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🗂️ What’s in Today’s Newsletter:

📖 The Anecdote: The Library at the End of the World
🔬 Research Insight: Why more input doesn’t equal more wisdom
🎯 Putting It Together: Five takeaways for becoming a better-curated leader
📌 Closing Thought: Great leaders read differently

There is a PDF Guide to a “Leadership Canon” activity we think every leader should do for themselves. But, we built it as a guide for a leader that would equip you to lead your staff or team through this as an activity!

The downloaded PDF is at the bottom of the newsletter.

🏆 The Idea: Why More Isn’t Always Better

The most-read newsletter in college athletics, the D1 Ticker, released their yearly Executive Leadership Book Recommendations yesterday.

We always pay close attention to this list. It is a fascinating encapsulation of leaders in NCAA Sports thinking at this current moment. Some of the books on the list make us chuckle. Some receive cheers and applause.

There’s a story we often tell with coaches about the importance of messaging to their team. Just put yourself in an athlete’s shoes for two weeks of a season.

• There are two emphases—one for each week. Typically, something like, “This week, we are going to focus on controlling the controllable.”

• Depending on the sport, they’ll play between 2-8 games over that span. Each game usually has a unique message attached to it. Then another one at halftime, then another after the game.

• Then, there’s the intermittent messaging that comes with the low-energy practice. Or the “lesson” they have to learn from some interaction, debrief, or film session

Now imagine that over an entire season. We call it “idea whiplash”. The athletes are being jostled back and forth by all these different messages from their head coach and coaching staff, not to mention parents, social media, and the rest.

They end up catching none of it. As a coach or leader, you slowly tune your voice out over time and lose influence without even realizing it.

Instead, we want consistent messaging around a few core ideas that are reinforced repeatedly. That’s how athletes learn the best and how effective cultures are built.

Well, guess what? The same is true of your attention and the ideas your mind is consuming.

So, be careful what you read. Packing your brain full of ideas can hinder your leadership. We advocate that a healthier view of your reading should be in search of the best ideas. Curating a list of ideas that most impact your leadership.

📖 The Anecdote: The Library at the End of the World

Terry Pratchett, the late fantasy author, once wrote about a library that exists at the edge of the universe in a pocket of infinite space. This mythical library doesn’t contain every book ever written—it contains every book that could ever be written. Every idea, every story, every argument, every word—cataloged in endless aisles.

In leadership today, we’re closer than ever to that kind of library.

Between newsletters (👋), Twitter threads, podcasts, and annual book lists, you can feel like you’re never reading enough.

But here’s the paradox: The more content you consume, the harder it becomes to lead.

Why?

Because leadership isn’t about the volume of your inputs. It’s about clarity in your filters.

🔬 Research Insight: Why More Input Doesn’t Equal More Wisdom

A systematic literature review published in Frontiers in Psychology highlights that the exponential growth of digital information has led to the pervasive problem of information overload, affecting decision-making, productivity, and well-being.

Here’s a quote from the introduction of this study.

“Currently, the amount of information that is created every two days is roughly equivalent to the amount of information that was created between the beginning of human civilization and the year 2003.”

Their conclusion?

“Consuming too many strategies can paralyze a leader’s ability to choose one.”

In psychology, this is sometimes called analysis paralysis, but in leadership, it often resembles someone with all the right words but none of the right instincts.

The best leaders don’t read more.
They read better.

🎯 Putting It All Together: Five Takeaways for Curated Reading in Leadership

1. Read with a Purpose, Not Just a Plan
   Don’t read to finish more books—read to solve better problems.

2. Curate Your Canon
   You don’t need 100 leadership frameworks. You need the 3–5 that shape your worldview. Ours?

   • 10X is Greater Than 2X

   • The 100X Leader (Jeremie’s book!)

   • Win the Inside Game

   • Atomic Habits

   • The Culture Code

   • Into the Storm (Kevin’s book!)

3. Be a Rereader, Not Just a Reader
   The best books deserve multiple passes. Some of our favorites get marked up every year.

4. Apply Before You Add
   Apply one concept from your last book every time you read something new. Build habits, not hoards.

5. Audit Your Intake
   Once a quarter, ask:

   • What books/podcasts/newsletters are shaping my leadership?

   • Are they helping me get clearer or just busier?

How would we take you or your team through this process?

👇 Download the Guide Here

📌 Conclusion: Great Leaders Read Differently

You’re not a better leader because you’ve read more books.

You’re a better leader when the books you read shape who you are, not just what you say.

So this year, don’t read everything on the list.
Read the right things.
Re-read the best things.
And most of all—read less like a collector and more like a craftsman.

Keep Up With BETTER

1. This week, we got to be with leaders from:

• Mississippi State

• Columbus Crew

• Robert Morris

• OKC Thunder

• La Salle College High School

• Kevin will be speaking at the Iowa HS AD Convention

…and informally with a few more.

2. Very quietly, we have built a 5 Voices Playbook where Kevin and Seth walk coaches through the nuances of coaching each of the 5 Voices. It includes a built-in dashboard for you to track the Voices of the players on your team. We are ironing out the marketing of this, so we haven’t officially “launched” it yet. But if you want, the course is ready to go today.

BETTER’s Solution to Coach Development

As a part of our work, we lead cohorts of leaders. It’s just one meeting a month with a topic, some homework, and sharing about how it’s going. But it’s powerful. Many of the coaches and leaders in our cohort express the following sentiment:

“I wish every coach got to experience this on some level.”

So, we thought, why can’t they?

As a part of what’s next for BETTER.

We are launching a community around the Culture Playbook.

Until now, the Culture Playbook has been something you buy and then get. We wanted it to be so good and affordable that every coach in the country could access it.

From now on, leaders will receive the Culture Playbook as part of a guided community led by Kevin and Seth.

If you’ve enjoyed our newsletter, imagine a community where we will take you and others through a deeper level of how to install the systems for yourself, athletes, or other coaches. You can ask us questions directly. We can guide and share discussions, share ideas, and get feedback.

We will host monthly calls, and every coach will have direct access to us. We will lead guided discussions and encourage coaches and ADs to share best practices. We want it to become the absolute best resource for all things Culture Development, both at the program and department levels. Over time, we will continue to add content, resources, and offerings. You’ll get discounts on future products that the public won’t get. And no, the price is not changing.

We’re targeting a public launch in early January, offering newsletter readers early access and a 25% discount. Fill out the form using the link below, and we’ll send you a link to get started.