Shownotes
What if one podcast, one book, or one idea could permanently change the direction of your life? In this episode of the Leading Visionaries, host Anjel B. Hartwell sits down with Nick Hutchison, founder of Book Thinkers, to explore how reading became the catalyst for leadership, entrepreneurship and conscious growth. From building a side hustle while still employed to hosting large-scale author events and serving visionary leaders around the world, Nick’s story is a powerful reminder that slow, intentional growth often creates the strongest foundations.
This conversation dives deep into leadership development, vision-building, community, and why books remain one of the most accessible tools for transformation in an ever-changing world.
What You Will Learn:
How podcasts can act as a gateway to deeper learning through books.
Why most successful leaders credit reading as a key factor in their growth.
How to develop leadership skills by learning from a wide range of perspectives.
Why revisiting the same book at different stages of life creates new insights.
How reading expands global awareness and challenges limited worldviews.
What it really takes to transition from a side hustle to a sustainable business.
Why financial runway matters when leaving full-time employment.
How intuition, timing, and signs can guide major life decisions.
What it means to lead other visionaries while honoring individual strengths.
Why community is essential for authors, creators, and thought leaders.
How events create safe spaces for growth-oriented, mission-driven people.
Why “slow and steady” leadership often outperforms rushed success.
How books can serve as both personal development tools and business assets.
What it looks like to build a life and business rooted in peace, purpose, and impact.
Resource:
Nick Hutchison
Join the Leading Visionaries Community
Transcripts
LVP 113 Nick
===
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Leading Visionaries podcast, featuring stellar conversations with emerging and established leading visionaries. Thanks for joining us today as we celebrate and spotlight the leading visionaries who are thinking differently, seeing new possibilities, have the courage to dream big. Take inspired action and create conscious change all around the world.
Now here's your host, angel b Hartwell.
Welcome to another episode of the Leading Visionaries Podcast, where we celebrate the ingenious, insightful, innovative, and inspired leading visionaries of our time, and provide our listeners with world class examples of the kind of courage, clarity, and confidence it takes to bring visions into reality.
This is your host Angel b Hartwell, and today we welcome our special guest, Nick Hutchinson. Nick has collaborated with industry leaders such [00:01:00] as Louis Howes, Alex Ozzi, and Vanessa Van Edwards and his work has been featured on hundreds of top business and personal development podcasts. A passionate advocate for authors.
He has helped hundreds of thought leaders amplify their messages and grow their impact rooted in his love for books. Nick has donated thousands of titles to nonprofits and individuals striving for personal growth, making knowledge accessible to all. His mission is simple but profound to empower others to rise to their potential.
Through the wisdom found in Books. Connect with Nick to learn how he can help you, your team, or your audience, harness the power of reading to create the life of your dreams. I'm super excited to have you here on the show. Welcome, Nick. Thank you for the lovely introduction and for welcoming me. I cannot wait to provide value to your audience today.
Oh, well, my audience can't wait to receive value from you. And so I [00:02:00] wanna start our conversation, Nick, by talking about being visionary and obviously you know, you are quite the visionary you have. Built a lovely business and an event that I'm actually gonna be attending soon called Book Thinkers and you're helping a lot of other visionaries as well.
So I'm curious about your own visionary journey. My journey really started in my early twenties, as we were talking about before we press record, angel, I attended the University of New Hampshire. And when I was heading into my senior year of college, I took an internship at a local software company in Lee, New Hampshire.
And my boss at the time, Kyle told me something I'll never forget. He said, Nick, listening to the same songs or the same playlist, the same music on the way into work every day, it's probably not going to change your life, but the right podcast might. And I was a very ambitious person in my early twenties, and so I [00:03:00] took his advice to heart and I started to listen to podcasts on my way in and on my way out of work that summer, five days a week.
My commute was kind of long, it was about an hour. And as I was listening to these successful people describe how they became successful, I noticed a very common thread, which was they were all giving at least some credit for their success to the books that they had read. And at the time I wasn't much of a reader, but I thought if I'm going to ignore this through line, that is very clear to me that I'm choosing not to live up to my own potential.
And so I went to my local Barnes and Noble in Newington, New Hampshire, and I grabbed a stack of 10 books and I fell in love with reading as a form of personal development, as a way to solve problems and build skills and diversify my perspective. And I realized, angel, that. All of the world's most successful people had documented decades of their greatest life experiences in today's, and those books were available for [00:04:00] $20 and you could read them in a few hours.
And so I think that that period in my life, I was the ambitious, but I didn't know what it meant to be a visionary until I started reading other visionaries stories and I just became addicted to it. Oh, I love that. Well, books are something that have been my friends since I was nine years old in Hollis, New Hampshire, going to the library myself on my bike from my house, which wasn't too far from, from where the library was.
So books have been my friends forever. And I love what you said about, you know, the, for you it was like a two step process. And for our listeners, it may also be a two step process where now we, we have podcasts that. Are essentially like books in your ears, you know what I mean? And you know, so that you took what you learned from podcasts, but then you also went and got the books and went deeper is is really a key piece of data here for our listeners.[00:05:00]
So it, it, to me, it talks about leadership as well, because you could have just listened to the podcast and blown off the fact that there's actually way more info and way more learning and way more development available to you from the book. So. Let's talk a little bit about your leadership journey. Sure.
My first job, as we were talking about was at Hampton Beach and I worked in an ice cream shop between high school and college, and within a couple of weeks I was given the keys to that ice cream shop. I was opening it, I was closing it. I was managing all of the other employees, and I think that my leadership confidence in that role.
Probably stemmed from some of the responsibilities I had in high school. I was captain of the wrestling team and I was involved in some other extracurriculars. We had the largest club in our high school. It was a dodgeball club that I founded with a couple of friends, and so I think I always really enjoyed getting to [00:06:00] exercise my own creativity within a group of other people.
And then as I mentioned, I had that internship where I learned about podcasts. And when I graduated College Angel, I went full-time with that company and I went from intern to regional sales rep, regional sales rep to director of sales. And then through multiple acquisitions I stayed with that company and continued to take on more responsibility.
And so I think I, you know, I just really enjoyed it and I consistently tried to read great leadership books written by other people so that I could take from them what I wanted to and apply it. And then let go of anything that didn't apply to me. And that's another great aspect of these books, is that you don't have to take everything that you read.
In fact, sometimes I think it's important to read opinions from people that you don't necessarily agree with so that you can understand how they got to where they were. And so a lot of my leadership principles, a lot of the things that I try to do in my company today, book Thinkers, again, stems from the books that I read.[00:07:00]
Mm. Well, I love this idea of taking what works for you and then letting go of the rest. And one of the experiences I definitely have had over the years in reading, because I'm a deep reader is, going through a book and getting something in the book in that moment and leaving a bunch behind, but then going and reading it again maybe five years later and discovering that there was much more there that I had missed the first time around, but I just wasn't ready for it.
I don't know if that's been something that has happened for you as well. 100%. There's some type of old proverb and I, I don't remember exactly where it came from, but it's the idea that you can never step in the same river twice. Mm-hmm. Because you've changed and the river has also changed. And so I would, I would translate that to reading and say, you can never read the same book twice.
Because you've changed, and that means that the book has changed as well. So there are some examples like Rich Dad, poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, or The [00:08:00] Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, the Alchemist by Paulo Culo. Those are books that I've read 10 times, and every single time I read those books, I get a different takeaway from them.
So revisiting the books, the 5% that have created 95% of the impact on my life is something that I try to do regularly. Yeah. I love that. Well, let's talk a little bit about the kind of the trajectory that you had or maybe the vision that you got for book Thinkers. It's like the trajectory from job to self-employment.
We can do both. Sure. And, and I think there's some fun lessons in here for the audience as well. It, it changed over time. So the original idea for Book Thinkers was a place for me to document my favorite takeaways from each book so that aspiring readers could have a library of options, they could get a little preview for the books.
And then decide if it was gonna be a good fit for them based on my feedback. [00:09:00] And that started as a website, book thinkers.com. And over time I started to share the books that I was reading on social media as that became a little bit more popular, 20 15, 20 16. And by 2017 I started to develop an Instagram following.
And so I was sharing all these books that were having a big impact on my sales career and my relationships and my spirituality. And just my overall global perspectives. And as my audience got bigger and bigger, angel, I had some authors reaching out to me and they would ask questions like, Hey Nick, how much does it cost for you to read my book and to talk about it in front of your online following?
And I thought, what an interesting side hustle. Getting paid to read. I mean, it's something that I'm doing for free already, and I knew based on the inbound leads that. It would expose me to books that maybe I wouldn't have decided to read otherwise. And so that's how Book Thinkers started. As a side hustle, I was getting paid to read and talk about [00:10:00] books.
I was always very honest about the books I was reading, so I would share my favorite takeaways and who I thought the book was a good fit for and who should stay away from it. And over time to make this kind of a, a shorter story. Over time, those authors started to ask if I could help in other ways, because a lot of those books, while they were meant to provide a standalone impact to the reader, there were also lead mechanisms or credibility builders for something else.
Coaching, consulting, public speaking courses. And so I started to try out other ways to help those authors and then fast forward until today, now my agency Book Thinkers has evolved into a platform that supports hundreds of authors a year with services like podcast booking, social media reviews, content creation, social media management, things like that.
Beautiful. I love it. So, before we hit the break, one of the other things that I heard you say was you, [00:11:00] you were getting a global perspective. So there's people listening in sixties, two countries to this show. I'd love to have you speak a little bit about, 'cause you came from Massachusetts, you, you know, spent the summers in New Hampshire.
It can be very insular here. Like what was the first. Big thing that kind of woke you up to a more global perspective, either first book or first aha from a book or first author that gave you a, a different view on the world. I, there were so many great books. I think the first book that really opened my eyes to a different way of living was the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris.
In that book, Tim talks about building a virtual business, but at the same time, he talks about traveling the world while building his business. And Tim, the one that comes to mind is he talks about going to Argentina and taking tango classes. And [00:12:00] trying the food and experiencing a different language. And so I actually followed in his footsteps.
I didn't know anybody in South America, but I thought I'd like to live the life that Tim is living. So I booked a five week trip to Argentina. I flew to Argentina by myself without speaking a word of Spanish. And I remember the first day I was there, I thought I am way, way, way in over my head. But by the end of the five weeks I thought that was not.
A long enough trip. And so that was the book that I think really opened my eyes. And then I read a book that he endorsed called Vagabonding, and the subtitle is something like The Uncommon Art of Long-Term World Travel. And so I, I started to travel a lot. I started to travel all over the world. And my wife and I, I mean, we've been to 25 different countries sometimes for up to three months at a time, and it's because of the books that I've read.
And then of course I've read tons of books written by [00:13:00] authors living in different time periods in different parts of the world, like Autobiography of a Yogi by Para Mahana, yoga Nanda, and so many other great stories like that. You have a library like mine. I love it. Alright, well we're gonna take a quick break.
When we come back, we're gonna let our listeners know a little bit more about book thinkers and where they can find you. But right now, listeners, are you a leading visionary or in the role. Of leading other visionaries. Consider joining our community and sharing your feedback and takeaways from each episode.
We invite you to join us and support this podcast by making a [email protected]. If you're interested in finding out more about how you can receive support for getting your big vision out of the air and onto the ground, you can apply to qualify for a complimentary consultation with me or a member of my team by clicking the Connect with Angel Button on the website.
Be sure to share this show in your own spirals of influence with the people who you think might benefit from our content. I wanna say a huge [00:14:00] thank you to all of our listeners who are downloading, rating and reviewing. We are welcoming thousands and thousands of downloads from all over the world. I wanna shout out this week to our new listeners.
We have new listeners in Ukraine, that's one of our newest countries, so welcome Ukraine. We'll also shout out to our listeners in Japan and Belgium and we might as well shout out to our listeners in New Hampshire and Massachusetts while we're at it and we'll be right back with Nick Hutchinson.
The Leading Visionaries Podcast is brought to you by the Creative Age Consulting Group. Are you the one who thinks differently? Who is called to create a significant conscious change in the world? Who is seeing and dreaming of a better way for your industry, your community, human. Creative Age consulting group is hired to guide leading visionaries just like you who want to break through the [00:15:00] static in order to clearly express and confidently enroll support for their vision in a way that makes it inevitable that it will come to pass.
Your word is your wand. And as the leader, your ability to articulate and communicate your vision is essential to its materialization and monetization. Please enjoy with our compliments, a free copy of the book, be Heard By Millions, and Live Your Destiny, which was a number one new release in three categories.
To get you started, the book is yours by visiting gift dot Leading visionaries podcast.com.
And we are back with Nick Hutchinson. You can find out more about [email protected] and we [00:16:00] will have that for you in the show notes. So before we went to the break, you were talking about how all of these authors started coming to you, Nick, and I'm curious. As this turned from a side hustle into a full-time thing, if you'd share a little bit about that journey, because many of our listeners are maybe full-time employed and they're thinking because they have a vision about either side hustling or growing into you know, starting their own thing and leaving the job behind.
What was kinda like the turning point for you where you said. Oh, I'm done working for someone else and I'm ready to go. All in on my vision, I had what I would consider to be based on all of the books that I've read. A little bit of a, of a counterintuitive approach here. I had an early mentor named Kevin Horsley.
He wrote a book called Unlimited Memory that sold over half a million copies. He's a memory grand master, which is interesting. They [00:17:00] have the same designations as chess, so he's a grand master of memory. And he told me, Nick, so many small businesses fail because they run out of runway, financial runway.
Mm-hmm. They'd make the jump too quickly without a solid enough foundation. He told me, no matter how many times you read Aesop's Fable, the tortoise in the hare, the tortoise always wins. So the lesson there was that slow and steady wins the race. And I took that to heart because there were a couple of times that I wanted to make the transition to entrepreneur before I think I was ready before the business was ready.
And so I actually had a couple of full-time employees at Book Thinkers while I still maintained my full-time job. Again, not, not the normal approach, but the approach that worked for me the moment that I decided to transition. Was a really interesting day and you're actually gonna get to hear a little bit more about it at the event because I was out in LA on business for book thinkers, [00:18:00] and in the morning I spent the day at Steven Pressfield's house.
He wrote The War of Art and the number of other amazing books, and then in the afternoon. I was in the Lewis Howes studio in LA and I was getting to hang out with Lewis, who's become a great mentor of mine, and I remember that night I was doing a long walk with somebody on my team, his name's Luke, and I was telling Luke, I would love to do this full-time.
This is what I'm meant to do, but I'm just not quite sure if I'm ready to make the jump, I need a sign from the universe. What was really interesting about that day is that Steven Pressfield talked about how he has always been really superstitious. He would look for signs, one of them being a penny, if he saw a penny on the ground and it was heads up.
It was about to be the best day. Ever. And so we were on the fourth or fifth lap around this little area outside of our hotel and I said, I need a sign from the universe. And we looked down and there's a penny on the ground facing heads up that I could have sworn was not there the first four times we walked by [00:19:00] and I looked at that penny and I looked at Luke and I said, I'm quitting my job on Monday.
And that's what I did. The fun, the kind of fun final part about this is that. The following month, we doubled our revenue, and it was not because of the additional time that I was putting into the business. I mean, my full-time job was only a few hours a week at that point, but I think it was a, a pat on the back from the universe conspiring to assist me saying, Nick, you finally made the the right jump.
And so that's how it happened. For me. It was slow and steady wins the race. I think I waited a little bit longer than most people would, but the business is alive and it's healthy. When so many other businesses are struggling, and I think that's why. I love that whole story, Nick. Really beautiful and very similar to, you know, my life has been all about finding the signs, receiving the signs, getting the signs, and you know, I love that the penny was there.
My mom sends me dimes from the other side. I can always tell when my mom is. Like [00:20:00] thinking about my money situation because I find a dime here and there somewhere. So that's beautiful. And you know what I really also appreciate about what you said there is the idea of being slow and steady. I was a rabbit.
I mean, I was born in the year of the rabbit. So when I left behind my full-time career, I took a flying leap with no nothing. I had no business, no vision, no nothing. But it was completely guided by spirit. For me to leave and, you know, here I am today, 20 years later, I've made it. You know, I'm so to speak.
I've, I've, I've functioned for the last 20 years without a full-time job, let's put it that way. Hats off to you. That is a very difficult thing to pull off. I was the hare. You're the tortoise. Okay. Well, I love to ask you now about leading other visionaries because there are some special people out there, yourself being one of them, who not only are [00:21:00] you a leading visionary yourself.
In the creation of everything that you've created in your own business, but your business is literally set up to serve and support and assist other leading visionaries. So I'd love to have you speak a little bit about kind of herding cats, right? And how you serve your clients and what it's like to be the leading visionary who's leading other visionaries.
I think it all comes down to knowing what your strengths and what your weaknesses are. I think a lot of these very successful social media personalities, these authors that sell a lot of books and they have a big following, they're very good at specific things, and as their businesses grow, they learn that they need to delegate some of the things that don't necessarily bring them energy.
Or that are not their specialties. And oftentimes social media or content creation or booking [00:22:00] podcasts fall into that category. You know, there's a fun line at the back of Rich Dad, poor Dad by Kiyosaki, where he's talking to a reporter and he makes the comment that it's not the New York Times best written book, or most impactful book, or most thoughtful book.
It's bestselling book, and sales is a verb. It takes a lot of action and usually the skillset to write a successful book. And promote and market a successful book are just different skill sets. Mm-hmm. And so as far as herding cats go, yeah. I work with a lot of very interesting personalities. They all have very high expectations, but at the end of the day, they can feel confident knowing that they've delegated something that they didn't enjoy doing in the first place.
To somebody, a team, right. An agency that loves doing those things. Mm-hmm. I mean, I do believe the right book at the right time can permanently change somebody's life. And I know you believe that too. And so how do you get your book, your message in front of [00:23:00] the right target customer? That's what I obsess over.
That's what my team obsesses over. And so it's a lot of fun and I think that working with people that have high expectations. Keeps our, keeps us on our toes. We always have to consistently update in order to overdeliver. So those are some of my first thoughts on the subject. Yeah. Beautiful. Well, let's talk about Book Thinkers the event.
So, is this is not the first time you've done this event. Where did the. Vision come for doing an event. And tell us a little bit more about this event and your intentions. You know, going forward from here, not only for the event that's happening in a few days, this episode is not gonna go out before the event, but there's an episode, I mean, an event happening in a few days where I'm actually gonna attend as press.
And I'm excited about that. It's happening in Boston. But you do book thinkers events all over the place. So tell us a little bit about the vision for that. And your intentions moving forward with the [00:24:00] events? Sure. It actually started about two years ago. I, and we're bringing up his name again for some reason, but I was planning to attend the Summit of Greatness, which is an event that Lewis Howes, a hosts.
And he told me, Hey, I'll give you a ton of free VIP tickets for your authors because they're the perfect target audience member that I'm trying to go for, and I'd rather have, you know, an extra 50 people in the audience or something like that. So I thought, well, why don't I actually host an event on the front side of his summit, and at the time it was in Columbus, Ohio, and I'll include a free VIP ticket in my ticket price.
Mm-hmm. So there'd be a book thinkers event, and then you go to the Summit of Greatness, which is this huge production. So Smart Nick. So yeah the First Book Thinkers event, I had about 50 authors fly into Columbus. We hosted a full day event. I put a bunch of my clients up on stage. I filmed it for them.
So there were some big names [00:25:00] there. And I, you know, I, I pulled them in because I filmed the, the speeches that they were giving, and then I provided it back to them for social media. And it was an overwhelming success. It was a ton of fun. And so, I mean, this event that we're hosting in a couple of week, or I guess this weekend in Boston, we'll have 200 authors and.
Podcasters people from the press there. And what will it look like moving forward? I'm not sure, but I'll tell you this, while personal development is meant to be personal, it is not meant to be lonely. Mm-hmm. And so many authors and creative types, they are the most motivated person in their local friend group, or the only motivated person in their local friend group.
And so to build an event like the one that we're putting on, and we'll continue to put on. As a space, that's a very safe space for people like us, you know, who love thought leadership and are infinitely curious and always want to be growing and learning. Yeah, [00:26:00] it's a special endeavor and we'll continue to do it because people are lonely and they're looking for community and they're looking for in-person events especially.
And so that's, that's the main intention behind it. Excellent. Well, in the last couple of minutes, Nick, what's your. Vision that's leading you now for your business and your brand? Like where do you see yourself in 4, 5, 10 years? Another, another answer for you, angel, that maybe is a little bit uncommon. I want to be doing more of the same.
I love everything about my life. I experience a lot of peace, which is something that I do not take for granted. And when I say peace, I mean yes, I'm consistently. Pushing the envelope. I'm always uncomfortable growing in so many different ways, shapes and forms, but I love the life that I have. Mm-hmm. And so for book thinkers, I want it to serve.
Hundreds more [00:27:00] authors every year, and we want to host more events. And in my own personal life, I want to continue to read more books and grow as a leader and meet all of these great human beings that have learned all of these amazing things. And again, take, take what I think is relevant and implemented into my life and leave what's not to the side.
And so, you know, we were talking a little bit earlier. I'm young, I'm 31 years old. And when I'm 41 years old and 51 years old, I wanna be doing the same thing. And maybe that'll change. I'm not so, so naive to think that it's impossible for that to change, but I have this unquenchable thirst just to grow and to enable other people to grow as well.
And so that's what I want to do. Beautiful. Well, well done Nick. Very well done. 31 you said? 32? 31. 1 32 in December next month. Wow. Congratulations. You made it that far and you've done so much. [00:28:00] In such a short time you think you're being a turtle, but let me tell you, you are definitely being a hare when it comes to being successful as a leading visionary, and so I'm so excited to be attending your event and looking forward to meeting you in person.
And thank you so much for being a guest on the show today. Listeners, we love feedback. Please let us know what you think of today's show by joining our community, sharing your takeaways, asking questions, or submitting guest suggestions. You can weave your visionary. Thread into our fabric by opting in on our [email protected] or by interacting with us on social.
Look for the handle at Leading Visionaries podcast across all the major platforms. Thanks so much for tuning in. Keep your eyes, ears, and hearts open. And remember you. Are here to create conscious change.
Thanks for tuning in, downloading and listening. [00:29:00] Be sure to rate and review leading visionaries on Apple Podcasts and share with other people you know who can benefit from today's episode. Leading Visionaries is the premier podcast series for informing, activating, and inspiring the leading visionaries who are called to create conscious change and know that now is the best time to welcome wealth and cultivate a web of collaborative support.
To bring their vision to life. We invite your feedback and guest suggestions and invite you to subscribe to our mailing list to be notified of new episodes at leading visionaries podcast com.
