In this episode of the podcast I interview educator Ashish Gogia. Ashish and I talk about role models, goals, and making the most of a college education.
In this first episode of the podcast I interview Andy Fossett, a musician, martial artist, writer, and educator. To learn more about Andy’s work, visit getajobinjapan.com.
I maintain a constant stack of between five and a dozen library books on the floor next to my bed. The local library lets me place up to fifteen books on hold at a time, and at any given moment I am probably using up my entire quota. Clearly, I have far too many books on hand to read in a reasonable amount of time, and yet I rarely return a book to the library until I have gleaned every useful bit of knowledge from it. I have never spent any serious time studying speedreading techniques; in fact, my reading speed is only slightly above average. I am able to keep up with such a large supply of literature because only very rarely will I actually read any work of nonfiction. Instead, I skim, skip, and scan.
Skimming should be a familiar process; by skimming I mean running your eyes quickly through the text, picking up only enough words to get the gist of a piece of writing. Skimming lets you search quickly for the parts of a book that are most useful, which you can then read at a more normal pace (and, if they are useful enough, reread as many times as you like). Never spend valuable time reading things that you already know or have no interest in—instead, skim for the good stuff.
Better yet, bypass the fluff altogether—apply the 80/20 principle and skip the parts that you just don’t need. I am writing this while waiting at a gate at the Philadelphia airport. During my flight here from Atlanta I worked my way through the first 102 pages of Barry Farber’s How to Learn Any Language (review coming soon). I skimmed and skipped over 3/4 of the introduction. One chapter described a very useful technique for remembering vocabulary, but spent over a dozen pages offering a variety of examples of its use. I read the first three examples and skipped the rest. Remember: any time spent reading information that you don’t need, won’t use, or already know is time wasted. Be ruthless.
Finally, you will often find that some parts of a book are so useful that you simply have to keep them available as reference material (for me, charts, tutorials, and bibliographies often fall into this category). If you enjoy the material enough and want to give back to the author, you can buy a copy of the book. If you’re like me, however, you don’t have the access to the large trust fund that you would need to do this as often as you would like to, so instead you’ll need to resort to scanning the pages that you want to keep (If you don’t have access to a flatbed scanner, you can use the photocopier at your local library). Among the items that I’ve added to my digital archives are workout charts from The New Rules of Lifting, the epilogue of Your Money or Your Life, a chapter on knife sharpening from An Edge in the Kitchen, a packing checklist from The Traveler’s Toolkit, and many others.
Taken together, skimming, skipping, and scanning will enable you to quickly extract the most useful parts of the books that you read and keep those parts indefinitely. Together with a decent method of choosing reading material and a strong notetaking system, these techniques will turn you into a freakish learning machine in no time!
I have just finished reading Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What To Do About It. The book offers advice to future and present entrepreneurs, especially the ones who are highly skilled employees who have decided to start a business around their area of expertise. The format of the book is a series of descriptions of interactions between the author and the owner of the struggling All About Pies, a hypothetical business. I found the style of the book annoying at times, but Gerber provides a solid overview of the entire process of opening a successful business, from conceiving the initial product to hiring employees to marketing to franchising.
Some highlights:
Gerber says that within each business owner the Technician, the Manager, and the Entrepreneur are in constant struggle. The Technician represents the person who does the physical work, the Manager is the one who plans, and the Entrepreneur is the one who has dreams and visions. In short, most small businesses fail (70%, according to the book) because the founders are excellent Technicians who spend too much time and energy focusing on doing the work and not enough on planning and dreaming.
According to Gerber, you can overcome this problem by Working On Your Business, Not In Your Business. Essentially, part of your job as a Manager is to break down all of the pieces of your business into clear roles with very clear instructions that can be kept in operations manuals. The instructions should be plain and detailed enough that they can be carried out by the least skilled labor possible (Gerber cites McDonalds as the ideal business model). As an Entrepreneur you should find a clear vision of what your business should mean to the world (“caring”, etc.) that you can communicate to your employees.
In short, if you can wade through some fluff (which, realistically, you will find in any self-help book), The E-Myth Revisited is a strong introduction to the principles of small business entrepreneurship.
I was excited to read Peak Learning: A Master Course in Learning
How to Learn by Ronald Gross. This book is one of the classic manuals for adult self-education; the author has been one of the leading writers and speakers in the field since the publication of the Independent Scholar’s Handbook in the 1970s. Peak Learning contains a huge amount of material, with topics ranging from how best to design a study space to effective notetaking techniques to using the Internet to find public domain literature.
Unfortunately, so many topics are covered that Gross sometimes sacrifices depth for breadth. For example, the book includes a quiz that aims to show the reader which of Howard Gardner’s seven intelligences is an area of personal strength. The quiz is far too short to have any degree of accuracy, and Gross does little to describe what the reader should do with the knowledge the quiz yields. Gardner’s work could likely be of great value to Gross’s readers, but the readers will need to turn to other books to gain a useful exposure. Several other topics were given the same treatment—Gross’s introdution to many concepts is so brief that readers will need to turn to the books listed in the bibliography to fill in all of the gaps.
The book seems that it would be an excellent choice for one who is just beginning to pursure a course of self-education. Early chapters deal with overcoming obstacles to learning, including stress from poor high school and college learning experiences. Several exercises are designed to improve the reader’s memory, concentration, and critical thinking. Often the exercises feel gimmicky, but they seem to build useful skills. Again, these exercises are geared more towards the beginning learner than the intermediate or experienced.
Regardless of your level of ability or experience, you can gain something useful from this book. If you are just beginning to embark upon a program of learning, you should buy this book and keep it close at hand; if, like me, you feel somewhat more comfortable with your own education, you should check out a copy from the library and give it a very thorough skim.
In a previous post I mentioned that I constantly keep a stack of five to a dozen library books by my bed and that this stack rotates extremely quickly. In this post I will describe the system that allows me to maintain and replenish this stack with books from libraries all over the Atlanta area for a time cost of about ten minutes once a week.
The system revolves around a new conception of the library: instead of a place to go to find and read books, for me a library is a delivery box. I use the catalog on my library’s website to place books on hold from my laptop at home. If the books that I want are available locally, a librarian will pull them from the stacks and place them on a holds shelf near the entrance to the library. If the books are not available at the local library, the computer system will send a request to another library to deliver a copy, which will then be placed on the same shelf near the entrance.
About once a week I visit the library, drop off any books that I’m finished with, pick up the books that have been held for me, and use the self-checkout computer next to the holds shelf to sign out my books. I’m rarely inside the library for more than five minutes, and I never pay a dime. I get movies and audiobooks the same way; in the past two years I have only purchased three DVDs, and all three were gifts.
The library emails me every time a new book arrives, so I never waste a trip. In addition, I am notified if a book needs to be renewed, so I never have to keep track of due dates. Not every library system will do this; if yours does not, sign up for an account with Library Elf.
If you don’t know where to find your local library and you live in the United States, find out by visiting publiclibraries.com.
