1071 – Your knowledge is the key: Tom talks Giving Away 4000 Books Can Make You Successful

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Tom Antion explains how giving away thousands of books—rather than keeping them—highlighted the real source of his success: the knowledge he absorbed from them, not the physical books themselves.
While cleaning out his Virginia Beach retreat center, Tom donated hundreds of books at a time to a local library (eventually totaling thousands). As he handled each book, he reflected on the ideas, skills, and mindset he gained over decades of reading—many of which remained relevant years later and directly contributed to his business success.
His core message is that knowledge is one of the most valuable assets you can own because it can’t be taken away, repossessed, or lost in an economic downturn. However, knowledge alone isn’t enough—you must apply it. He contrasts this with highly educated people who fail financially because they never act on what they know.
Tom credits the ideas he learned from books with generating millions of dollars in consulting and mentoring income, funding his retreat center, vehicles, hobbies, and lifestyle. He encourages listeners to read (or listen to audiobooks), continuously learn, and even consider writing their own books, as he has done.
He also notes a practical bonus: donating books to a library can provide a tax deduction, adding yet another benefit.
Bottom line:
Books are tools for transformation, not trophies. Absorb the knowledge, apply it, and pass the books on—your success lives in your mind, not on your bookshelf.

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Episode 1071 – Giving Away 4000 Books Can Make You Successful
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1071 a Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about how giving away 4000 books can make you successful. Sounds crazy right? Well, I'll talk to you about about that in a minute. Hope you didn't missed episode 1070. That was you are the side hustle. You can make all kinds of money sitting, you know, just on zoom and and remotely in your spare time to pay off bills and, you know, buy cars and all kinds of stuff you could do with that extra money. Now, anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, the episode number. You are the side hustle is episode 1070. Oh and today is 1071. All right, pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Just one of the tips in this book, folks. One, and this is not hyperbole. Save me. We estimated over 9 million keystrokes. And that was a couple of years ago when we estimated that's probably 10 million by now. Save me. Carpal tunnel syndrome let you just work unbelievably fast. So that's just one of the tips in the book. And make sure you pick up if you have the older version, pick up version 3.0, which is the latest. screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org, and save yourself a couple hundred grand and wasteful four year college where you don't come out with any skills. And this school was certified to operate by SCHEV, The State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because its quality distance learning.

[00:02:14] All right. So as part of our big renovation here at the retreat center in Virginia Beach, I decided I needed some of the bookcases to do some other stuff. And I said, you know what? I should purge of all this, this old stuff I had hundreds and, well, I'll say thousands of back issues of magazines like E-week and Information Week and Forbes and everything. So we threw all that stuff away. But in just three bookcases and we, I'll say, I don't know anybody that would challenge me on this, but I probably have one of the largest personal libraries in the state. I don't know, 4 to 6000 books and hundreds or thousands of audio tapes and video tapes and CDs and DVDs and everything else. So. But anyway, I decided to to start cleaning some of this stuff out, and I was going to donate it to the local library. So I called them up and I and our first load just from three bookcases was 760 books. And I thought, you know, I should call ahead of time, maybe before I show up with 760 books. And they said, oh, no, that'll overwhelm us. We only, you know, organize books and take books on Friday mornings and, uh, you know, just bring only 200 at a time.

[00:03:47] You can come every Friday. But, you know, we can't take 760 from just one person. So I said, oh, I'm glad I called because I don't want to show up with this trailer full of books and have to bring them home. So anyway, I dusted them off and went through. And now they won't take any old computer books. I mean, I had windows XP books from 2005 and Windows Vista books and, you know, had a lot of that stuff where I just had to throw it away. I was going to burn it, but I thought, that's a lot of toxic ink smell in the neighborhood, so I better not put it in my fire pit. And those of you that have been to the retreat center know that my whole you know, what would in this great big mansion kind of house, the the formal dining room and the formal living room when you come in the front. That's what I turned into libraries as soon as I bought the place back 25 years ago. So. So those have been gathering and increasing books. I mean, I have probably 3 to 400 just books on public speaking and humor. And my old saying is books are your friends. And what's funny is, is I used to go, you know, I did a lot more travel for my flying, you know, all over the world. Really. And it would always really be upsetting to me on what books I could take on the plane and what I had to leave home.

[00:05:19] This was before, you know, Kindle and all that stuff. And so I'd take maybe three books I could take with me, and I usually have 12 of them going at once. All non-fiction. I'm not. I've only read two non-fiction books, probably in the last 30 years, I imagine. So I'm donating these these books, and I'm thinking as I look through, because I'm going through each one and throwing away ones I know they don't want, or sums that I really want to keep by putting the different bin. And I'm looking at each one because I'm dusting them off and making sure that it's, you know, the library will accept them because they told told us what they would take and what they wouldn't take. And I'm looking at things that I've studied. You know, I read this book ten years ago and it's still current. The ideas I got from it and and I, you know, another book. I mean, like I said, we went through 700 of them in one day. All right. And I remember somebody gave me this book, and I remember this other book I bought for everybody in the crowd, like 300 copies of this book. Uh, that this judge wrote because everybody hated him. And he decided to write thank you letters. I think it's 365 thank you letters as the title. And I was so moved by it that I bought one for everybody in the audience.

[00:06:43] So, I had that one, and I was thinking about how wonderful that concept was and what I learned from it and gratitude. And, you know, so I'm all day I have this, this kid that helps me on Sundays and, and, uh, we're going through these and, uh. Oh, there's one one story that I got to tell you from the time I was cleaning the books out. Oh, man, I almost busted a gut laughing about this. One of my students gave me this giant. I think it's some kind of really valuable print. I mean, we're talking three by four foot frame and this giant thing of the Beatles. And it was in front of one of the bookcases leaning up against it, and I had to move it to get to the books that were behind it. And this kid, he's 16, going to be 17 next this week. So this kid said, hey, who's that band there? That's the Beatles, right? I started laughing and thought he was joking with me and and I and I said, what? Are you kidding? Who's this band? And he said, yeah, yeah, who is it? Who is it? He says, I think I know who it is. It starts with a B. I can't remember this. Is this kid talking? Starts with a B and I'm laughing. Yeah, yeah, now you got it. He said yeah, the Beastie Boys.

[00:08:16] It was the Beatles, the Beastie Boys. He thought that was the most famous band in history. Oh, man. So anyway, we, uh, we packed up all these books. There's all these totes are stacked everywhere. We got 12 totes, and they got too heavy, so we couldn't fill them up fully. But the bottom line on this episode is that your knowledge is one of the most important keys to your success, because they can never take that away from you, no matter what happens in the economy. And you know you have that in your brain. They can't take it away. They can't repossess it. Like if you can't pay for your car, right? It's not the only key because having there's plenty of people that have tons of knowledge that don't do crap. I mean, there's a lot of PhDs that have enormous amounts of knowledge, but I mean, I knew one that was working a trade show booth with a PhD because they couldn't get a job anywhere. So having the knowledge is one of the major, major keys to your success. Like I said, you got to do something with the knowledge, but having it and gathering it is one of the most important things you could ever do. And now you can listen to the books now. And they have the shorter, you know, audio books to get the ideas, the major ideas, instead of having to read the whole book. Now, I'm not suggesting that you're lazy, that you should be lazy, but and I'm not suggesting you have to have 4000 of them before you can be successful either.

[00:09:57] I was just thinking about this as I was looking back over my career and all that I learned from these books. I mean, books are your friends. And now I got, I don't know how many on on Kindle books now, so I don't have to worry about going on a plane and running out of books right now. The success of these books, in all the the, the knowledge they gave me, has led to millions and millions of dollars in consulting and mentoring fees. It's bought this $2 million retreat center. The all the vehicles, the cars and trucks and all my hobbies and my motorcycles and quads and all this stuff is paid for this. And oh, and one other sidebar on the library thing, you get a certificate from them signed, and then you can put the amount, the reasonable amount of the value of your donation and you can take that as a tax deduction. All right. Now I'm not giving you a tax advice. But you know I was thinking about giving them to a used bookstore. But then I wouldn't get a tax deduction over it. So that's another big benefit of this besides the knowledge. But but I want you to to read or at least listen to a lot of different things and get the knowledge from them.

[00:11:23] And that's going to mold you into a very valuable person in whatever field you decide to go into. You know, mine is all marketing and sales and internet and all that stuff, but you might be in a different field, so there's bound to be books out there, and maybe you should write one. I mean, I've written 25 of them, and yes, I have some unique concepts, but it's all molded from what I've learned over the years. Okay. So, um, all kinds of good things can come from dealing with books, and I just happened to be cleaning him out of here. But even if I give it to the library so they can do something with it and pass it on to somebody else and have success. It's already in my head. I'm not, you know, throwing things away. I'm giving opportunities for success inexpensively because they're going to sell them off cheap or put them in their own library there so people can read them for free. But the stuff is still in my head, and nobody can take that away from me unless they beat me on the head with a baseball bat, which I don't know. I'm pretty careful about staying away from people with baseball bats. So? So anyway, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Books are your friends. Get that knowledge and do something with it. That's my message for today. Catch you on the next episode. See you later.