Staying Motivated

A Rocky Balboa clip. "You gotta take the hits". Amazing message we all need sometimes in life.

Book # 2: "The Time Paradox"

The next book up for reading is a brand new one by Philip Zimbardo. I thought I would choose this next as this was recently published and I am intrigued by the cover. Titles like this always catch the inquisitive side of me. The summaries I will write for each book is a new tool for me, I never used to do that. I wish I had started long ago. After countless hundreds of books over the years, there is no way of really remembering every book without doing them. Sure I remember the big ones, like "Power, How To Get It, How To Use It", "Dress For Success" by John T. Molloy. I had read those back in high school. But many others have passed through my hands, long but forgotten. Never too late to start!

Book #1 Review

Book #1 is to be the definitive go-to guide for all things nonverbal. It offers a powerful way to read others quickly and accurately. Definitely worth the read. Well, on to the next book!

A Goal To Read 200 Books This Year

Having read 600-1000 book over the years, I am rediscovering the value gained from this. This year my goal is to read 200 books AND to write a detailed summary of each. Books are so valuable and immensely critical in personal growth and education.

Share with me as I chronicle the books I read this year and post my thoughts on each. Do you have a reading goal? Write me and let me know.

Book #1:
"What Every Body Is Saying" by Joe Navarro. "An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People".

Stay tuned!

Mastering The Information Age Series

I've noticed over the last few years, the skills I use in business and in life have drastically changed. In order to keep up with ever growing amount of projects, ventures or just plain activities requires me to learn how to adapt to master them efficiently. I thought I would use this opportunity to share some of my strategies, some learned and some invented documenting many of them here in this blog.

One of the most important skills I have used occasionally over the years is speed reading. It is more imperative than ever with all the white papers, ebooks, email, blogs, books, newspapers and magazines competing for my attention that it must be an every day practice. The benefits of speed reading can be enormous, in fact it is not just a matter of choosing your reading material carefully knowing you may have to toss a lot because of time constraints, but it is about getting through what you choose to read much faster that pays big dividends.

My current reading diet consists of 35+ industry trade magazines and 2-5 books a month, up to 20 white papers/ebooks a week and up to 5 newspapers, hundreds of emails a day, which continues to grow exponentially. Whether you pursue the "Evelyn Woods" speed reading program or teach yourself, it will be an investment you'll never lose money on.

On Being Educated vs Getting An Education

I try and share at times to others the meaning and value in a life-long self-directed education.
With a college-given education one acquires in a relatively short period of time as much knowledge as possible about certain subjects. One also inherently accepts the knowledge that is given in the form of a teacher and textbooks. This form of learning is not generally questioned and is conveyed to the student as being authoritative and complete. Once "graduated" from this form of learning, few individuals have the desire to continue any further to explore or inquire about the subjects they were taught. It is as though subconsciously they feel that they "know" the subject and have no need to continue any further sans the required continuing education that is needed to maintain their licensing or employer requests.
Because of this it is extremely difficult for an individual to morph from a college-given education to a more self-directed education than vice versa.
With a self-directed learning approach one searches for the knowledge of a given subject and conducts a more critical thinking type of component, questioning the source of information, comparing viewpoints and most importantly continuing to strive to get to a place where they feel they understand the subject, as a result it keeps the self-directed learner never getting to the point where they have "graduated" in the pursuit of that subject simply because they don't know where that point is and creates a catch-22 if you will. More learning to 'graduate' = No 'graduation' exists so more learning is needed....and on and on.
It perhaps helps to balance these two ideologies in such a way as to meet accredited coursework necessary and still pursue a life-long interest in learning.

A Magnifying Glass Analogy

Recently I got into more of the blog world (starting my own again) and "bookmarking" other blogs I find informative (which by the way has grown exponentially) and getting into learning more about SEO, SEM and the world of building great blogs/websites which leads me to consider this like a magnifying glass. Let me explain..

From a distance you see this industry perform and hear things about it passively, but as you get closer and closer to it you find that it's just swarming with fast-paced events, sites and articles that it almost overwhelms you. You see a finely tuned, increasingly complex and sophisticated world all about promoting, lead generating, marketing, increasing readers, analytics for blogs and websites. I congratulate those that have the ability to keep up and master such intense field.

I have learned over the years that there are two types of knowledge which will determine your course of future action:

1. Knowledge of a trade, skillset (in this case learn it so you know and can do it yourself)
2. Knowledge of where or who to go to for that knowledge (hire them to do it and move on to other areas)

Is it worth it to spend the time and money learning new skills in this area or outsource it to specialize in other areas. I'll have to get back to you on that.