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Brain Food Wednesdays: How to Activate Your Knowledge to Profit From the Books You Read
Dear Reader,
In this week’s newsletter, the 146th issue, I’m writing about how to activate your knowledge to profit from the books you read.
Most professionals read a book and do nothing with the information. You may have heard me say this before, but reading a book, and not applying the ideas, is like slaving all day in the kitchen preparing a delicious five-course meal and nobody eating it. That makes no sense, does it?
I try to apply ideas from the books I read, but sometimes I don’t go far enough. I write to clarify my thoughts. And that’s what I’m doing right now. This post is a reminder to me, as it is to you, to always apply your knowledge to practical situations. You bring the information to life and you remember more of what you’re reading.
Every day, you face challenges and obstacles at work and home. There are always questions you want answered. And one way to solve the challenges and obstacles, as well as answer questions you have, is by reading books to gather the relevant information.
Below, you’ll find the article I wrote, and I hope you find it helpful.
Ask Avil
How to Activate Your Knowledge to Profit From the Books You Read
This week we’re talking about activating the knowledge to aid in profit reading. You cannot profit from your reading time unless you do something with the information. I think it’s invaluable to leverage the information you find in books to enable you to achieve your goals. Knowing how to activate knowledge allows you to apply big ideas and business processes to practical situations.
Here’s why it’s important to take action on the books you read:
1. When you take action on what you read, you’re more likely to remember it. This is because your brain associates the knowledge with a physical action, which makes it easier to recall later on.
2. Taking action will help you better understand the concepts in the book. If you’re just passively reading, it’s easy to gloss over important details. But if you’re actively trying to apply what you’re learning, it forces you to really think about the material and understand it at a deeper level.
3. Taking action on what you read will help you retain more information in the long run. This is because taking action requires you to think about the concepts in a new way and connect them with your existing knowledge base.
Process to Activate Knowledge
- Start the process by reading through your notes a few times to review them.
- Pick out the big ideas from your notes.
- If you noted any business processes, techniques, models, or systems, pay special attention to those as well.
- Create a simple table with seven columns and three rows. You’re going to work with five books at a time.
- In the seventh column, you have combined ideas and business processes.
- In the five column headings to the right of the combined ideas (Columns 2 to 6), add the name of the books you have notes for.
- In the second row of the first column, label it big ideas, and in the third row, label it business process for simplicity’s sake.
- Record the ideas and models for each of the five books in your table.
- Start combining ideas in each book and then across the five books to see what you discover.
- Start combining the business process across books. This will enable you to identify the gap in the business process in any book. And the combining will bridge the gap.
- Pay close attention to what you discover.
I used this method with sales books, and books on creativity and ideation, and it worked very well. I came up with elevated ideas and hybrid business processes. It’s important for me to continue the process. For each course offered on the Art of Learning, I plan to activate the knowledge.
I already went through recording the big ideas and business process if the book had one. It will be interesting to see what I discover when I activate the knowledge. It’s important to do this exercise to find that one big idea that can transform your life. Ideas are seldom fully formed, so it’s important to work with them to make them better.
One way you can do that is by combining them. To combine business processes, you might find a process that’s now unique to you, to use in your business or career. Most people will not go through this process, because they’ll think it’s too much work. But you already know that to succeed in life, you must do the work.
Join my membership site, Art of Learning Leadership Academy, at an introductory price as we build out the content on the site. Be one of the founding members.
Art of Learning Leadership Academy Membership Site
Until Next Week,
Avil Beckford, Founder, The Invisible Mentor
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