Every 18 months for the last decade, the world has doubled the data it pushes to you.
Twice as much email, twice as many friend requests, twice as many sites to check, twice as many devices.
When does your mind lose the ability to keep up? Then what happens? Is it already happening?
Your business has a core, a goal, a challenge and a deliverable. There is probably one thing that would transform your project, one success that changes things, one hurdle that's tougher than the others. What's difficult, what would respond to overwhelming attention? That's the core.
Getting from here to there involves making sales, delivering on promises, overcoming the Dip and shipping.
Along the way, there are supporting tasks you can engage in, things you can do to make the goal easier to achieve.
A popular blog might gain attention and then trust and ultimately help you sell more widgets.
A lot of followers online might give you permission to tell a story that gets you better employees.
A vibrant party at SXSW can create buzz that gives your salespeople entree to important meetings.
These aren't trivial activities. In fact, they're part of what marketing means today. But...
But if they give you and your team an outlet to avoid the difficult work of achieving your goal ("I can't go to that sales call, I'm busy uploading pictures of last night's party to the blog and then tweeting out the url") then you're not building, you're hiding. Rich calls this playing with turtles. The thing is, the turtles are alive, and they're going to demand a lot from you.
There's a huge downside here: once your side activity gets going, it will lead to crises (we have an urgent email we have to answer), to feelings of abandonment (hey, you haven't been on the forum lately!), to irresistible offers to have the CEO speak or get people involved. There will always be a feeling of sunk cost, of opportunities missed and of things on the verge because these are human movements, not paid ads.
Two choices: 1. find a way to make your goal completely aligned with the tactics you use to achieve it. What's good for your blog is good for your business. or 2. Now that these approaches are working, and working incredibly well, it's time to come up with boundaries so the tail doesn't end up wagging the dog.
In my last post, I talked about making sure we Use LinkedIn Effectively. Here’s something else to think about: stop importing your Twitter feed into LinkedIn indiscriminately. If LinkedIn is meant for business networking, what do you think these updates (pulled at random) are doing to help your business?
Let’s see, we have:
A quote – shows you can copy and paste (okay, and a little bit of where your head is).
A link – this one’s actually pretty good, as it leads me somewhere, but it’s a request for help with a contest. (still okay)
News talk
Sports talk
Location talk – which is good for finding potential business meetings.
Software talk (?)
Another quote
Um… wtf?
And a retweet of a retweet of a quote.
There’s nearly no business value in any of those items listed above (I’ll give Lewis a pass for his location quote). As someone using LinkedIn for business networking, what do you think others see when they read those bits of information? Do you think they’re at the desk, thinking, “Wow. Now THIS is actionable. I’m going to get a little deeper with this person right now.”
I’m going with no.
Now, what does that mean? Advertise? No. Maybe it’s a mix of uses. Here are a few I put out there over the last few days:
In one, I ask a question about using LinkedIn for networking. It gets 27 comments (which isn’t bad, but also tells me that people certainly had some thoughts about the topic, so I make a note to blog more about this). In the one before that, I make a direct request for folks to subscribe to my blog. This is partially because I just added a bunch of new connections on LinkedIn, so I want to be sure to invite them into my primary property (my home base).
But in all cases, anything I put across that status message is something that pertains to my business interests in one way or another.
Frankly, what I can see happening in short notice is that people might choose to unlink from you to clean up their status stream. So, you might even be risking network connections by threading Twitter into LinkedIn.
Just because you can doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Thoughts?
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “200 mph”, goes to another fellow author from my publisher’s stable, Mark Frauenfelder.
Mark’s got a new book out, “Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World”, which I’m halfway through reading (The publisher kindly sent me an advance copy etc). As editor in chief of Make magazine, Mark’s in a good position to write about the spiritual and social merits of DIY culture…
But if that wasn’t enough to place him high up on the geek pantheon, BOM BOM BOM Mark is also the co-founder and co-editor of pretty much the coolest blog on the planet, Boing Boing.
I only have eleven blogs bookmarked on my browser in the “Favorite Blogs” section. Boing Boing is one of them. I’m getting picky in my old age.
While designing this bizcard, I was thinking about what it was about Boing Boing that always appealed to me since Day One… It wasn’t just all the cool, geeky stuff they were linking to, it was something about the way they did it. Like it was the ideas and human drives behind the cool stuff that mattered, not the actual cool stuff itself.
This high-speed, voracious appetite and enthusiasm for new ideas… that’s what makes the internet, at its best, so much damn fun. And nobody does it better than Boing Boing. “Driving 200 mph on the highway of ideas” pretty much summed up their ethos to me.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Mark, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I'll send a free box of 100 to you. And if your Boing Boing co-editors, Cory and Xeni do likewise, I'll extend the same offer to them as well. Thanks!]
Take a look at just about any industry with many competitors--colleges, hotels, sedans, accounting firms (especially accounting firms)...
The websites bend over backwards to be just like all the others. You can't identify one hotel website from another if you delete the name of the hotel (unless there's a beach or a snow-capped mountain in the background).
Sometimes, we try so hard to fit in we give consumers no choice but to seek out the cheapest. After all, if everything is the same, why not buy what's cheap and close?
How about a site that says, "Here's why we're different." And means it.
(Easy to read this and nod your head, but... what's your resume look like?)
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This post is a book summary that highlights the major ideas contained in Abby Marks-Beale’s 10 Days to Faster Reading. This summary is different from many of the others you’ll find on the web: books are primarily vehicles for ideas. Instead of following the structure of the book in question, we’ll isolate and examine the key ideas and themes that make the book useful. Along the way, I’ll tell you how I actually apply the ideas. If you like this book summary, please leave a comment and spread the word!
Abby Marks-Beale is the author of the Personal MBA-recommended book 10 Days to Faster Reading, as well as The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Speed Reading. If you want to fly through your reading pile, RSS reader, and e-mail inbox at breakneck speed while maintaining consistently high levels of reading comprehension, these speed reading books are for you.
For more information about Abby’s work, check out:
Here are ten big ideas from Abby Marks-Beale’s 10 Days to Faster Reading…
The purpose of non-fiction reading is not to read every word on every page – it’s to extract useful information from the material. Growing up, most of us learned to read by starting with the first word on the first page, then continuing to read until we get to the last word on the last page. Unless you’ve learned structured non-fiction reading techniques, you probably still read this way, even though it’s extremely inefficient.
Efficient reading is non-linear – a series of quick skims, skipping around, referencing, and note-taking. The purpose is not 100% eye-coverage of the text: it’s to extract all of the useful information that’s relevant to what you want to do.
It’s easy to get hung up on “reading the book” as turning pages until there are no more pages to turn. Once you get comfortable with the idea that you don’t have work your way through the entire book linearly to benefit from your reading, you can read much faster, and put the book down when you’ve learned what you need to know.
Most of us have way too much to read. Between books, newsletters, magazines, e-mail, blog posts, and snail mail, our reading pile overfloweth. Until someone invents a Time-Turner that will allow us to keep up with our reading, choices must be made.
Triage helps you read the most critical materials first. In any good hospital Emergency Room, doctors identify which patients need help first – everyone else can wait. Heart attacks get first priority; cases of indigestion can wait a while. The same principle applies to reading: you may have a large pile, but some reading material will be more important than others.
Having a sense of clarity about what you’re trying to do is necessary in order to triage your reading pile effectively. If you’ve taken the time to clearly define your goals (i.e. “what you want”), it’s much easier to figure out if reading certain materials will help you get what you want.
When I was in the middle of writing my book, I didn’t check my blog reader for over four months. That was okay: reading RSS feeds was not as important as writing chapters, so I made a conscious decision not to read them for a while. When in doubt, throw it out or defer the reading to another time.
Effective non-fiction reading does NOT start with picking up the book. You can multiply your reading effectiveness by taking a few minutes before you start reading to decide why you’re bothering to read in the first place. I call this technique “Purpose-Setting.”
Purpose-Setting is the act of deciding what you want to learn by reading this material. By figuring out what information would help you, what questions you want answered, and how you intend to apply the material, you’ll make it much easier to recognize useful information when you find it.
I’ve found the best way to purpose-set is to write down 8-10 questions on an index card or in a notebook before opening the book. This effectively programs your brain to look for the information you’re trying to find – a very important concept called “Priming.”
Priming is the act of “programming” your brain to notice certain things about your environment. If you’ve ever been interested in a certain type of car, only to find you start seeing them EVERYWHERE you go, you know what priming feels like. The universe hasn’t unloaded thousands of new cars all over the highway – they’ve always been there, but your brain filtered them out as irrelevant. Your interest changed the filters, so you actually notice when they appear.
Priming happens unconsciously, but you can control it if you know what you’re doing. Purpose-Setting works because it gives you an opportunity to consciously “prime” your perceptual filters to notice information related to your interests. That’s what allows you to read so quickly – when you’re sufficiently primed, you can skim through a book quickly until your brain recognizes something as interesting or important. As you skim, you suddenly find your eyes stopping on the part of the text that relates to what you’re looking for. It feels like magic, but it’s just your brain doing its job.
Before you start reading, don’t skip the two richest sources of priming material in the book: the table of contents and the index. The TOC gives you information about the book’s structure, content, and order. The index, aside from being a useful reference tool, is essentially a frequency-map of the book’s key terms. If you find a term you don’t know with a large number of citations, chances are it’s important – write it down on a list of key terms before you start reading.
Purpose-Setting and Priming only take a few minutes. Once you’re done, you’re ready to fly through the book.
The biggest barrier to faster reading is subvocalization: sounding-out words verbally instead of thinking them. Subvocalization is a useful tool in learning to read, but it’s a major speed barrier once our skills have developed. Our minds are capable of taking in written words as thoughts much faster than our ability to vocalize them.
The first step in eliminating subvocalization is realizing that you’re doing it. Pick up a piece of reading material and notice what’s happening in your mind as you read it. If you’re saying the words to yourself as you read, you’re subvocalizing. To stop, simply start reading faster: at a certain point, you’ll be going faster than you can subvocalize, and you’ll be amazed at how much you’re still able to comprehend and retain.
Realizing that you can comprehend written material without subvocalizing is a major milestone that will increase your reading speed dramatically.
Your eyes can easily take in more than one word at a time. Instead of fixating on every word, taking in groups of 3-5 words at a time can increase your reading speed without harming your comprehension. Learning to read more than one word at a time is mostly a matter of training – Marks-Beale includes many exercises that can help you learn this skill.
New speed readers tend to gravitate to eye fixation techniques because they’re concrete, but they’re not the most important part of reading speed. In my experience, Purpose-Setting and Priming are far more important – if you’re trying to get the 80/20, start there. Eye fixation naturally develops with practice and experience.
(Note: a useful tool you can use to train your abilities to read without subvocalizing and taking in more than one word at a time is Spreeder.)
Reading is not a passive activity – it’s not like television, where your job is to simply absorb stimuli. Reading is an active mental process that can result in all sorts of unexpected insights and connections, so it pays to be ready to capture them before you forget.
Don’t hesitate to write as you read. Taking notes does two useful things: it creates an archive of your thoughts for later reference, and it helps reinforce what you learn. Personally, I find the latter most important – if I read something and then write it down, it almost always sticks in long-term memory. The idea capture / archival process is useful for application – you can spark many new ideas by reading older notes.
Note-taking can take many forms. Some people prefer to write notes in the margins of the book itself, some prefer notebooks, and some prefer capturing notes via a computer or other device. Personally, I prefer a physical notebook – it’s easy to carry and easy to reference. Regardless of what you choose, always take notes.
Reading quickly requires intense mental concentration and effort. Done well, it engages your total attention, challenges your skills, and requires focus. If the phone is ringing, e-mail alerts are buzzing, and co-workers are constantly interrupting you, it’s best to find a quiet, pleasant environment where you can focus for longer periods of time.
(Side note: don’t ever let a co-worker give you a hard time for reading at work. Reading is real work, and is often one of the most effective things you can do with your productive time.)
Once of the differences in reading for school and reading for your own self-education is being able to reach out to authors you respect or disagree with and get answers. Since most of us grew up reading school textbooks and assigned material in an effort to pass tests, we often forget that authors are real people who are happy to engage with their readers.
Capturing your thoughts as you read is a major opportunity to discuss and engage with the author and other interested readers. Once you’ve sketched your own thoughts regarding a book, you’re in a much better position to have interesting and useful discussions about the book with others.
I often read material twice: the first pass is non-critical, keeping a completely open mind and trying to understand the author’s key points and position. The second pass is critical: are there elements that are confusing or contradictory? Are there positions I don’t agree with? If so, I write my thoughts down for later reference and discussion.
The purpose of reading non-fiction is not to simply read the book – it’s to learn something useful. While reading is fun (and gets even more fun as you learn these skills), it doesn’t become profitable until you start translating things you’ve read into real-world results.
After reading a good book, you should always be able to add at least 3 tasks to your active to-do or projects list. Capture these actions while you’re reading, and review the list when you’re done. Ideally, these actions should be directly related to accomplishing one of the goals you had in the purpose-setting step.
Effective non-fiction reading is a skill. It takes some time and practice to learn, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll experience enormous gains in your productivity.
Once I learned the material in 10 Days to Faster Reading, I easily quadrupled my reading speed. Now, I can easily sit down with a book for 10-15 minutes and extract most of the valuable information from the text – a task that would previously take me at least an hour.
Here’s an experiment I highly recommend trying for yourself: go to your local bookstore or library, grab 6 books and a timer, and spend no more than 10 minutes trying these techniques on each book. At the end of the 10 minutes, go back and write down in a notebook all of the things you learned. You’ll amaze yourself – guaranteed.
A while back, I interviewed Abby Marks-Beale about her ideas. Here’s the interview in its entirety – enjoy!
In this conversation, Abby and I discuss:
If you found this book summary useful, be sure to subscribe to the Personal MBA Insider newsletter – I’m planning to create book summaries for every book on the Personal MBA’s list of the 99 best business books, so subscribe now to ensure you don’t miss anything!
