If you are like me then you probably read a lot of business books. You probably read things about starting a business, marketing businesses, selling, personal development, leadership, etc. Books can be exceptionally useful tools. So can blogs and other websites by the way. (shameless plug for my own material) You actually have to put their ideas into practice though.
People write books for more than just financial reasons. They write books for the same reason I built my website. They do it to share knowledge that they have learned through their personal experience. Stop and think about that for a minute. Someone is trying to tell you what they have learned the hard way. Maybe you should really listen to what they are saying.
Book lovers like you and I have a tendency to read an awful lot. We plow through books one after another. We have this sixth sense that the more we read, the more some of this great insider knowledge is bound to stick with us. We assume we will get better in our own lives through the process of osmosis. This is probably true to a small extent.
I think you and I would be far better off though, if we screened our reading material much better and didn’t read as much of it as we probably are reading. Sometimes reading things of lesser value just causes mind clutter that we don’t really need. We should be more selective. We would probably also be far more effective if we read our books with a notepad along side of us at the same time. When you read something that lights that light bulb inside your head, you should stop and immediately write down the idea.
If you don’t take notes, then by the time you are done reading the entire book, there will have been some good ideas that probably escaped you because you just kept on reading. Those ideas got buried in the mountain of new information that your brain was absorbing. Had you kept a notepad with notes, you probably would have gotten a lot more out of that book. You could then use those notes as reference points to improve your business or improve your personal life.
I think you know what I am talking about. You can remember a great book that you read like maybe Stephen Covey material that was stuffed full of exceptionally good ideas. When you were done with the book though, you felt like you left a lot of those good ideas behind you. They are still back in that book. Had you written them down as you went along, you wouldn’t be spending all this time flipping back through the book looking for what page they are one. Which chapter mentioned this? Where did he say that?
I have tried this method myself. I can assure you that it really works. It helps me a great deal because I do most of my heavy reading before I go to sleep at night. I will read in bed. Often times, I fall asleep while in the middle of something. When you are sleepy, it is easier to forget what you are reading. Keeping notes helps me to extract the most important parts of what I need to apply to my own life. I wake up in the morning and catch a glimpse of the notes I left the night before. Man that is energizing. It is a great feeling when you remind yourself of an awesome idea that you had.
Try it for yourself and you’ll see what I mean. You will start absorbing more of the material that you read. You won’t be learning from osmosis. Instead you will be learning great material like a college student learns from his textbooks.
