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BFW: What Would Happen if You Mastered Strategic Reading?
Dear Reader,
Welcome to another edition of Brain Food Wednesdays, your weekly intellectual feast. In this edition, issue 234, we talk about mastering strategic (leadership) reading.
In a world where we are constantly bombarded with information, it is more important than ever to read strategically. But what does that mean?
Strategic reading to identify relevant information and disregard the rest goes. Once you’ve identified relevant information, understand how to use it to your advantage. This requires taking the time to really think about the implications of what you’ve read and how you can apply it in a real-world situation.
What Would Happen if You Mastered Strategic Reading?
The top three reasons people give me for why they don’t read more are lack of time and focus, and the inability to remember key information. Today, I’ll deal with lack of time and focus.
I once talked to a CEO, and she mentioned they started a book club, but had to abandon it because they couldn’t focus on the books because there was so much information in them. And the reason most professionals don’t have the time to read books has to do with their definition of what it means to read a book. They’re thinking about spending hours reading a book from cover-to-cover.
My response to not having time to read or focus is the same. And it’s meant for nonfiction books. Most nonfiction books aren’t meaty enough for you to invest oodles of time to consume them. Think of a nonfiction book as a problem-solving tool. You have a problem and you’re looking for the solutions in books. When you find the answers, you’re done with the books. You got what you needed, so you’ve read the book.
Think of the 80/20 Rule and apply it to reading books. You read twenty percent of a book to understand eighty percent of the text. Preview the book to determine which sections to read.
If you’re reading only the important sections of a book, reading strategically, you’re unlikely to lose focus because you’re not spending a lot of time reading non-essential information.
When you’ve mastered strategic reading, it’s time to focus on reading syntopically. Syntopic reading is reading three to five books on a topic in relation to each other. You have an urgent workplace or business problem you must solve. When you have a problem, you need diversity in thought. Therefore, it’s important to read three to five books to find solutions to your problem. You’ll spend twenty to thirty minutes on each book. And read the books strategically.
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Warm regards,
Avil Beckford
Brain Food Wednesdays
Editor, Brain Food Wednesdays
Founder, The Invisible Mentor & Art of Learning Leadership Academy