the month of May. And then graduations, end-of-year variety shows, talent shows, plays — everything is just crazy, man.

00:03:54.72 Host 100%. We try to limit our kids' events to keep it realistic, so they'll have some family time, but in May we had events all but two evenings and all but two weekend days. So May is just busy — I totally get it. But we're coming up on summer, hopefully things will quiet down, right? No?

00:04:16.37 AROB Debatable.

00:04:18.63 Host Well, hopefully it'll calm down enough for you to get some reading in. I know that's a common — at least among our team — a common summer pastime is to kick back and catch up on some books, catch up on some reading. And that's what we want to talk about today. We've talked about fundraising books in the past. I think at the end of last year, we did a whole series on our social media of our top recommended fundraising books over a couple of weeks. But today we want to talk about nonfiction, non-specifically-fundraising books that we find helpful for nonprofit professionals to read.

00:04:55.45 AROB That sounds like a very specific genre, but it's just the opposite of a very specific genre.

00:05:01.94 Host Right. So these aren't necessarily just for fun, although I find a lot of them to be pretty interesting and fun to read. They're helpful, but they're not necessarily directly applicable to fundraisers. Well, they are applicable — they're not directly speaking to fundraisers. But I think there's a lot of lessons you can pull out of them, kind of in parallel to fundraising, and use them to increase your fundraising effectiveness.

00:05:23.35 AROB Oh yeah, for sure. Speaking of summer — we're coming up on it — I'm an adjunct professor for a course through the University of Mary's MBA program. Their Institute of Catholic Philanthropy offers three courses on Catholic fundraising. One of the courses I've taught over the past couple of years is how to build an effective development shop, basically.

00:05:47.48 AROB I have all my book recommendations and videos and podcasts that we have students listen to. Most of them — the majority — are not fundraising-specific books. And some of them are on the list I'm going to talk about today. The elements and principles are applicable in life and in business, but in particular, there are always ways to find good application to the work we do in fundraising, whether it's communication, relationship building, psychology — all of that kind of stuff helps us be better fundraisers. So reading and absorbing those principles is important regardless of the work that you do.

00:06:34.37 Host Definitely. And a lot of these titles that we're going to talk about today — if you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you've probably heard us reference some of them, or if you've gone through any of our courses, some of these concepts come up frequently. I think they're that pivotal. They're that useful. So without further ado — we both have a list that we both just kind of scoured.

00:06:48.50 AROB Yeah.

00:06:52.78 Host We both keep a spreadsheet of the books we read, right? And we kind of went back over the last — I have about a decade's worth on mine. I don't know how far back yours goes.

00:07:01.06 AROB That goes back to, I think, 2020. So not that far back.

00:07:04.97 Host Gotcha. But yeah, so we kind of looked back through our lists, pulled out the ones we thought were especially useful. As I was telling you before we started, there are a couple of books that I had noted on my list like "read this again — this was amazing," and I have no memory of what was in it, what it was about. I didn't retain anything.

00:07:19.06 AROB Yeah.

00:07:23.11 Host Going to have to go back and revisit some of those from a few years back. But that's kind of a benefit of doing this exercise — to bring some of those up. So without further ado, what's the first book you have on your list?

00:07:34.97 AROB So I'm going to go back a couple of years — I think I read this in 2020, then I loved it and recommended it to everybody on the Petrus team. We read it in advance of our annual planning retreat.

00:07:49.50 AROB It's a really good book that gives you a way to conceptualize where your organization can fit in a bigger market and then be intentional about working towards that goal.

00:08:04.27 AROB The book I'm talking about is called Play Bigger. The author is Al Ramadan, but it's really a collective book by about four guys who all run a company called Play Bigger.

00:08:15.70 Host Yeah.

00:08:16.51 AROB He just happens to be the author name that put it all together. But amazing book. Really good read.

00:08:25.43 Host It really — and it's been a while since I've read that book, I think I read it a couple of times — it really helps you figure out how you differentiate your organization, right? It shows you that you don't necessarily want to be just like the others in your space. You want to have something distinctive, and it kind of shows you how to do that effectively.

00:08:45.50 AROB Yeah, the principle boiled down is pretty simple: instead of being a little fish in a big pond, they advise being a big fish in a pond that you've essentially created for yourself. Some of the terminology they use is "category design," and then having your organization — your company, your business, whatever — be the "category king."

00:09:16.97 AROB They've got a lot of really great examples in the book. Essentially, Netflix is the category king of streaming because they essentially created the category of online streaming video. Before that, they created the category of mail-in DVDs. Before that, there was Blockbuster, Family Video — all these video rental companies. Netflix said, "We can do this in a completely different way," created the mail-in DVD ordering process, and then from that, created streaming. So now there's competition, but Netflix will always be considered the OG of streaming media because they created the category and have been the category king throughout.

00:10:12.70 Host Absolutely. Love it. Great. So the first book I have on my list comes from the marketing side — I have several of those, and I'm going to save them for later. Let's go more organizational first. One that we refer to all the time, and I think it's one of the probably most well-known business books out there, is Good to Great by Jim Collins.

00:10:32.98 Host Basically anything Jim Collins writes is fantastic, and they're all in the business category, but they're so applicable to nonprofits as well.

00:10:39.12 AROB Yeah.

00:10:41.19 Host There's a lot to take from Good to Great. We talk about the flywheel probably almost every episode of the podcast, it feels like — and that's a concept that came from that book. Or "getting the right people on the bus, getting them in the right seats" — that's pivotal to any organization's staffing plan and hiring. All those concepts come from that book. It's worth a read every few years, honestly, for most organizations, I think.

00:11:08.18 AROB Yeah, for sure. And I think Jim Collins frames this as how to build an enduring company, right? It's about starting with a very core concept or a very clear mission.

00:11:22.58 AROB I think he calls it the Hedgehog Principle — how do you be laser-focused on what you can do well, and then build the systems to sustain excellence at that level?

00:11:26.39 Host Yep.

00:11:34.98 AROB Good to Great came from him going back and studying a number of enduring companies and then writing about them. And he also has a corollary — I don't know if I've ever read it; I feel like I probably have — a supplementary or corollary book, Good to Great specifically for nonprofits. Have you read that, Rhen?

00:11:57.37 Host I have. It's been a long time. I know I saw it on my list actually — let me search for it right now.

00:12:02.71 AROB Yeah, I again can't remember if I read it, but I'm sure the principles are the same. The cases he uses to make the points are obviously different because they're nonprofits and not — you know, whatever companies he uses, GE and some of those others. But yeah, you're absolutely right — the flywheel, the Hedgehog Principle, the "stockdale" concept, "getting the right people on the bus in the right seats" — all those phrases that are now common business vernacular, a lot of them came from Jim Collins.

00:12:39.38 Host Yeah, Good to Great and the Social Sectors — it's a monograph, which he explains in the book. It's very, very short, like 50 pages.

00:12:50.26 Host So it's kind of an addendum to Good to Great.

00:12:50.62 AROB Oh, okay, great.

00:12:53.75 AROB Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah.

00:12:55.96 Host Great, what's your next book?

00:12:56.22 AROB So I think along with Jim Collins as one of the premier business minds, I'm going to go with a book from another guy who's also just one of the most premier business minds in existence, really — and that's Simon Sinek. He's written a number of books. What was his first big book that took off? Start with Why, yes?

00:13:27.58 Host Yeah, I think so — and Leaders Eat Last, I think, is the other one.

00:13:30.90 AROB Yeah, those are great. I loved his book The Infinite Game. It's, again, about how to build sustainability — how to not focus on winning the quarter, but how to basically set yourself up for long-term, infinite success. Some of the principles he has in there are about having a rival that you sort of balance yourself against, because it makes you want to be better. Just a lot of really important and valuable insights from Infinite Game that I've applied for a long time, both in the work with Petrus and in helping our clients do better.

00:14:25.68 Host Having a "worthy adversary," right?

00:14:27.28 AROB "Worthy adversary." That sounds better than a rival, but it's essentially it.

00:14:30.74 Host Something to keep you sharp.

00:14:33.94 AROB Yeah, exactly.

00:14:34.87 Host Excellent. I also thoroughly love that book. That would have been on my list, except I knew you were going to put it on yours.

00:14:40.96 AROB Good.

00:14:42.42 Host Awesome.

00:14:43.50 Host All right. That's The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. So the next one I'm going to put on my list is called The 4 Disciplines of Execution. It's by Sean Covey, who I think is —

00:14:58.97 AROB — the son of Stephen Covey.

00:15:00.30 Host I think this is actually another one that a group of people wrote, but that's the name I have written down on my reading list, at least.

00:15:04.28 AROB Yeah. Yeah.

00:15:08.79 Host There are several principles from this book. One that we talk about all the time is lead measures versus lag measures, and we kind of got that concept from this book years ago. There are some other ones in there, such as keeping a good scoreboard for your activity. Those core concepts make it a very tactical book — it helps you put things into action well. And again, it's been almost a decade since I read that one, but I still remember some of the core principles. It's a very useful, helpful book for anybody to read, nonprofit or business-wise.

00:15:43.06 AROB Absolutely. Great book. Highly recommend it.

00:15:50.23 Host Awesome. What do you have next?

00:15:52.09 AROB Okay. So this is a book that — I don't know that I would say it changed my life, but it definitely prepared me and the company for a significant shift in the way that we operate.

00:16:09.46 AROB This book is called Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz. Mike Michalowicz is a very popular business author and consultant — not at the level of Jim Collins in terms of being that well known — but he's just a brilliant mind. He has a number of books. Something about a pumpkin — Profit First — but I thought Clockwork was —

00:16:37.43 Host Hmm.

00:16:41.18 AROB — was really helpful, and I read it at like the perfect moment. Clockwork is really about how to set your business up to run without everything having to go through the CEO. He kind of starts by saying a lot of businesses struggle from what he calls "founder syndrome," where everything goes through the founder or CEO, and they struggle to scale because things take too much time for that person to make decisions.

00:17:14.17 AROB Or the founder/CEO eventually gets burned out and the company struggles from a lack of direction. So Clockwork is about putting the team and systems in place to operate if the founder were no longer there.

00:17:22.34 Host Yeah. Yeah.

00:17:29.30 AROB I read this book in 2022. There are a lot of principles in there, but he essentially says to fire-test all of them by going on a month-long sabbatical.

00:17:42.36 AROB So I took a month-long sabbatical in August of 2022, and it was great for the company. Everybody on the team — Rhen, you included — had to figure out, "All right, how do we operate without Andrew in the mix?" And it was great. We prepared for it, went through the exercises. It was fun — you know, I thought, "Okay, that's cool. Hopefully that never happens again."

00:18:06.26 Host We had some kinks to work out, which was a good thing to do while you were still available for emergencies, right?

00:18:06.46 AROB Yes. Yeah.

00:18:11.45 AROB And then a year later — not to the day, but almost exactly a year later — I had a series of personal traumas. Essentially, I broke my leg and had to have surgery. I couldn't walk for three months. In the midst of that, my daughter ended up in the hospital for an extended time, and we had to adjust our entire family life as a result of that.

00:18:41.72 AROB Then I was out for another month in February of 2024, continuing to deal with my daughter's recovery. So I was essentially completely removed from the business for an extended time.

00:18:54.36 AROB And because we had gone through those exercises, we were able to survive.

00:18:54.80 Host Yeah.

00:18:59.49 AROB I mean, the long and short of it is — that was it.

00:19:03.58 Host Yeah. I was going to say, you may feel like it didn't fully change your life, but I feel like it did. Me and Tara — that prepared us for... I mean, this could happen in any business, any nonprofit, right? The director or the chaplain is out unexpectedly for an extended period of time. You just never know.

00:19:23.67 Host I think they talk about it — if I remember right — it's called a "hit by the bus" plan. Maybe I got that from somewhere else, but something happens, and if we hadn't done that, who knows what would have come of the company. That's a difficult exercise to do, but we're very, very glad we did it when we did.

00:19:43.13 AROB Yeah, it's one of those books — and the exercises — where it's best to do it before you need it, right? It's like buying insurance. You want to buy insurance before you need it. Reading Clockwork, going through those exercises, putting the systems in place before you need them is important. I would also say even if you never need it — even if your founder is never hit by a bus — our company changed significantly because we were able to disperse the workload, the decision-making, and the creativity across the whole team, which made for a better working environment in general as well.

00:20:30.46 Host Excellent. Yeah. Fully on board with that book.

00:20:33.72 AROB Good.

00:20:34.54 Host Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz. Good. All right. So next, let's see — the next one I'm going to talk about is definitely not a Catholic book. It's called The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. The concepts in there are super solid, super good.

00:20:53.53 Host There — I don't know if any example has a married couple that's a man and woman; it's kind of a book of its time and leans into that. But the principles in The Art of Gathering are all about how to design effective events and gatherings to make a lasting impact on the attendees, and in certain situations, how to get people to work together better — if you're trying to bring people together in a meeting, that type of thing. I find it a very helpful, very actionable book for giving some principles for designing different types of gatherings and events, which you could use in donor gatherings, alumni gatherings, bringing together your advisory council or your board — whatever that might be. A very helpful book for those purposes.

00:21:36.79 AROB Yeah. I've started reading more about developing memberships and creating some more intentional efforts that way, and I know you recommended this. So The Art of Gathering is on my list for that purpose. I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. And I think that's important, right? Anything that you can learn about how to run your business or organization more effectively is always a good thing.

00:22:08.26 Host I think you should put it on your summer reading list.

00:22:11.84 AROB I'll do that. Yeah — so we're talking about our summer sprint, yeah?

00:22:13.91 Host With that in mind, let's pause for a second and talk about this summer. Because Petrus — we've been working on something to help nonprofits with their fundraising in a bit of a sprint over the course of this summer. You want to talk about that a little bit?

00:22:34.33 AROB So fundraisers spend most of the year moving from one urgent thing to the next. I mean, that's just the reality of running a nonprofit and being able to fundraise — appeals, events, donor meetings, thank-you notes, reports, board requests.

00:22:49.46 AROB Before you know it, summer's over, fall is here, year-end is coming, and you're trying to build the plan while you're already in the middle of executing it.

00:22:56.68 Host It's like a tidal wave coming at you.

00:22:59.08 AROB That's right.

00:22:59.90 AROB So that's why the summer matters, right? The summer is a time you can take a breath from the rapid pace, even if you're an organization that doesn't serve students.

00:23:12.06 AROB The school year and academic year affect everybody — every family, every organization.

00:23:16.63 Host Right.

00:23:18.22 AROB And so the summer is your time to take a breath and do some planning. For many nonprofits, summer gives you just enough time to slow down, right?

00:23:29.14 AROB To look honestly at what's working and, hopefully, to get your fundraising plan either back on track or started before the busiest time of the year — which is your fall semester leading into year-end.

00:23:43.61 AROB And so the Petrus Summer Coaching Sprint is built specifically to work with organizations to utilize the summer to get your plan in order for the fall.

00:23:56.15 AROB Over three months, if you sign up for our Summer Coaching Sprint, you'll work with a Petrus coach to reset your goals, clarify your priorities, strengthen your donor communications, identify major gift opportunities, clean up your systems, and build a practical plan for the fall and year-end season.

00:24:17.40 AROB So a lot happens during the Summer Sprint.

00:24:17.66 Host It's pretty thorough, yeah.

00:24:21.63 AROB This is new for us. We've done coaching for 20 years, so Petrus knows how to work with an organization — assess your needs, figure out where you want to go, what goals are realistic —

00:24:27.41 Host Yeah.

00:24:33.31 AROB — and then put a plan in place. This Summer Sprint is, I would say, our normal coaching operation basically on steroids. We want to really maximize this time.

00:24:43.64 Host Yeah.

00:24:46.49 AROB So you're meeting with a coach every week and working through multiple steps of multiple plans.

00:24:58.41 AROB There's a Sprint Playbook that you'll create as you're going through the sprint. It captures everything you're working on and puts those plans down on paper so you can refer to it all year long.

00:25:10.35 AROB And the goal is: let's use this time during the summer to get you set up for a successful fall and year-end, which ultimately benefits everybody in your organization.

00:25:23.79 AROB Yeah.

00:25:24.66 Host Yeah, and this is 12 weeks, right? With 75 minutes with a coach each week — an hour and 15 each week of those 12 weeks, face-to-face with a coach, working through a number of checklists, the playbook, and getting your questions answered.

00:25:39.13 Host I know our standard virtual coaching is an hour every other week with a coach, and the standard price for that is $1,200 a month. So for something like this — amped up, high-intensity, weekly calls a little bit longer each week — the equivalent for three months would be about $10,000. Is that what we're charging for the Sprint?

00:26:02.85 AROB Oh, no, no, no. Not at all.

00:26:04.60 Host Really? Tell me more.

00:26:08.22 AROB The price for the Summer Sprint is $4,800. You can pay that one time, or spread it out over the three months. There is no doubt in my mind that investing $4,800 this summer — with that amount of learning, that amount of planning, that close working relationship with a Petrus coach — is going to generate five, ten, twenty, a hundred times that amount in results.

00:26:36.75 AROB Certainly, if not in the next academic year, definitely over time — because it's just like we talked about with Jim Collins, right? Getting that flywheel going, putting those plans in place benefits you now, but it benefits you even more down the road as these programs and processes grow.

00:26:56.44 Host Absolutely. Yeah, going into the year-end giving season especially — just pouring on the gas is going to get things moving.

00:27:04.98 AROB Yep. And one thing we didn't mention: in addition to the weekly calls with a coach and the Sprint Playbook,

00:27:15.74 AROB you also get access to Pete — our Catholic AI fundraising co-pilot, right?

00:27:20.66 Host Yeah, that's right.

00:27:22.20 AROB So Pete — I don't know if we've talked about Pete a lot — but Pete is something we've been working on for a while. Pete is an AI co-pilot that we have designed. It's trained on 20 years of Petrus content.

00:27:36.09 AROB Everything we've ever talked about on any podcast, in any course, in any blog post has been used to train Pete. So the questions you're asking Pete are going to get you answers grounded in good, solid Catholic fundraising instruction — and not instruction or ideas coming from who-knows-where in the nonprofit world. Pete is a great resource, and we are rolling it out to all of our members in our Harbor. We'll be rolling it out beyond that. But specifically as part of the Summer Sprint, we'll work with you and train you in how to use Pete — how to use an AI fundraising co-pilot to maximize your efficiency — whether that's writing appeals, writing thank-you notes, or brainstorming event ideas. But it

00:28:32.79 AROB is designed to help you move faster on all of those things — appeals, donor follow-ups, impact stories, meeting preps, and more — while not sacrificing your human agency in building those relationships and while still receiving guidance from true Catholic fundraising experts.

00:28:55.67 Host Yeah, I'm going to add just a couple of quick thoughts on Pete. We've had a beta version — a custom GPT trained on our materials through ChatGPT. This is kind of version 2.0. It's a standalone co-pilot trained on our materials that also provides memory. So you can upload files — say, examples of your appeals — and it'll remember those and write in your voice going forward, for example, and keep it in a secure location that only you can access. And it pulls from multiple different models as well, so it's pretty flexible in terms of how it generates things. Pretty helpful. You get the coaching sessions every week, and in between the sessions, putting things into action speeds up quite a bit when you have a tool like that to help you draft things.

00:29:41.27 AROB Yeah, a hundred percent. The Sprint is really designed to utilize the summer to get your flywheel going, to get you on track for a successful fall and ultimately a successful next year and beyond. By the end of it, you'll leave with more than just good intentions, right? You'll have a working Sprint Playbook, clear next steps, and real momentum going into the fall. So if people are interested, where do they learn about the Summer Sprint, Rhen?

00:30:11.80 Host Go to petrusdevelopment.com/summer and you'll find all the details there.

00:30:16.74 AROB That's just about the easiest URL you could have come up with. I like it.

00:30:19.77 Host Excellent. Hopefully you'll check that out and get a jumpstart on your fundraising for the rest of the year.

00:30:26.81 AROB Yep. And when does the Summer Sprint begin?

00:30:32.18 AROB We haven't talked about that, huh?

00:30:34.56 Host It's changed, right? Is it July now?

00:30:37.08 AROB Yes. So when is it — after the 4th of July?

00:30:40.78 Host It's going to kick off after the 4th of July. A lot of people have fiscal year-end things going on right now. So once we get past that and past the 4th of July holiday, be ready to settle in and get your fundraising going. So it'll be July, August, and September — it kind of bleeds into the fall a little bit, but that'll help set up your year-end fundraising.

00:30:58.91 AROB Yep. Looking forward to it. I think it's a great program, and I'm excited to work with some great organizations that are eager and ready to get moving.

00:31:08.60 Host Great. So again, check that out — petrusdevelopment.com/summer. And with that, let's continue with our book list. All right.

00:31:17.43 AROB Great. Is it my turn now?

00:31:18.97 Host Yeah. What do you have up next, Andrew?

00:31:20.66 AROB Okay, so this is a book I read a couple of years ago that I don't even know how I found it. I do audiobooks — I think we've talked about this. I can't read a physical book anymore.

00:31:30.95 Host Hmm.

00:31:33.31 AROB I've been conditioned away from it. But I use the Libby app. Libby accesses my public library, which is great. I end up —

00:31:45.18 AROB — looking for books I want to read. And I also look for books that are recommended, that say, "Hey, you read these, you might like this" — which is AI telling me what I might like. Sometimes it's right and sometimes it's not, but I think this was one where Libby recommended it. It was free, and I listened to it.

00:32:04.12 AROB The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgley is a phenomenal book, and I've probably mentioned this a couple of times. The story is this: Ross decides he's going to swim all the way around the United Kingdom.

00:32:17.29 AROB He goes all the way around the island — England, Wales, Scotland — all the way back around. And —

00:32:28.08 AROB I think it takes him, oh gosh, 157 days, something like that.

00:32:33.02 Host Wow.

00:32:33.94 AROB He never steps on land until he's done. He has a tiny boat with a crew that he sleeps on and eats on.

00:32:36.88 Host Geez.

00:32:42.09 AROB But he swims for, I don't know, eight to fourteen hours every day. And it's a phenomenal read because he uses that experience to talk about the science of resilience — what is it about our body that is sort of designed for resilience, for enduring suffering and continuing to move on, and then how can we use principles of science to maximize our resilience, even when we're not swimming around in the water? Just a really good book, really inspiring story. And it's funny — there are a lot of really great stories, as you can imagine. That much time in the water, he's got some really funny stories. And a lot of it applies to just how do you stay true to course when life's got you down.

00:33:35.70 Host I have not read that book. I think you used it as a premise in one of your conference presentations that you did in the last couple of years.

00:33:43.69 Host I'll have to add that to my list.

00:33:44.15 AROB Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love it. And it's a pretty short book — not that long. But again, it's just a lot of action with a lot of really good principles.

00:33:55.64 Host Awesome. Good. So I mentioned I have several marketing books — let's dig into those a little bit. I'm going to mention two by the same author, Robert Cialdini. If you've done any reading on marketing topics, you've probably come across his book Influence.

00:34:10.62 Host And he has another book that's kind of a precursor to that book, but it came out later. It's called Pre-Suasion. These are all about the concepts of what influences people, right? If you look at a sales page on the internet, they almost all deploy the different elements he describes, such as social proof, consistency, things like that —

00:34:37.36 Host — that subconsciously make you agree with what they're saying or buy what they're saying. And Pre-Suasion talks about things you can do to kind of set up — making people more... what's the word I'm looking for... accepting of your ideas later on. So it's very interesting, both from a marketing standpoint and from a "knowing how you're being marketed to" standpoint. I think it's very good to be familiar with those concepts. I would say it's a little drier reading than some of the others we've talked about — a little more academic feeling — but it's still pretty good.

00:35:11.54 AROB Did you read Pre-Suasion before or after you and your wife started dating?

00:35:16.28 Host These are both far after.

00:35:18.19 AROB Okay.

00:35:19.06 Host Yeah, I read Influence probably 12, 14 years ago — it's been a little while. And Pre-Suasion is newer. I want to say that came out maybe seven or eight years ago.

00:35:31.35 AROB Yeah, but for our listeners who may be at a point in their life when they're looking for that special somebody they want to settle down with — these are probably good books for you to know and understand the psychology of desire, right?

00:35:46.89 AROB How can you set your presentation and your message up for success and acceptance?

00:35:57.35 AROB I think there's a lot of application in these books.

00:35:58.29 Host Yeah, send over some testimonials, I guess. You do see videos of people getting up and speaking for why people should date their friends at events these days, so maybe they are using those principles. There you go. All right, so that's Robert Cialdini — that's C-I-A-L-D-I-N-I, Cialdini — but yeah, definitely check out his books. What do you have next?

00:36:02.61 AROB Awesome.

00:36:09.53 AROB Yeah.

00:36:20.82 AROB Okay, so this is a pack — and I put all these together because they're all three memoirs, and I read them all around the same time.

00:36:31.63 AROB I got into memoirs. I've always kind of read biographies — my dad loves reading biographies and he's always sending me recommendations — but I hadn't ever really read a memoir. A memoir is different in that it's more somebody — even an autobiography is telling your story —

00:36:50.82 AROB — but a memoir, I feel like, is told in a lighter voice generally. More of a tone that captures not just what happened, but also why it happened, how it influenced you, what you were thinking while you were doing it.

00:37:07.94 AROB So anyway, I read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, Sociopath by Patric Gagne, and Educated by Tara Westover — all not quite back to back, but in a very short amount of time. Obviously you know who J.D. Vance is now — he's the Vice President — but before that he was just a guy who grew up poor in basically Appalachia, in Kentucky and Ohio, and his life was really not set up to become the Vice President of the United States.

00:37:24.05 Host Okay.

00:37:52.89 AROB He had help from his grandmother, and he just had a desire to learn and grow. So Hillbilly Elegy is just a phenomenal book about overcoming adversity, about being grateful for people in your life who support you, and how nobody's story is pre-written.

00:38:11.68 AROB I love that book. Sociopath by Patric Gagne — I think "Patric" is French, but she's a woman, so that threw me off at the beginning. She is a diagnosed clinical sociopath who basically has to learn what that means and why she acts and lives the way she does.

00:38:40.73 AROB And then she goes on to — I think she earns her PhD, does research on sociopathy, and then writes this book, Sociopath. She is funny as heck. The book is just really good. It's a look into mental health that — I mean, you just never think of a sociopath as being anything other than a serial killer. She really unpacks that in a really profound way. Loved that book.

And then Educated by Tara Westover — Tara Westover grew up very, very poor in Idaho. Her parents were Latter-day Saints and were basically kind of preppers, off the grid. So she never went to formal school until she applied and was accepted to BYU at the age of about 17. Just a really phenomenal book about, again, overcoming adversity, not letting your story be written for you, and pursuing what you want in life with intentionality. So those three books — Hillbilly Elegy, Sociopath, and Educated — were just phenomenal memoirs, really, really well written, funny, and just very inspiring to me about living life — and also helping to guide and set my kids up for success, whatever that path may be.

00:40:11.38 Host Awesome. I haven't read any of those, so I'll add those to my list as well.

00:40:15.73 AROB Yeah, really good.

00:40:17.08 Host Great. The next one I have is one we reference all the time — Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. At a very high level, every story kind of follows a very similar arc: there's a hero on a journey who has a problem, who consults a guide, who helps him solve the problem. And he brings that as a framework for how we should talk about our organizations, right? There's a hero of the story, and we tend to think of that hero as ourselves or our organization, but really we're the guide. The donor is the hero, in the nonprofit sense. So how do you talk in a way that shows the donor, "Hey, you're the hero."

00:40:55.90 Host "We'll help you accomplish this mission — whatever our mission is — but we need your help to go and vanquish the foe," which is defeating whatever ill exists in the world. It's a super helpful book for any time you're doing any type of marketing communications or writing for your organization. You should have that framework in mind. So check out Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller.

00:41:21.08 AROB Yeah, I read that a number of years ago and really enjoyed it. And I love how once you understand the formula he's talking about — the hero has a problem, the hero can't solve the problem, a guide comes along to show them the way, and then the hero solves the problem and wins the day — once you see that formula, it applies to everything. Every Disney movie is basically this hero story. Shakespeare — all the stories are some version of this hero story. So it's really interesting to understand what you find captivating, and then how you can flip that and use it in your business, your fundraising, and your work effectively. I thought that was really cool.

00:42:13.35 Host Definitely. Great. What's your next book?

00:42:16.18 AROB Okay, so I've got two, but I feel like I'm going to combine them. The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. Really, really good book. It's basically about how, over time, civilization and society have come to desire comfort over everything else.

00:42:46.79 AROB Comfort and convenience over everything else. And that's not how our ancestors — I mean, thousands of years of mankind — have lived. It's really only in the last 100 to 150 years that we've had a society where comfort can be our primary desire. So he talks about how understanding that and then looking for ways to challenge yourself and get out of that comfort zone is actually very healthy for your mental health, your psyche — for you in every way.

00:43:24.36 AROB I really loved this book. The first part — he kind of starts off by doing this month-long caribou hunt in northern Alaska.

00:43:35.93 AROB And so, yeah, I know.

00:43:36.50 Host Sign me up.

00:43:38.15 AROB So I just remember those scenes where he's sitting there — it was him and his guides — and they would have to sit out on the ground on these big tufts of grass on the tundra —

00:43:50.86 Host Like tussocks.

00:43:50.86 AROB — tussocks, yes — so the ground was not quite frozen but almost frozen, and they couldn't bring chairs or anything. So they would just have to sit exposed on these hills for hours during the day, just waiting for the caribou to come along. No iPhone, no book, nothing to do other than sit there.

00:44:15.81 AROB And just this idea that we are terrified of boredom. We fill our time and our minds with noise all the time, when —

00:44:26.52 Host Yeah.

00:44:28.38 AROB — for literally generations, boredom was just very much a state of life for a lot of people. And a lot of our best answers come from that. So getting back to that — even a desire for boredom — is something I tell my kids all the time. My son Luke came up to me the other day and was like, "I'm bored," and I said, "Good. I'm glad you're bored. Go find something to do. Use your brain and get out of your boredom. If you want to be bored, then be bored — but that's on you. Find a way to un-bore yourself and you'll be happier." So anyway, I like that book. I said I was going to combine it with another one, but I think it's different enough — it's in line with The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgley, but there are enough differences that I recommend both.

00:45:11.48 Host Awesome. Good. The next one I have is called Smart Brevity by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz. It's a pretty quick read, but it's all about — and again, this is very marketing-applied — I think they helped with the Morning Brew email newsletter that comes out every day, in terms of helping it grow. But it's really a bunch of principles to help make your content more skimmable,

00:45:37.46 Host easier to read quickly. It's all about being brief with your content to get it seen by more people and seen more deeply by more people. Super applicable as attention spans shrink, right? When they open your email — do they open your email? And if so, how much of it do they read? This is a book that'll help you get more of it seen and read.

00:45:58.65 AROB My wife would love it if I read that book. She says my stories go on too long.

00:46:04.00 Host It's a pretty helpful, pretty tactical book in terms of "do this, don't do that." So it's helpful. Smart Brevity by Jim VandeHei.

00:46:12.12 AROB Love it. You've got a couple I have not read, so I'm going to put these all on my list.

00:46:14.20 Host I know you've got one more. I'm going to add one more after you — one I just thought of while sitting here pondering.

00:46:21.82 AROB Perfect.

00:46:21.94 Host What's your last nonfiction one on the list?

00:46:22.91 AROB This is real-life programming, huh?

00:46:26.74 Host Yeah.

00:46:27.32 AROB Okay, so this book — I've spoken in hyperbole about Clockwork changing my life, but I would say that this book has also — at least, if not changed, then redirected — a lot of how I think about life, the future, technology, and how technology is changing, and the role we have to play in this changing technology if we choose to play it. The book I'm talking about is called Empire of AI — it's actually got a longer name: Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI — by Karen Hao. Karen Hao is a reporter, specifically a technology reporter. I don't remember who she worked for — maybe the New York Times. But she basically followed the evolution and growth of AI and then wrote this book about the whole history, with a particular focus on Sam Altman and OpenAI, which is the creator of ChatGPT. Because they did fundamentally change the world — we're living through those changes playing out right now. My history-brain and timeline-brain loved understanding how OpenAI got to the point where they were, what Sam Altman's role in it was, what Elon Musk's role was, all the Silicon Valley investors and key people — the competition from Google, from Anthropic — it's just a really interesting history to understand. But it helped me so much to see, okay, ChatGPT didn't just show up one day and change the world. It was a 50-year roadmap of AI getting to that point, and that wasn't even a finish line in any way — that was

00:48:37.11 AROB a new starting line for consumer acceptance of AI tools — by everyday Americans, by everyday people. And what role we have in that.

So it really struck me as important to understand. One last thing I'll say about it: I can't remember who said it, but it was basically, "All of these companies are competing on selling more AI tools to the public, and they're driven by shareholder value, by maximizing profit."

00:49:16.25 AROB And what that means is that every company will push a little bit closer to the line of what's right and wrong in order to sell more products and make more profit. And without any moral voice — without anybody saying, "Are we doing these things the right way?" — plug in any entity with moral authority into that space. I thought of it as the Catholic Church's role in that. Without that, it ends up becoming what they term — which I think is a useful term — the "race to the bottom."

00:49:54.49 AROB And so that struck me as: all right, I'm one guy, we've got one little company in this — but can we play a role in this development of AI so that it is beneficial from a spirit of evangelization, from a spirit of proliferation of the faith? Absolutely.

00:49:55.38 Host Yeah.

00:50:15.89 AROB And I think we should. A lot of people don't agree with that stance, but I feel like fundamentally we need to be playing a role in that. And so that's where Petrus has really pivoted a lot of our work already, and will continue in the future — how can we utilize this technology to make fundraising more efficient and maximize the capacity of people who care about the faith, care about the Church, and want to use these tools in appropriate ways.

00:50:51.63 AROB So Empire of AI — phenomenal read. I love the history of it, but it also just shaped my thinking about the role we should be playing in this journey.

00:51:02.61 Host Yeah, pretty critical at this point in time. Good. I'm going to add in one bonus book since I had one fewer than you — and that's because as I was pouring my coffee, we'll see if this plays well on audio.

00:51:16.27 Host Filling up a moment ago, I remembered a book called Caffeine by Michael Pollan. I just love Michael Pollan's writing — he writes great stuff. The book Caffeine — I remember it being pretty short — but his conclusion, after giving up caffeine for a time and researching it deeply, was that the benefits of giving up caffeine are very few, and life is just better with it.

00:51:38.01 AROB There you go.

00:51:38.36 Host So have that coffee. I think a lot of fundraisers feel the need for the caffeine — we're all running on empty a lot of the time, going hard. So I think that was a fun book. He has lots of great books, but none of them are really applicable to fundraising in any way — maybe beyond that one. I read a great one last year on gardening.

00:51:59.48 AROB Oh yeah.

00:51:59.53 Host It was an audiobook, and it showed the publication date as a few years ago. I was listening to it, and it was talking all about, "Are we going to survive smog?" And I was like, "What the...?" Looked it up, and it was actually printed like 25 or 30 years ago.

00:52:11.30 AROB Yeah.

00:52:11.54 Host But the audiobook was copyrighted just a couple of years ago.

00:52:15.29 AROB That's funny. Yeah, that's cool. No, I like that — and I need to read that. I have some talking points: my wife would love it if I stopped drinking diet soda. And you know what? I figure life is more enjoyable with a diet soda every day — I think that's worth a lot.

00:52:15.90 Host His writing is really good. It's fun. I like it.

00:52:38.26 Host Excellent. Any — do you want to throw in any bonus fiction book before we wrap up? We're going pretty long, but any fiction book that stands out? We probably won't do a full episode on fiction books, huh?

00:52:43.36 AROB Ooh, fiction book. Golly.

00:52:50.25 AROB I don't know — maybe we should. I think people would love that — people are always looking for recommendations. I will say my two favorite fiction books of all time, which I've read both of them multiple times and probably talked about multiple times on the podcast — one is Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Phenomenal book. I read it way too young — I read it in high school. There's some adult content that —

00:53:11.53 Host Hmm. Hmm.

00:53:18.33 AROB — I probably should not have been reading about in high school. But just a really good book — historical fiction about what it really took 500, 800 years ago to build a cathedral and how the lives of everybody in the book changed through the course of the building of this cathedral.

00:53:43.26 AROB I just love it. I've read it multiple times. And then my —

00:53:46.64 Host Do I get to guess your other one?

00:53:49.10 AROB That's going to be really hard. What's your guess?

00:53:50.70 Host I'm going to guess it's Lonesome Dove.

00:53:53.18 AROB Oh, man. No — that was number three.

00:53:55.03 Host Oh! That's your most talked-about fiction book of all time.

00:53:56.76 AROB Well, probably. Yeah, probably because I read Lonesome Dove for the first time ever in 2024. And — awesome.

00:54:10.90 AROB Amazing book. That'd be number three, Lonesome Dove —

00:54:13.31 Host Okay.

00:54:15.64 AROB — by Larry McMurtry. But number one — you want to try another guess?

00:54:21.59 Host I would have guessed The Colors of the Earth or Lonesome Dove, so I don't know. I should know this.

00:54:26.74 AROB Watership Down by Richard Adams.

00:54:29.28 Host I should have known that one.

00:54:31.22 AROB I have read Watership Down probably six times in my life. I've watched every TV series and movie that's been made about it. Love it. And I get nothing but grief from anybody I ever tell how much I love Watership Down, because everybody says, "It's a stupid book about rabbits, Andrew." And I say, "God, it's so much more than that."

00:54:55.24 AROB Watership Down is about a group of rabbits that flees their warren and goes on this epic journey for survival. Such a good book — I love all the characters and the stories. I've read that one multiple times.

00:55:12.53 Host Awesome. And just as a fun aside — I know you were on a bison/buffalo kick over the last several months.

00:55:18.71 AROB Oh yeah, uh-huh.

00:55:20.80 Host I remember the journey you took us on, and one of the books you got about buffalo — you realized it was actually a book about vampires. Is that right?

00:55:26.94 AROB Yeah. What the heck was that called?

00:55:32.18 Host Watching that slowly unfold over our text chain was pretty fun.

00:55:36.12 AROB My daughter — whatever — I finally figured out it was actually a book about vampires and was like, "Are you an idiot, Dad?"

00:55:47.38 Host Ha!

00:55:48.84 AROB I know — I genuinely just sort of... I didn't read the cover. Give me a break. Oh gosh, what the heck was that book called? Let me see — oh, here we go. Buffalo Hunter Hunter. That's what it was. Oh god — look at the jacket of Buffalo Hunter Hunter. There is probably like a tagline in there.

00:56:12.76 AROB There is nothing in there that makes it seem like a vampire book.

00:56:15.18 Host I don't know.

00:56:16.28 AROB And then I'm reading this and I'm like, "Wait — is this guy a vampire? Has he been alive for like 1,500 years? What am I reading?" Yeah, that was pretty funny. But that was part of my — last year was really the first year I started cataloging all my books. I know you've been doing it for 10 years. I had not been, and I give a very simple rating on a five-star scale. I realized that most of the books I was reading were three and four stars — like, decently readable books, a couple of fives in there that I loved, and then maybe one or two twos. But I just wasn't reading many bad books. I mean, why would that surprise me?

00:56:30.17 Host Mm-hmm.

00:56:59.35 AROB I'm drawn to good books, right? So I pick up good books. So I went on this quest to find a one-star book.

00:57:01.53 Host Right.

00:57:06.26 AROB And so —

00:57:08.31 Host After reading The Comfort Crisis, you realized you needed to add —

00:57:11.13 AROB — more suffering, more struggle. Yeah. And my wife was like, "Why do you want to read a one-star book?" And I was like, "So I can appreciate the twos, threes, fours, and fives even more. I need a baseline. I assumed I knew what a one-star book was." Oh no — I found a one-star book, and it was

00:57:11.86 Host — some struggle.

00:57:31.06 AROB terrible. It was absolutely terrible. And it was also about vampires, thank you very much. And so I read that — I would not have finished it except for this challenge. And then Buffalo Hunter Hunter came up like two months later, and I was like, "Am I reading a second vampire book? What in the world?" So anyway — people really like that book. You go online and there are a lot of really good reviews of Buffalo Hunter Hunter, but I would not be one of those good reviewers.

00:58:03.67 Host Okay.

00:58:08.09 Host Different strokes. Awesome. Good. I'll throw out one fiction book too, as long as we're here.

00:58:17.21 AROB Yeah, how about you?

00:58:18.97 Host Again, not really related to anything. Any fiction written by Wendell Berry is my favorite.

00:58:25.78 AROB Hmm.

00:58:26.65 Host There's a book — it's a collection of short stories called That Distant Land. That's my favorite book of all time. I think I sent that to you, and you were like, "Didn't really think it would be my street, necessarily." But if there's anybody out there who really connects with Wendell Berry's fiction, come find me on LinkedIn and let's chat, because I could unpack that all day.

00:58:36.11 AROB I read it.

00:58:45.72 AROB Yeah. I gave it four stars — That Distant Land.

00:58:48.41 Host Okay.

00:58:48.83 AROB Yeah.

00:58:49.09 Host I like the community — the explorations of community.

00:58:49.39 AROB Yeah.

00:58:53.18 Host I see a lot of the last remnants of what he talks about in my grandmother's generation — just her life in her little town. It's interesting to think about that and unpack it and how it's changed over the last number of decades. Great stories, though, too.

00:59:08.55 AROB Yeah. Yeah. Really good. We could do a whole other series on fiction. We could do a whole other series on nonfiction — I've got even more that I'd love to share.

00:59:17.40 Host Oh well — to come. Maybe we'll come back to that.

00:59:17.57 AROB Yeah. There you go.

00:59:19.04 Host This might be a good kind of Christmas-time, December — we get through the busyness of fundraising and need to settle down for a few weeks.

00:59:21.19 AROB There you go.

00:59:26.00 Host I always love reading a fiction book over Christmas break. That's kind of my brain reset — just pick up something totally popcorn and fluffy, turn everything off for a few days.

00:59:37.40 AROB You should read Lonesome Dove.

00:59:37.85 Host It's... I downloaded it. I have it. It's a commitment, though — what is it, 45, 50 hours? So I've definitely contemplated it.

00:59:45.09 AROB Yeah.

00:59:47.04 Host The problem is I started a fantasy series, which I had never been big on. But somebody recommended the Wheel of Time series to me.

00:59:53.75 AROB Okay.

00:59:54.01 Host Have I talked to you about this? I don't know.

00:59:55.64 AROB I think so. Yeah. It's like 14 books, right?

00:59:58.36 Host It's 14 or 15 books, and they're all 30 to 40 hours long on audio.

01:00:02.05 AROB Yeah. Yeah.

01:00:02.76 Host But man, once I got into it, it is amazing. Let me clarify — this is not romantic fantasy.

01:00:08.95 AROB Let's go.

01:00:09.02 Host I guess that's the whole thing — I've had questions come up. No, this is all big battles and adventures and quests in the woods. And it's awesome. It's very long, it kind of unfurls slowly, but it's really good.

01:00:21.59 Host I'm only on book four, maybe, after a couple of years. So I've got a ways to go.

01:00:28.41 AROB Yes, that is a commitment. Lonesome Dove is long — I want to say it's like six or seven hundred thousand words. That's probably not right. It's probably about half a million. But I read Lonesome Dove, and then there are actually four books in the Lonesome Dove series. I think Lonesome Dove actually follows chronologically as number two, even though it was the first one written. Then he wrote number three, then number four, then number one, which is a prequel. And so I read Lonesome Dove.

01:00:57.44 AROB I read number three — Comanche Moon, or something like that — read number four, and I don't remember the names of all of them. And then I went back and read the prequel.

01:01:08.51 AROB And by that point, I felt like I knew the two characters — Call and Gus McCrae — so well that I needed to read Lonesome Dove again to better appreciate it.

01:01:20.50 Host Ha!

01:01:20.56 AROB And I started Lonesome Dove all over. So that was like two to three months of just Lonesome Dove Westerns. And by the time I finished, I added it all up —

01:01:33.30 AROB — it was like 1.3 million words or something like that.

01:01:36.02 Host Oh wow. Jeez.

01:01:37.44 AROB Yeah. But man, I don't regret it. No regrets. Loved it. Amazing. Lonesome Dove — highly, highly recommend.

01:01:43.25 Host It's great to find a good series like that.

01:01:43.42 AROB Yeah.

01:01:46.78 AROB Yeah.

01:01:48.86 Host All right. Well, that was a long episode — we're kind of harkening back to the early days of the podcast with a longer episode here, but I think it was good. It was good fun.

01:01:56.18 AROB Yeah, I enjoyed it.

01:01:57.82 Host Awesome.

01:01:57.94 AROB Talk about books all day.

01:01:58.10 Host Well, we'll do it again. Maybe, like I said, we'll come back to this at the end of the year and unpack some more fun ones.

01:02:03.66 AROB That sounds great.

01:02:04.57 Host But until then, hopefully you got some good ideas for your summer reading list.

01:02:08.09 AROB Yeah.

01:02:08.31 Host And don't forget — you can check out our Summer Coaching Sprint at petrusdevelopment.com/summer.

01:02:18.19 AROB Cool. Okay. Right on.

01:02:19.51 Host We'll see you back next time.

01:02:21.50 AROB All right. Thanks, Rhen.