This Business of Getting Better

What I love about entrepreneurs is how focused you are on getting better. The fact that you are subscribed to the KellerINK newsletter shows you care about books and what books can do to help you on your journey.

For the last thirteen years, I’ve worked with Gary, Jay and the KellerINK team on books that you know like The ONE Thing, Your First Home, and now Rookie Real Estate Agent.

I want to share another book, a book I have written that I think can continue to help: 100 Best Books for Work and Life.

There are 40,000 books published each year in business and self-help. That means there is a new book published every fifteen minutes hoping to get your attention. Who has time to sort through all of those titles? My goal was to help people cut through the clutter.    

In this article, I want to talk more about getting better. It is so important to me that I focused the opening chapter on exactly that.

Having a Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck is the researcher we should most credit for showing us all we can get better. In her book Mindset, the theory is simple: some people don’t think they can change, while others think they can. Fixed mindsets box us into thinking that we can only be so good at something. That thinking means we never look at our deficiencies or work to correct them. We often contribute to perpetuating these fixed mindsets by praising others with lines like “You are so smart.” Calling out seeming innate qualities further cements their fixed qualities in our minds.

Now if we believe we can change, then we believe we can grow. Jim Collins teaches a selfless, ever-improving quality of Level 5 leadership in his book Good to Great (another selection in 100 Best Books). Dweck sees it in schoolteachers like Marva Collins who challenges four-year-olds who start in September to be reading by Christmas. The goal of any relationship should be to encourage the other’s development and for them to do the same for you. Here are three things you can say to encourage a growth mindset in others:

• “Thank you for struggling and learning something new. It really helped.”

• “Thank you for being undaunted by the setback we had on that project.”

• “Thanks for seeing that difficult task through. I know it was really hard.” 

There Is No Limit

You might not know Anders Ericsson, but I bet you know the 10,000 hour rule. Malcolm Gladwell popularized the practice component of Ericsson’s research into expertise. Here is Ericsson’s description from his book Peak:

"In pretty much every endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement...but you have only scratched the surface. [H]ow much you improve is up to you. “

Did you catch that last sentence? This aspect of Ericsson's research is even more interesting to me. There appears to be no limit to the ability to improve.  In 2015, James Lawrence completed 50 Ironman-distance triathlons in 50 states in 50 days, and in 2021, he upped the challenge and completed 100 Ironman-distance triathlons in 100 consecutive days. Last year, endurance bicyclist Lael Wilcox completed an 18,000 mile round the world in 108 days, shaving more than 16 days off the previous record. In 2019, Nirmal Purja of Nepal climbed fourteen mountains over eight thousand meters tall in six months and six days. The previous record was seven years and 310 days. Every one of these feats seems impossible and in each case, the records are beat by another impossible task.

I’ll let Ericsson explain the broader implications:

"Imagine a world in which doctors, teachers, engineers, pilots, computer programmers, and many other professionals hone their skills in the same way that violinists, chess players, and ballerinas do now. Imagine a world in which 50 percent of the people in these professions learn to perform at the level that only the top 5 percent manage today. What would that mean for our health care, our educational system, our technology?"

Tactics For Growth

Daniel Coyle provides a different telling of what makes people get better. Coyle brings a journalistic approach, and his reporting takes him from research labs to training centers around the world. His three part model includes deep practice, proper motivation, and great teachers. Here’s specific tactics from his book The Little Book of Talent:

• Choose spartan over luxurious: Simple, humble spaces help focus attention on the deep-practice task at hand.

• Take your watch off: Instead of counting minutes or hours, count reaches and reps.

• Pay attention immediately after you make a mistake: Look straight at mistakes and see what really happened, and then ask yourself what you can do next to improve.

• Shrink the space: Toyota trains new employees by shrinking the assembly line into a single room filled with toy-sized replicas of the equipment and found it was more effective than training on the actual production line.

• To learn from a book, close the book: Writing a summary forces you to figure out the key points (one set of reaches), process and organize those ideas so they make sense (more reaches), and write them down on the page (still more reaches, along with repetition).

I’ll leave you with this:

Growth comes from believing that change is possible, and change is always possible, because there's no limit to how good you can get.

Todd Sattersten is the publisher and owner of Bard Press. He has worked in non-fiction book publishing for over two decades. Todd is the author of four books, including 100 Best Books for Work and Life: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You, published in October 2025 through Bard Press. Todd lives in Portland, Oregon.