Category: Books

On Forgetting Books

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

There’s a common wisdom that partners only do their best until they get married. This might be true or not but I’ve noticed similar things in various areas – diets, sport, alcohol consumption. An injury, a stressful situation, or just a long series of small transgressions and we are back to our worse selves but less hopeful. I think some of that is happening to my efforts to learn about Psychology and Marketing.

Yesterday I finished a book, called “To Sell is Human” by Daniel Pink. It covered areas of which I expected to be knowledgeable – engaging in conversations, noticing communication failures, active listening. The book is citing many others I’ve already read and even a research I’ve been aware of. Many takeaways, however, felt new. I checked my notes from “Verbal Judo” and “Crucial Conversations”. It was eye-opening. It felt like I forgot much of the content without ever using it. Then I checked a couple of other related books I read 2-3 years ago – I had no notes whatsoever.

Dale Carnegie suggested somewhere [citation needed] that his “How to Win Friends and Influence People” needs to be re-read, and I think also in another book suggested a slow pace of reading (no more than 1 chapter per day). All of that is so that the information sticks. The goal of reading non-fiction, after all, is not filling my home with books but learning skills and becoming a better human. Re-reading sounds a bit too much for me but read and forget is not a good strategy either (well, maybe it is, for “A Song of Fire and Ice”).

Here is what I plan to do:

– Write notes and keep highlights when I read non-fiction and self-help
– Write resumes with key takeaways so that I can go back and remind myself what was it all about when I need it.

I hope this makes my new year in reading more productive.

Sequels

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

Imagine the feeling of an amazing book. A good one. You go to the store, find this new shiny cover, bring it home, open it, inhale the smell of freshly printed paper, spend the whole night on it, close it with happiness. It had new characters, they progressed well, everything was wonderful. You now want more of it.

Now a few days later, or a few years if you’re not lucky, you get the sequel. You go to the store, find this new shiny cover, bring it home, open it – the smell is there, it looks pretty, but your expectations are set high. No new characters, just this constant sense that thing need to go wrong before coming back to normal. And they go wrong, and you fight to reach the last page.

Then vol. 3. comes.

You go to the store, find the same cover with a different color, bring it home, open it, uhh. The author has discovered the magic of torturing the main character to keep the attention. He also introduced 30 more characters, because the original one is already holding the Sky like Atlas nad no progress is ever possible. Something with the editing has changed too. The first chapter was 400 pages, the 3rd is 700, and many pages do not say anything.

This is what I’m dealing with at this very moment, trying to read Red Rising #3 and Liveship Traders #3.

There is a solution, but it takes mental power. It is a very simple one.

Go to the bookstore, find this new shiny cover, bring it home, open it, inhale the smell of freshly printed paper, spend the whole night on it and close it happiness.