I now own my own business, work for myself as a business teacher and consultant, have an enormous amount of flexibility in my day-to-day schedule, and make more than professors who teach at top business schools.
Any chance you could put an ebook up for sale? Your book hasn't been released in Europe yet, and the import charges when buying from Amazon.com are pretty bad (~200% increase in price). :-/
I can't sell an e-book directly, due to the grant of rights to the publisher. Kindle, etc. is the best option - the UK/International version comes out February 3rd, and an international Kindle version should be coming with it.
That said, I'd recommend getting your hands on a hard copy if you can - the book is designed to be equal parts primer and reference, and the hard copy is optimized for easy reference use.
Give yourself some credit for going through 99+ books, though; if something doesn't sink in after all that, then you should reconsider the way you read. :)
thousands? if your average book has 300 pages, and you read 30 pages per hour, you would need to read for 10000 hours, doing it for 8 hours a day you need 1250 days. that's without repeating anything of course.
am i wrong? in what timespan did you read those thousands of books?
I'm not the original poster, but I've found that most 300 page business books contain 10-20 pages of useful info and 280-290 pages of fluff and filler. I generally skim through the average business book in an hour or 2, including the time to make notes of all the potentially useful advice I find. It's rare to find a business book worth carefully reading cover to cover.
That's exactly what I do, only I've practiced enough to cut the time per book to 10-20 minutes, depending on complexity. Reading for information extraction vs. word-for-word is much more efficient, and if you practice, your comprehension and retention is just as high.
It's not uncommon for me to go to the library or B&N and read a stack of 20-30 books in a few hours. I've been reading business books for six years, and easily read 200-400 books a year.
Wow, and you actually find these books valuable? Any book I read that I truly learn something from usually takes weeks or months to get through. Call me slow but it just takes time for real information to sink in for me. Sure I understand the words, but to fully absorb the knowledge takes time. Reading 200-400 books a year - how do you ever get the chance to absorb any of that information? If you can really learn valuable information from a book in 10-20 minutes than I am jealous.
Maybe business books are just different than technical/science oriented ones.
Business texts and technical books are very different. I read math/science/programming books as well - I'm currently working through Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes. There's no way I could grok that book in 20 minutes.
10-20 minutes won't cut it for deep technical material, particularly if the book is designed to teach via working through examples. If you're reading a workbook, then take the time to work through the examples. Choose your workbooks carefully, since they require a more significant time investment.
Most non-fiction books, however, are written around a few simple, straightforward concepts - you can identify them in a few minutes. A few more minutes identifying examples, relationships to other concepts, and counter-examples / edge cases, and you've extracted 90% of the value of the text.
Almost every non-fiction book fits this model. It pays to tailor your reading approach to what you're reading.
As to value - in general, most business books are marginally valuable in isolation. Once you read many of them, however, very useful patterns begin to emerge. Recognizing and using those patterns provides the value.
The short answer: Syntax Error.
--
I spend a lot of time working with different languages and frameworks. Though my day job is PHP, I've got an itch to make a mobile game.
Since they're not actually written in PHP, I've got to switch to a new language. ObjectiveC for iPhone, Android-Java, or any number of cross platform languages to pick up a third party framework.
On top of that - there's the issues of structure and stuff.
For learning a new language, there's no way to skim.
HOWEVER for something like an A* pathfinding algorythm (an artificial intelligence method of finding the most efficient path from A to Anywhere) - you can get the "Gist" by skimming a paper. I understand what A* is and how it does it ... but if I want to replicate it I still have to go over it line-by-line if I want to get it right though.
So, I think the short answer is "NO" coders can't skim stuff and get the job done right.
Wow! Has anyone else achieved this level of efficiency in their reading?
-- 10-20 minutes per book?
-- 20 to 30 books in a few hours.
I am a bit skeptical, but maybe it is doable. I am curios to know if anyone else on HN can read/comprehend a non-fiction business book in less than 30 mins.
I went ahead and ordered '10 days to faster reading'.
It only works on books that are two pages of content padded out with three hundred pages of sales.
Fortunately, this is what nearly all "business" books are. They repeat that two pages of content over and over. If you spend 20 minutes skimming, chances are you will hit the actual content at least once.
Another interesting point is that most business books, if they cite references, usually only cite a few. Often times one can look up the paper(s) it references and get the actual content in a much more, ah, compact form, without most of the sales.
Of course, /actually reading/ business books rather than skimming them, I think, is a reasonable way to figure out how to talk to and even to sell to business people. I mean, that's what the book is doing, right? even if the actual "content" of the book is complete BS, if the book is a popular one, it's obviously good at selling to business people, and you can learn by example.
Just this morning I had the idea that since so many books are appearing in electronic format it won't be long before lots of the text has been tagged. I'm reading an enjoyable book about sleep right now. In many places the author goes into personal stories that led to a particular discovery. I thought 'wouldn't it be nice to be able to have those parts filtered for me by my Kindle software?'.
I could see things getting to the point to where you could have the option to generate an executive summary from any popular book that tries to hit the main points. Then you drill down as you want more information. Books could function almost like mini-wikis at that point but with a narrative or order that you use to drive through it.
Serendipity! I was thinking the same thing -- though I was thinking more along the lines of Quora posts.
This is a feature I have posted about and asked for on Reddit actually; the ability to tag information to topic and quality etc.
This would really apply to quora best though, as the information is already sorted in one dimenstion: quora topics.
I'd like to be able to assemble and curate information from sources like quora and get them into a more of a how-to; infact I posted a question along these lines on quora, with little response.
However - I predict that this will be a golden goose of social search. A question is asked within a particular topic, experts respond - then the best answers to the most popular questions within a topic, and tagged by the audience, are assembled into cliff-notes of information on that topic.
Quite the opposite, actually - I tried to write a fluff-free business book. I think that's why readers are finding it useful. If you can read it in 20 minutes, I'll be impressed. :-)
That's a great point and unfortunately it does not work that way with math books.
Well, fortunately in that the signal-to-noise ratio is high. Unfortunately in that one must be very selective about what one chooses to invest time into reading.
One quibble: I'd put Steve Blank's "Four Steps" under Entrepreneurship rather than "Value Creation and Design". I've read Four Steps, Universal Principals of Design, and Design of Everyday things (I have not read Rework, the other book in the category). Four Steps really covers much different material than the other other two books.
Comments
This is exactly what I did with business, instead of getting an MBA or a PhD.
Here's my reading list: http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/
Here's the book I wrote, condensing what I learned in the process: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591843529/
I now own my own business, work for myself as a business teacher and consultant, have an enormous amount of flexibility in my day-to-day schedule, and make more than professors who teach at top business schools.
Education is changing.
Any chance you could put an ebook up for sale? Your book hasn't been released in Europe yet, and the import charges when buying from Amazon.com are pretty bad (~200% increase in price). :-/
I can't sell an e-book directly, due to the grant of rights to the publisher. Kindle, etc. is the best option - the UK/International version comes out February 3rd, and an international Kindle version should be coming with it.
That said, I'd recommend getting your hands on a hard copy if you can - the book is designed to be equal parts primer and reference, and the hard copy is optimized for easy reference use.
Give yourself some credit for going through 99+ books, though; if something doesn't sink in after all that, then you should reconsider the way you read. :)
It wasn't just 99 - it was thousands. The books on the list are just the best. :-)
I like the idea of reading ridiculous amounts of things more than reading one thing ridiculous amounts of times.
thousands? if your average book has 300 pages, and you read 30 pages per hour, you would need to read for 10000 hours, doing it for 8 hours a day you need 1250 days. that's without repeating anything of course. am i wrong? in what timespan did you read those thousands of books?
I'm not the original poster, but I've found that most 300 page business books contain 10-20 pages of useful info and 280-290 pages of fluff and filler. I generally skim through the average business book in an hour or 2, including the time to make notes of all the potentially useful advice I find. It's rare to find a business book worth carefully reading cover to cover.
That's exactly what I do, only I've practiced enough to cut the time per book to 10-20 minutes, depending on complexity. Reading for information extraction vs. word-for-word is much more efficient, and if you practice, your comprehension and retention is just as high.
It's not uncommon for me to go to the library or B&N and read a stack of 20-30 books in a few hours. I've been reading business books for six years, and easily read 200-400 books a year.
Here's a post I wrote on effective non-fiction reading techniques, for more info on the approach: http://personalmba.com/10-days-to-faster-reading/
Wow, and you actually find these books valuable? Any book I read that I truly learn something from usually takes weeks or months to get through. Call me slow but it just takes time for real information to sink in for me. Sure I understand the words, but to fully absorb the knowledge takes time. Reading 200-400 books a year - how do you ever get the chance to absorb any of that information? If you can really learn valuable information from a book in 10-20 minutes than I am jealous.
Maybe business books are just different than technical/science oriented ones.
Business texts and technical books are very different. I read math/science/programming books as well - I'm currently working through Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes. There's no way I could grok that book in 20 minutes.
10-20 minutes won't cut it for deep technical material, particularly if the book is designed to teach via working through examples. If you're reading a workbook, then take the time to work through the examples. Choose your workbooks carefully, since they require a more significant time investment.
Most non-fiction books, however, are written around a few simple, straightforward concepts - you can identify them in a few minutes. A few more minutes identifying examples, relationships to other concepts, and counter-examples / edge cases, and you've extracted 90% of the value of the text.
Almost every non-fiction book fits this model. It pays to tailor your reading approach to what you're reading.
As to value - in general, most business books are marginally valuable in isolation. Once you read many of them, however, very useful patterns begin to emerge. Recognizing and using those patterns provides the value.
On the other hand, the more you get used to reading math, the more possible it becomes for your eye to skim through math stuff.
I'm at the point where I can sometimes skim through arXiv papers and understand the gist.
(Does it work the same for books with code in them? Legit coders can skim and understand?)
The short answer: Syntax Error. -- I spend a lot of time working with different languages and frameworks. Though my day job is PHP, I've got an itch to make a mobile game.
Since they're not actually written in PHP, I've got to switch to a new language. ObjectiveC for iPhone, Android-Java, or any number of cross platform languages to pick up a third party framework.
On top of that - there's the issues of structure and stuff.
For learning a new language, there's no way to skim.
HOWEVER for something like an A* pathfinding algorythm (an artificial intelligence method of finding the most efficient path from A to Anywhere) - you can get the "Gist" by skimming a paper. I understand what A* is and how it does it ... but if I want to replicate it I still have to go over it line-by-line if I want to get it right though.
So, I think the short answer is "NO" coders can't skim stuff and get the job done right.
Wow! Has anyone else achieved this level of efficiency in their reading?
-- 10-20 minutes per book? -- 20 to 30 books in a few hours.
I am a bit skeptical, but maybe it is doable. I am curios to know if anyone else on HN can read/comprehend a non-fiction business book in less than 30 mins.
I went ahead and ordered '10 days to faster reading'.
It only works on books that are two pages of content padded out with three hundred pages of sales.
Fortunately, this is what nearly all "business" books are. They repeat that two pages of content over and over. If you spend 20 minutes skimming, chances are you will hit the actual content at least once.
Another interesting point is that most business books, if they cite references, usually only cite a few. Often times one can look up the paper(s) it references and get the actual content in a much more, ah, compact form, without most of the sales.
Of course, /actually reading/ business books rather than skimming them, I think, is a reasonable way to figure out how to talk to and even to sell to business people. I mean, that's what the book is doing, right? even if the actual "content" of the book is complete BS, if the book is a popular one, it's obviously good at selling to business people, and you can learn by example.
Just this morning I had the idea that since so many books are appearing in electronic format it won't be long before lots of the text has been tagged. I'm reading an enjoyable book about sleep right now. In many places the author goes into personal stories that led to a particular discovery. I thought 'wouldn't it be nice to be able to have those parts filtered for me by my Kindle software?'.
I could see things getting to the point to where you could have the option to generate an executive summary from any popular book that tries to hit the main points. Then you drill down as you want more information. Books could function almost like mini-wikis at that point but with a narrative or order that you use to drive through it.
1. Get out your kindle
2. buy a copy of Neuromancer
3. search for the part where Case tells his Ono-Sendai to "sift this shit. 2 minute precis"
4. Be amazed once again that a guy with a typewriter predicted what you're doing.
What about MS Word's AutoSummarize feature?
Teddy Roosevelt was known for his speed-reading ability:
http://artofmanliness.com/2009/10/18/how-to-speed-read-like-...
@JohnWatson
Serendipity! I was thinking the same thing -- though I was thinking more along the lines of Quora posts.
This is a feature I have posted about and asked for on Reddit actually; the ability to tag information to topic and quality etc.
This would really apply to quora best though, as the information is already sorted in one dimenstion: quora topics.
I'd like to be able to assemble and curate information from sources like quora and get them into a more of a how-to; infact I posted a question along these lines on quora, with little response.
(http://www.quora.com/Would-Quora-users-like-an-entrepreneurs...)
However - I predict that this will be a golden goose of social search. A question is asked within a particular topic, experts respond - then the best answers to the most popular questions within a topic, and tagged by the audience, are assembled into cliff-notes of information on that topic.
So, should I assume i can read your book in 20min? Or did you filled it with fluff and filler? :)
Quite the opposite, actually - I tried to write a fluff-free business book. I think that's why readers are finding it useful. If you can read it in 20 minutes, I'll be impressed. :-)
That's a great point and unfortunately it does not work that way with math books.
Well, fortunately in that the signal-to-noise ratio is high. Unfortunately in that one must be very selective about what one chooses to invest time into reading.
Nice list.
One quibble: I'd put Steve Blank's "Four Steps" under Entrepreneurship rather than "Value Creation and Design". I've read Four Steps, Universal Principals of Design, and Design of Everyday things (I have not read Rework, the other book in the category). Four Steps really covers much different material than the other other two books.
Rework is probably the best out of all of those!
Isn't there a limited amount of room for people to do what you did? I mean there can only be so many teachers and business consultants.
To my mind part of being an entrepreneur is leaving the world of books, professors, and ideas.
Anyway congratulations and here's to hoping that your book makes the B-school reading lists.
ha! i just picked your book up off the new arrivals shelf at the library. glad to see you're on hn.
Great to hear - please leave a review after you read it. Helps tremendously. Thanks!
Wow, incredible reviews, just picked up a copy ;)
Thanks, I appreciate it!
Ditto. Kindle rocks.
You've just got another sale thanks to Kindle ;)
Thanks, hope you find it useful!
I'll be sure to review it on Amazon afterwards.