Do you want to get more out of everything that you read, will join the club, or you could join book Topia's CEO Tony Nash and start listening to more audio books instead. Tony is someone who doesn't stress about taking notes while he's listening to audiobooks and instead prefers
to absorb the information into his mental data bank. So if you have ever felt guilty or stupid for not retaining everything you've learned in books or training programs or podcasts like this one, then I think that you will love hearing about how Tony thinks about making learning automatic. My name is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium. And this is how I work a show about how to help
you do your best work. On Today is my Favorite Tip episode, where you go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip from the interview. This extract starts with Tony describing the impact that some first aid training had for him as a.
Leader at Booktopia. And I don't have to do it anymore. I've got other people who do this, but I've done first aid training at book Toopia, right so you go on and you do the one day course, and you give the dummy all the pumps and do all the things he's supposed to do. Lie them on the side, talk about this injury and what you've got to do. Are playing pressure there all the things that are required
to do first aid. My mate, my next door neighbor, was working in the garden and he was using a pickaxe to get rid of some sugarcane that was growing in his garden, and he fell two meters down onto the bed below him, and then rolled and fell another two meters onto the concrete driveway next to that. So with hit his head and blood and unconscious, and so I'm reversing out and as a lady standing over him, I'm going, what's going on? And there's there he is
lying in the in the driveway. And why did I know what to do? I couldn't remember. And luckily for him, a doctor was driving past. He's an op themologist, so you know, an eye surgeon with his wife, and they stopped and he came out. He knew what questions to ask. He's the doctor, he's trained. He knew exactly how to ask this and do that and be in this position
and then finally the ambulance arrived. And the thing for me about business and about these books and everything else that you're reading and consuming, it's got to be automatic in a similar kind of way. So when when I talk about someone resigning and my reaction automatic reaction.
Is like wow, Wow, where a you're going next?
That's so exciting. It's like that's automatic for me. But if someone had to go, Now, what did Tony say again? Did he say we had to do this or you have to? Like, then it's not automatic. Then you're you're learning the skill. It's still at that. You know, learning how to ride a bike or drive a car. You're learning all the skills and it's not automatic. And so it's really about the automation of that when you say what you just said to me in terms of you're reading these things and then.
You want to you want to stop.
It's like you want to put the book on pause because you want to make notes and you want to think about that and you want to you want to mull over it and then work out how you can use it. I've just set that up that I'm going to do that through listening and that whatever I take and I take in and is adding to my data bank of knowledge and information that is automatic.
So with making things automatic, what are some other habits or things that you do in your working life that just happen automatically that you feel like serve you really well, like your reaction to when someone resigns, So.
When something comes out of left field and it's not necessarily something resigning, so extra cost is on certain things projects next to six hundred thousand dollars here that you weren't expecting, or one hundred thousand here. When we were moving from Lane Cove to Lidcom or to the Regent where we are now near Olympic Stadium and where the big Australia Post hub is, which is where we wanted to move to. We had spent a year trying to find a place. Found a place, paid out ten thousand dollar.
It's not a deposit, it's like a heads of agreement kind of holding money so that you go, yep, we're taking this property and.
Sign the heads of agreement.
And then I got a call from the real estate agent to say, Tony, I've got the worst possible news. The CEO of a large multinational who rents from your landlord that you want to take the building from. Once the property that you've taken has rung the CEO of that company and demanded that they get it because they rent all over the country and doesn't matter they've signed
something else forget it. And so he was just like, I had to make this call to me and just say how you know, like apparently he was sweating bullets before making the call because it was Christmas, even we'd worked all year, and he just like he was just gutted to have to do this, and I let him speak, and then at the end of it, I said, Sean, relax, the only reason you're telling me is there's a better
property waiting for us around the corner. And because I wasn't so angry and pissed off and kicking the bucket and whatever else, and you did this because I was so amenable. We got a bigger property for an amazing price because we really helped them out. They were under pressure and so they did what they could to really support how supportive we were.
And that's happened.
Many, many times in various things where something comes out of left field, and when you're in business, things come out of left field.
You cannot be.
Running a company, even as the appointed CEO or a leader in your company, doesn't matter what's going on, even in your team, something will come out of left field, and you've got to be able to say.
Bring it on. Oh, I wasn't expecting that.
I mean last night it is like my son, seventeen year old doing is hsc silly kids, right, He takes his computer up stairs, He gets a glass of water out of the fridge, turns around and because I've been doing the dishes, the computer felt into the tub that I was washing dishes in. You know, like there's no point in just kicking and screaming. It's like, okay, how are we going to resolve this? What needs to happen? And you just got to get it done. But I
think that's an important skill. You want to be able to be as stable as you can in any situation. Because you've got to, you'll be more resourceful, you'll be more available to listen to others, you'll think of options. When you're really emotionally charged and you're angry, all of a sudden, all of that capacity to think of something else is almost removed because you just don't have the memory space to focus on that. That is definitely one that served me very well.
So how did you almost train yourself to have that reaction become automatic?
I'm not embarrassed to say, and I'll protect the people involved, but I when I sold my recruitment company, it was sold to a listed company, and we had a dot com crash and things were just it was just everything just went to pieces. In the late nineties early two thousands, there was a lot of companies that went under.
The whole market fell out.
If you look at the Nasdaq in the early two thousands, you'll see it go from like five thousand, five thousand points to sixteen hundred or something.
It was just really awful.
Anyway, the guy that was running a company that made the acquisition, he had a meeting with the head office and he.
Came back and he just he was just so pissed off with what.
Had happened at the board level that he walked to his desk and just smashed the filing trays all across the room. And I was anyone in the office at the time. It was in the evening. I was working, and everything just went flying everywhere. And I looked at that and going is that really the best way to react and manage your situation. It just didn't give me a lot of confidence in his dealing with crisis.
And so that was one thing that I remember.
I was quite shocked, and I remember going, that's not the way that I want to operate in a situation.
So if you ask me what happened outside of my personal experience, that was one that immediately comes to mind.
But when I was younger, and I remember I was coaching or managing a young basketball team of teenagers and something had happened and I just lost my I lost it and I just started yelling at the kids, and there was parents and everyone in the stands, And I remember my mum coming up to me later and she goes, I've never been so embarrassed.
In all my life.
Nothing could have been better for anyone to say anything at that time for me to then think about how my reaction really didn't work. So I think those two things was that when I think about it, when they pop up, it must be some.
Of the core red faced experiences.
One that I had done to myself and one where I was like someone else had done it to themselves that I was observing that gave me reference points to shift.
I hope you enjoyed my chat with Tony and got something out of it. Now, if you're enjoying How I Work, I would be so grateful if you could take maybe five ten seconds out of your day to leave a review wherever you're listening to this from. If you're listening in Apple podcasts, all you need to do is click on a star rating, or you might even want to write some words and thank you to the hundreds of
people that have left reviews. It's so wonderful getting listener feedback and it really does make my day, So thank you. How I Work is produce my inventing with production support from Dead Set Studios. And thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix and makes everything sound much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.