Guiding Books for Inspirational Leaders with Cristina and Alex

EPISODE 109

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives. 

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that's with our families, co-workers or even ourselves. 

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni. 

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore. Let’s dive in.

Cristina Amigoni: Let’s dive in. 

“Authenticity means freedom.”

“Authenticity means going with your gut.”

“Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you.”

“Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself.”

“It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true.”

“Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be.”

“It's transparency, relatability. No frills. No makeup. Just being.”

Alex Cullimore: Hi. Welcome back to this episode of Uncover the Human. Today it's just Cristina and I. We wanted to give a chance just to talk through and recommend a couple books that we've really enjoyed over the last few years and make this a quick book club recommendation list from just some human-first thinking. With that, do you want to start, Cristina? Do you want me to start? 

Cristina Amigoni: Why don't you start? Your topic.

Alex Cullimore: All right. We're obviously a little bit of gluttons for leadership material. We love kind of reading about it, digesting all the new thoughts on it. And we have a couple that have really bubble to the surface that we refer to a lot in our own internal workings at SIAMO. And it's a lot of what informs how we operate. And a lot of ways, how we think about life and interactions with people in general, is just that's a filter we love to see the world out of. So with that, we came up with two big ones that we kind of made informally required reading within SIAMO. And the one that comes up first for me is The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. And that one is a great book on basically kind of leadership philosophy. It's an idea how do you think about things in a much larger scale when we are all part of a much larger timeline than we will ever comprehend or actually actively participate in? So what are you doing? What is your company doing that has got more of a just cause that everybody is moving towards and something that will outlive you and a mission and a vision you can't possibly accomplish? It never really has an end point but you're still moving the needle in that direction. The Infinite Game has a lot of descriptions of how to think about things in terms of infinite versus finite thinking and what that really means and how you can endorse a much larger view and spare yourself some of the immediate slings and arrows of just ups and downs. As well as keep yourself moving towards a vision and keep everybody motivated towards what is the large thing we're moving towards. It helps make decisions. It helps guide how you're thinking about anything.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. I love that. I love that book. I listen to it. I think it was 2019 at this point when I listened to that. It just completely changed my perspective of almost anything and everything. I love the perspective of thinking about the infinite mindset. Meaning like there isn't a finite size of the pie in anything. And especially when it comes to collaborations with others, and helping others and also information that's available that you make available to others. I think that's one of the things that struck to me the most, is what if we didn't keep information to ourselves just in case the other. Whether it's a potential competitor, or a perceived competitor, or somebody in the same realm of industry. If we share the information, they'll just go out and steal our client just because we've mentioned something like, "Oh, you know, like we're – I don't know. We're either pitching. Or this is a service that we're providing." Or any type of information. But it really switches things when you realize that that's – we can't control. We can't control who the client is going to hire. What we can control is whether we look at others as partners, and collaborators and potential – I guess just potential people that we respect and we share. We don't withhold information just in case they will take from us. We can't control that anyway. We're not there to determine what they it will take from us. Not only, but it opens up an immense way to look at the world and of sharing and advancing that just cause that Alex mentioned. What is our common just cause? Well, then, does it really matter that we do it or somebody else does it in this instance? Can we actually have the capacity to serve every single company, client, person and individual that we want in the world with what we provide? Not even close. So what are we afraid of? 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I love the idea that pitching for like customers and stuff too, pitching for clients. No. Yeah. One person is going to win that one contract, sure. One company is going to do that. But there are other contracts out there to be – you have a chance to refine and change your messaging and see like where's your real niche? If you think about like just cause for SIAMO is to bring and humanize the workplace a lot more. Bringing humanity back and make sure that we're working in human ways. Because you get tremendous value as a business and as people when you are acting in a more human way. We do this through leadership development. We do this through uplifting leaders and changing cultures. That's our angle on this. That's not the only angle on this. That's not the only work to be done. And even if there were people who were taking that exact same angle, to your point, there are way too many companies in the world, in the nation, in the state that we could never serve all of these. There's no way we possibly get to all of them. It would be hamstringing the entire just cause for us not to be handing that to as many partners that we know that can deliver this similar work or can deliver the right thing for this client. That's where you start to really play on the infinite mindset and it reduces a lot of that stress and anxiety of treating everything is competition. And I think Simon Smith even – rather than calling it competition, he talks about worthy rivals. And that actually, interestingly, segues us into our other book that we have recommended. One of the worthy rivals that Simon brings up is Adam Grant. Simon Smith is a lot – really likes it and is great at coming up with language that sounds great, great marketing, great stage presence. And Adam Grant is much more the organizational psychologist who does research. And so, Simon talks about feeling a little bit insecure about that because he's much more – Adam's a little bit more experiment-backed and data-backed. And Simon's more in the realm of philosophy. There's a place for both of these. And once he stopped feeling like it was a competition between who's selling more books and started to realize it was just somebody he could learn a lot from and could take some of those habits and build his own repertoire and they can both learn from each other. And he even talks about being in a conference with Adam Grant at one point and just admitting on stage, like, "Look, I feel insecure about your book sales." And Adam Grant was like, "Well, I feel the same way." He found out that Adam was actually feeling like he was also in competition with Simon on that. But that brings up Adam Grant's book that we've liked, Give and Take, which is this incredible book about reciprocity styles. We're humans. We're social beings. And are we givers? Are we takers? Are we matchers? Do we give more than we received? Do we look to take as much as we possibly can and give as little back? Or we look to just try and keep things even. If somebody gives us something, we try and give back the same amount in social currency.And just kind of the different consequences of what happens when you have these and how humans react to givers and takers and matchers. It's a fascinating book. I would absolutely recommend that to anybody. Because it'll change how you work with people. It'll change how you work in companies. It'll change how you think about social interaction.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. It really does. What I really like about it is how Adam does a great job at providing examples, where if you are stuck in the moment, in the success of the moment, in the success of the quarter, or the year as the only measure of success, it may appear in a lot of cases that takers or matchers are the ones that are winning. If we want to use a winning and losing. Meaning like they have more success defined by, well, in this quarter or in this deal. Like if we narrow it down. However, if we expand the view a little bit like the meme of the dog in front of the fireplace where it looks like he's just coozing up with a mug of hot chocolate in front of the fireplace. And when you zoom out, he's actually in the middle of a house fire and not doing anything about it. And so that's what Adam explains really well in the book, is like when you zoom out from a larger chronological event or larger time continuum, that's when you realize like, "Actually, no. It's the givers that are successful." Because what comes around goes around. Karma. You know, there's a million ways to say this. The more you give and the more you focus on giving without expecting anything in return just because that's what you want to do, things do come back tenfold, five-fold, three-fold in completely different ways that you didn't expect. It's just a matter of getting past the, "I got to meet the numbers this quarter." 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Yeah. Givers. I mean, everybody is willing to go help a giver. You will help a giver that gave to you years ago if they just happen to be around. We all keep some amount of reciprocity in our minds of like, "Hey, I really appreciated this one thing this person did for me." And maybe you haven't had a chance to give it back to them. But at some point, that chance comes up and you immediately will help with that. And on the flip side, somebody's a taker and then you've noticed that you feel like they're a taker and then you're on edge, for one, when you're around them. And B, when they need help, you're not going to give it. It's just more common human sense to be like, "Yeah, I don't really trust that person. I'd rather give this opportunity to somebody else." And the givers are – if you think about it on the systems level, the givers are adding currency basically to the system. Favor currency. They're just giving out favors and value. And that creates more value in the system. The takers are pulling it off the table. The matchers are moving it all around. The more givers there are, the more there is to be had for everybody. 

Cristina Amigoni: Indeed. Yeah. Highly recommended. And also, SIAMO required reading. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. 

Cristina Amigoni: What's next? 

Alex Cullimore: There's two more that I definitely lean towards. And maybe we'll have time for a third one. But first, this was a very brief one, but the idea of essentialism. This is by Greg McKeown. Essentialism is a book that was recommended to us actually by a previous podcast guest, Sam Moore. But it's about – the basic motto boils down to being able to do less better. We only have so much energy to give. Focus that energy and make sure it's in a few places. You can't give it to all of the places. You can have 10 different things you're working on but you'll only be able to give a tenth of your energy at best to each of those if you try and do all of them. Because if you focus down to what's really essential, what's really necessary, you have a lot more power. You can push behind something that really matters to you. It's about getting down to what actually truly matters and is essential to you and focusing energy on that and being able to turn down the other things. Because that's where you really drive, and change and turn the needle.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, that's a great book. It's not very long either. But it's a really good book to just going to remember, like we're not going to be able to do everything. So what if we switch our mindset into expecting ourselves to do everything half badly and just figuring out like what actually does need to be done? And part of that, I think, it's also some courage and self-reflection on you're going to have to say no to things. And it's okay. And getting sucked into the like, "Well, but so-and-so is going to be feel bad. Or they're going to wonder this." Like then now we're slave to what other people may be thinking, which, we guarantee, that's not what they're thinking because they're not in their minds. And most likely, they're not even thinking about what we're doing or us. Because there's enough in their heads in the 900-plus words that are swimming around. And none of them are about whatever we think they're expecting from us. What if we could actually provide value in the best way by recognizing that we can only reduce how many things we keep on our plate? 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Great reminder to really prioritize where your energy goes. And a reminder that, as much as we would like to think so, as much as we would like to believe that we can make it so, our energy is decidedly finite. There's only so much you get to spend in a day. There's only so much you can do things to help recharge this. You can spend it in more efficient ways. Those are all great ways of thinking about where you're putting your energy. And another way to – and this is really great. This book is all about like how to really focus delivering as much energy as possible to the things that really, really will drive some change and mean something to you, which brings us actually to the other book that I'd love to discuss. We've both read this one. This one's much more about like life philosophy. But it builds on the ideas of essentialism. Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Truly, this is one that'll change how you think about your entire life. The concept of four thousand weeks is that the human lifespan is about four thousand weeks long, which is kind of shocking when you think about it. And then it makes sense, you got 50 weeks each in a year, 52, and you live about 80 years. That boils down to four thousand weeks. You have about 4,000 weeks on this planet. What are you going to do with them? It bridges between like reminding us that there is no time management system that will get us to be able to do all of the things. And the world is so wide and filled with so many potential experiences that you will miss out on 99.9% of them no matter what, no matter what you do. You only have limited time. You only have limited space. You will decidedly miss out on the majority of things. So how are you going to actually think about the things that you do do? And how are you going to pick those? And this is an excellent book in reminding us all of the ways that those are important. Reminding us not to try and invest in all of the latest time management systems to see if we can get that time back and answer every single email, and also be fully invested in our relationships, and also do all of these things and all of the things we deal with on a daily basis. It's a good reminder that we can't do it all. And that we need to admit that to ourselves so we can make the most of what we can do. 

Cristina Amigoni: It is an excellent book. Very similar to essentialism from a different perspective. But that time is – for us as human beings, is finite. It's infinite as a concept that we create anyway. But our time is finite. And so, how do we want to use it? And if we break it down to that, the thought of four thousand weeks in a lifetime, it's pretty scary because we do tend to make decisions and go through life as is, "Oh, well, we can just do it next week." Or, "I can take this on." Or, "It's okay if I don't talk to this friend, or respond, or see this person for another 1, 2, 400 weeks. Because it's going to take me whatever the math is there. You know, 10-plus years to actually make the effort. Like is it, though? Because there's not this never-ending thing. Prioritizing. Like what do we actually want our 4,000 weeks to be in our life? It's a big thing.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. That changed how I thought about all of things in life. I forever pursued the idea of a lot of the common traps that I think a lot of people fall into. Or maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm alone in this one. But either way, I tried to hold all the doors open. I tried to do all the things. I tried to make sure I could be able to do other things. And it's a good way to exhaust yourself and disappoint yourself all at the same time. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yep. Definitely get away with that. Yeah, enjoy these books. Hope you find something useful in them. We have lots more. And so, we'll probably do other episodes on this. But these are the ones that we recommend today.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Also, keep it going.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Keep an infinite mindset. And give. But not so much that you run out of weeks. And only the essential stuff. That's the core – 

Alex Cullimore: And do you mind, all the philosophies of this, you'll be fine. All these books.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Thanks for listening.

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you for listening to Uncover the Human, a Siamo podcast. 

Alex Cullimore: Special thanks to our podcast operations wizard, Jake Lara; and our score creator, Rachel Sherwood. 

Cristina Amigoni: If you have enjoyed this episode, please share, review and subscribe. You can find our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Alex Cullimore: We would love to hear from you with feedback, topic ideas or questions. You can reach us at podcast wearesiamo.com, or at our website, wearesiamo.com, LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook. We Are Siamo is spelled W-E A-R-E S-I-A-M-O.

Cristina Amigoni: Until next time, listen to yourself, listen to others and always uncover the human.