08:07Brad Bonanno | AI Automation · Demo
How I Watch ANY Video with AI in Seconds
A free agent skill sends any video straight to Gemini's API, so your AI gets back timestamped answers instead of a wall of screenshots.
October 2ndThe argument in one line.
A skill is just an SOP folder Claude reads only when relevant, so a business book becomes a permanent reference the model returns to fully rather than a memory it must reconstruct from probability.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A founder or solo operator using Claude Code or Claude.ai daily who wants outputs that stop sounding like generic AI copy.
- Someone who owns physical or digital business books they've read but can't get Claude to apply consistently.
- A builder curious about the Skills feature who wants a concrete, repeatable use case beyond the documentation.
SKIP IF…
- You're looking for the five books' content summarized. This is a workflow demo, not a book review.
- You don't use Claude Code or a Claude product with Skills support, since the whole method depends on that feature.
The full version, fast.
Claude has technically read every major business book, but asking it about one just gets you back a name-dropped list of frameworks, not usable output. The fix demonstrated here is a free, open-source tool called book-to-skill: point it at a PDF and Claude extracts the frameworks, decision rules, and mistakes chapter by chapter into a SKILL.md plus a chapters folder, glossary, and cheat sheet, which Claude only opens when the task actually calls for it. The creator built five: Breakthrough Advertising for copy, $100M Offers for offer design, The Challenger Sale for sales calls, Pricing Creativity for quoting, and Decisive for decision-making. For a book you don't own, he shows a legal workaround: aggregate several long written summaries and YouTube breakdowns instead of the real text.
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00:00 – 00:43
01 · Cold open: the forgetting problem
Claude has effectively read every business book, but treats each conversation like it never has, because reading a book once and having it open beside you while you work are different things.
00:43 – 01:31
02 · Why Claude doesn't already know the books
Claude can recite a book's frameworks from training but defaults to the most probable generic output instead of actually applying them, because it forgets the specifics without worked examples in front of it.
01:31 – 02:17
03 · What a skill actually is
A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file acting as an SOP. Claude loads only the name and a one-line description at the start of a conversation and reads the rest only when the task calls for it.
02:17 – 03:47
04 · How book-to-skill works
The free book-to-skill tool extracts a PDF with pdftotext, or IBM's layout-aware Docling for technical books, then works chapter by chapter pulling frameworks, decision rules, and mistakes into a SKILL.md, chapters folder, glossary, and cheat sheet.
03:47 – 04:21
05 · Setup and the live build
Installing book-to-skill takes about two minutes from an open-source repo URL. Running /book-to-skill on a PDF inside Claude Code extracts the text in seconds and writes the skill chapter by chapter.
04:21 – 05:11
06 · Book 1: Breakthrough Advertising (copy)
Eugene Schwartz's book becomes a copywriting skill that diagnoses the reader's awareness stage before writing, producing landing page copy that reads noticeably less generic than Claude's default output.
05:11 – 05:51
07 · Book 2: $100M Offers and Playbooks (offers)
Alex Hormozi's offer-creation process becomes a skill that scores each offer component on the value equation, stacks bonuses, and writes the guarantee. The companion $100M Playbooks become ten more callable skills for tactics like price increases and lead follow-up.
05:51 – 06:17
08 · Book 3: The Challenger Sale (sales)
Adamson and Dixon's framework becomes a meeting-prep skill before calls and a grading skill afterward, scoring a call recording against the book's six-step framework including how early the rep started pitching.
06:17 – 06:55
09 · Book 4: Pricing Creativity (pricing)
Blair Enns' rules-based pricing framework becomes a skill that pulls the client's stated outcome and budget from call transcripts and builds the proposal the book's way instead of Claude guessing a number.
06:55 – 07:35
10 · Book 5: Decisive (decision-making)
Chip and Dan Heath's four-step decision framework becomes a skill that steps the user through a stuck decision one question at a time, countering Claude's default tendency to agree with whatever it's told.
07:35 – 08:43
11 · Building a skill from summaries, legally
For a book the creator doesn't own, he has Claude pull several long written summaries and watch YouTube breakdown videos, then aggregates them into a skill that captures most of the frameworks and decision rules but not the author's exact wording or long case studies.
08:43 – 08:55
12 · Outro and CTA
Free workflow link in the description, plus a prompt to comment which book to turn into a skill next.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Claude can name every framework in a book like Breakthrough Advertising from memory, but still writes generic AI-sounding copy the moment you ask it to actually use them.
- A Claude skill is just a folder with a SKILL.md file. The model loads only the name and a one-line description at the start of a conversation, then reads the rest only when the task matches.
- Turning a book into a skill means Claude flips to the relevant chapter only when needed, the same way a person references a physical book rather than rereading it cover to cover.
- The open-source book-to-skill tool uses pdftotext for plain books and IBM's Docling for technical books with diagrams, since Docling is slower but layout-aware enough to preserve tables.
- A finished book skill contains a SKILL.md core idea, a chapters folder with one file per chapter, a glossary of the author's terms, and a cheat sheet of decision rules.
- Without a skill, asking Claude to price a project produces wild, inconsistent numbers. With the Pricing Creativity skill loaded, it pulls the client's stated outcome and budget from call transcripts before writing the proposal.
- The Challenger Sale skill grades a sales call recording against the book's six-step framework, including flagging how early the rep started pitching.
- You should never run this workflow on a pirated book. Only use it on a copy you actually own.
- For a book you don't own, stacking five or six long written summaries plus a few YouTube breakdown videos gets close to the real frameworks and decision rules, but loses the author's exact wording and long case studies.
- A framework-driven book like Decisive survives the summary-only workaround well because the value is in the process. A craft book like Breakthrough Advertising doesn't, because the value is in the specific wording.
- Claude defaults to being what the creator calls the world's biggest yes man, which is exactly the failure mode the Decisive skill counteracts by forcing a four-step decision framework instead of instant validation.
- The same book-to-skill process works on any PDF or document, not just business books.
Books become skills, not just memories
BOOK-TO-SKILL METHOD
Reading a book once and having it open beside you while you work are different things, and turning any book or PDF into a Claude skill closes that gap for good.
02Why Claude doesn't already know the books
- Claude can recite a book's named frameworks from training data alone, which feels like knowledge but isn't the same as being able to apply them on a real task.
- Without worked examples and detailed explanations sitting in front of it, Claude defaults back to the statistically most probable output, which is why everyone's AI copy sounds the same.
03What a skill actually is
- A Claude skill is nothing more than a folder containing a SKILL.md file with instructions for implementing one specific technique or book.
- Claude only loads a skill's name and one-line description at the start of a conversation, then reads the full file once a task actually calls for it.
04How book-to-skill works
- The free book-to-skill tool extracts plain books with pdftotext and technical, diagram-heavy books with IBM's layout-aware Docling extractor to preserve tables and structure.
- Claude works through a book chapter by chapter, pulling out the frameworks, the decision rules, and the mistakes the author warns against, then writes them into a structured skill folder.
05Setup and the live build
- Installing book-to-skill takes about two minutes: give Claude the tool's open-source repo URL, then run the slash command and point it at a PDF.
- Only ever run this workflow on a book or document you actually own a copy of. Never use it on a pirated file.
06Book 1: Breakthrough Advertising (copy)
- Loaded as a skill, Eugene Schwartz's five stages of awareness force Claude to diagnose how much the reader already knows before it writes a single headline.
- The same landing page prompt produces visibly less generic copy once the skill is loaded, because Claude follows the book's actual diagnostic process instead of guessing.
07Book 2: $100M Offers and Playbooks (offers)
- Alex Hormozi's offer-creation process becomes a skill that scores each piece of an offer against the value equation, stacks bonuses, and writes the guarantee for you.
- The ten short $100M Playbooks guides, covering things like raising prices and running limited-time offers, also convert into individually callable skills.
08Book 3: The Challenger Sale (sales)
- Before a call, the Challenger Sale skill builds meeting prep from whatever you know about the prospect, using the book's six-step framework.
- After the call, the same skill grades the recording against those six steps, including flagging how early you started pitching instead of teaching.
09Book 4: Pricing Creativity (pricing)
- Without a pricing skill loaded, Claude guesses at numbers. Pricing Creativity turns Blair Enns' rules into something Claude can actually run instead of a mindset it can't apply.
- The skill reads call transcripts to pull out what the client said the result is worth and what their budget is, then builds the proposal the book's way.
10Book 5: Decisive (decision-making)
- Decisive fixes Claude's default behavior as an agreeable yes-man by forcing it to run you through a four-step decision framework one question at a time when you're stuck.
- This skill isn't about outsourcing the decision to Claude. It's about making Claude a better thinking partner when you can't decide on your own.
11Building a skill from summaries, legally
- If you don't own a book, you can have Claude pull five or six long written summaries plus a few YouTube breakdown videos and aggregate them into an approximate skill.
- The tradeoff is real: a summary-built skill captures most frameworks and decision rules but misses the author's exact wording and the long case studies from the original book.
Terms worth knowing.
- Skill (Claude)
- A folder containing a SKILL.md file that Claude loads only the name and description of by default, then reads in full only when a task matches, functioning like an on-demand SOP.
- book-to-skill
- A free, open-source tool that converts a PDF or document into a Claude skill by extracting chapters, frameworks, decision rules, and mistakes into a structured folder.
- SKILL.md
- The core file inside a skill folder stating the skill's name, when to use it, and the core idea Claude should apply.
- Docling
- IBM's layout-aware PDF text extractor, used by book-to-skill on technical books with diagrams and tables where plain text extraction would lose structure.
- pdftotext
- A long-standing command-line tool that extracts plain text from a PDF in seconds; book-to-skill uses it for books without complex layout.
Things they pointed at.
02:40toolbook-to-skill (open-source tool)
04:45bookBreakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz
05:11book$100M Offers by Alex Hormozi
05:40book$100M Playbooks by Alex Hormozi
05:51bookThe Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
06:14bookPricing Creativity by Blair Enns
06:55bookDecisive by Chip and Dan Heath
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“Claude has read more business books than anyone that has ever lived. So why does it act like it's never read any of them when you use it?”
01:35
“A skill is just an SOP for AI.”
06:20
“Whenever you ask Claude to help you price a project without this book, it comes up with the most wild numbers. It's essentially useless at it.”
07:04
“It's the world's biggest yes man.”
06:50
“It's boring, but this is one of my favorites in this list.”
Word for word.
Read-along
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metaphoranalogy
Claude has read more business books than anyone that has ever lived. So why does it act like it's never read any of them when you use it? Because reading a book once and having it open beside you while you work are two completely different things.
So I took the best business books ever written and put them on Claude's bookshelf permanently. And now every one of them is a skill that can be called at any time. letting me instantly put the frameworks they teach into action in my business.
But here's the best part. The process that I'm about to show you right now doesn't just work on business books. It works on any book or PDF document that you have.
So today I'll show you exactly how to do it, then give you the five books that I gave Claude to solve the biggest issues that I had with it as a founder. But first, let me explain why Claude can't do this on its own. So the obvious question here is that if this AI model was trained on all of these books to begin with, why doesn't it just know them already?
And the answer is that it sort of does. You can ask it to tell you about a classic marketing book like Breakthrough Advertising and it'll happily name the frameworks back to you. But when you actually ask it to write a landing page using them, you still end up with the same AI sounding copy as everyone else.
The reason why that happens is actually why skills are so important, because while AI models are super intelligent, they tend to forget the specifics and instead default back to the most probable outcome and when you apply this to business use cases like the ones we're going to talk about today that means you end up with the same outputs as everyone else so you need to force the model to use these techniques by providing the worked examples and the detailed explanations that the book provides which is exactly what a skill fixes and when we turn these books into skills we're essentially giving claude a step -by -step sop for implementing the techniques that they talk about and the Skill itself is actually super simple.
It's really just a folder with a skill .md inside of it. And that file is the instructions for how Claude should implement the book. And the reason this works so well for books is that skills themselves also sit on a bookshelf.
The only thing Claude loads at the start of a conversation is the front of the skill, the name and a line about when to use it. Everything else stays on the shelf until it's needed. Then when you ask it to write a headline, it finds the right book skill on the shelf and then reads it properly.
which is exactly how you'd use your books anyway. You don't reread the entire thing every time you need to write an ad. You just flip to the relevant pages when you need them.
And there's actually a free skill that does everything for you. It takes the full books, converts them into skills your AI can use, and it's called book to skill. You give it a PDF and it handles the rest.
Depending on the type of document, the skill uses two different extractors to convert the PDF from raw text. For normal books like the ones I'll show you soon, it uses PDF to text a well -known command line tool that's been around forever that lets it extract a whole book to text within seconds and if it's a technical book with more diagrams it uses ibm's doc link it's a little slower but it's layout aware which means you can preserve the tables and structures from there claude works out where the chapters are then goes through chapter by chapter pulling out the frameworks the decision rules and the mistakes that the author tells you not to make and then it creates a skill that looks exactly like this a skill .md with a core idea, and then an index of every chapter.
A chapters folder, one file per chapter, a glossary of the author's terms, a pattern file with every technique in the book, and a cheat sheet of the decision rules you can use these skills for. And you can use these skills anywhere in Claude, Codex or even Claude Code. But there's one more thing I want to say here before we get into building one.
You should only ever use this on books or documents you own a copy of. Never pirate a book to use it with this workflow. If you don't have a copy of something, I'll show you a completely free and legal workaround that's almost as good as having the full book at the end of this video.
That being said, let's build one. The setup here takes about two minutes. Head into Claude and ask it to install the book to skill skill by giving it this URL to an open source repo.
By the way, if you want a detailed setup guide, plus the books, I think you should turn it to skills first. That's in the description below. That's it.
Here, I've got a digital copy of a book. So when I open Claude code, all I have to do is type slash book to skill and point it at that file. It pulls the words straight out of the PDF and it takes about a second.
And now it's writing the skill going through chapter by chapter until it's completed. Once it's done, you end up with the chapters, the glossary, the cheat sheet sitting in my skills folder, and it's ready to use.
So now you know how to turn any book into skills that Claude can use. Let's go over the five books that I turn to first to help me solve the biggest problems I keep running into using Claude as a founder. The first one is one that I know a lot of people struggle with, and that's getting Claude to write good copy for your landing pages and ads.
So for this, I went back to one of the classics, Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. And despite this book being Extremely hard to find, this is a book that every serious copywriter points to as the best ever written.
I took my copy and ran it through the book to skill process and then turned it loose on my landing page. Claude followed the techniques from the book, diagnosed exactly who's actually reading the page, how much they already know, and how many times they've heard this pitch before. Then it writes copies specifically for them, leveraging all the examples and techniques that the book gives.
And it starts writing. way better. The next thing that Claude really struggles with is designing good offers.
So I took another classic $100 million offers by Alex Hormozy and turned that into a skill as well. Now Claude extracted the five step process for creating offers and it turned it into a process that I can follow every single time. So now I just give it a rough idea of what I want to do and then it walks through the rest of the process.
It scores each piece on the value equation, stacks the bonuses and writes the guarantee. And while I was at it, I actually did the same thing for the $100 million playbook series as well. which are 10 short tactical guides for things like raising your prices without losing customers, running limited time offers or following up leads.
So all of those become skills too and then Claude can call them whenever they're needed. For book three, I pointed Claude at the challenger sale by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon so it can help me improve my sales skills. So now before a sales call, I just give it some information about the prospect and it goes to work creating my meeting prep using the six step framework from the book.
Then after the call, I drop in my recording back into... and it grades me against those six steps, including how early I started pitching. This creates a loop that I can use to constantly improve over time.
Number four is Pricing Creativity by Blair Enns. Now, whenever you ask Claude to help you price a project without this book, it comes up with the most wild numbers. It's essentially useless at it.
This one is also pretty hard to get a hold of though, but it's the best pricing book I've found because its frameworks are actually rules that Claude can run rather than a mindset like a lot of other books are. So as a skill, it stops Claude guessing entirely. It reads my call transcripts, pulls out what the client said, result is worth, and then what their budget is, and then it puts those two numbers together instead of making things up out of thin air.
Then it builds the proposal the way the book says to. It's boring, but this is one of my favorites in this list. The last book I gave Claude is a little different.
It's a book to help me make better decisions. And if you've ever tried to use Claude for this before, you'll know the problem. It's the .
So to fix this, I gave it a framework for stepping me through making decisions. I gave it Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath. And the whole book is a four -step process for making a call when you're stuck.
So now when I'm stuck on a decision, I tell Claude and it runs me through their four -step decision -making framework, one question at a time. This one isn't about outsourcing decisions to Claude. It's about making Claude a better thinking partner when you can't decide on your own.
Now, here's the thing with this one. I don't actually own a copy of Decisive, which brings me to that workaround I promised you a little earlier in the video. For every single one of these books, there have been hundreds of summaries published online.
And if you put enough of those summaries together, you can get a pretty close approximation of the book itself. And that's exactly what I did for Decisive. Because I don't own a copy, I asked Claude to go out and find five or six long written summaries of the book.
The ones that walk through the chapters by chapter. and then had it watch three summary videos on YouTube as well using my watch skill. Each of these summaries is slightly different.
So by the time Claude has read all of them and aggregated them together, we've essentially got all of the frameworks, the decision rules, and most of the examples that the book actually uses, which is exactly what is needed from a real copy anyway. Then I just ask it to build the skill the same way we did earlier using the book to skill workflow, and we end up with a skill .md full of the core ideas, the chapters, everything that we would normally get.
Now, I'll be honest with you about what you lose because it's not quite as good as having a copy of the book for yourself. You miss out on the author's actual wording and you don't get the long case studies that might be included.
So for a framework book like Decisive where the value is in the process, this is almost as good as the real thing. But for books like Breakthrough Advertising, you still need to go out and buy a copy for yourself because you're really looking for the actual wording there. And if you want to grab my full workflow for setting this entire process up, it's free at the link in the description below.
Drop a comment with the book you'd turn into a skill first, and if this was useful, hit subscribe. Thanks for watching.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Claude has effectively read every major business book ever written, and still hands back the same AI-sounding output as anyone else who asks it cold. This breakdown walks through the fix: a free tool that turns any book or PDF into a permanent Claude skill, and the five business books worth loading first.
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:56list
5 Stages of Awareness (Breakthrough Advertising)
- Most Aware
- Product Aware
- Solution Aware
- Problem Aware
- Unaware
Eugene Schwartz's framework for matching headline and lead copy to how much the prospect already knows about the product.
Steal forany landing page or ad copy that needs a headline
05:24model
Value Equation ($100M Offers)
- Dream Outcome
- Perceived Likelihood
- Time Delay
- Effort and Sacrifice
Alex Hormozi's model for scoring how good an offer is by weighing the outcome against the friction of getting there.
Steal forpricing or packaging any productized offer
03:10model
Skill anatomy
- SKILL.md core idea
- chapters/ folder
- glossary.md
- patterns.md / cheat sheet
The four-part structure book-to-skill produces for every book it converts.
Steal forbuilding a skill from any book or PDF
06:05list
Challenger Sale six-step framework
The book's structured framework for prepping and running a sales call, used both to prep meetings and to grade recorded calls afterward.
Steal forsales call prep and post-call review
07:15list
Decisive four-step decision framework
Chip and Dan Heath's process for making a decision when stuck, walked one question at a time.
Steal forany high-stakes decision Claude tends to just validate instead of challenge
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
08:43link
“if you want to grab my full workflow for setting this entire process up, it's free at the link in the description below”
soft CTA at the very end, paired with a comment-bait question and a subscribe ask; no mid-roll pitch or sponsor interruption anywhere in the video
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
Visual structure at a glance.
