Reading Time: < 1 minute

There are a lot of things that I’m not very good at, but I try to handle the situations properly when issues or questions come up.

Sometimes that means that I try to learn to solve the problem myself; if there is an issue with our company that I don’t know how to handle, I dig in and learn how to solve it.

On the other hand, if there is an issue with my car I’ll take it to a trusted mechanic so they can figure out what’s going on.

The third option is to just throw my hands up because it’s too complicated, which rarely is a good move.

In his book “$100M Leads“, author Alex Hormozi is pretty clear on this thoughts:

If You Say You Suck At Something, You Will Probably Suck At It.
Never say “I’m not techy” or “I hate tech stuff.” It just keeps you poorer than you should be.

There are things that I’m not good at, and some I can just pass off to others (like car issues). For many things, though, it’s in the best interest of myself and my company if I dig in and learn what’s going on. I may never be an expert in those troublesome areas, but to just say “I hate it” and ignore the problem is only going to lead to poorer outcomes.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

In looking at reading goals, it can be kind of tricky to set a decent metric to measure against.

Most people default to “number of books read” (including myself), which isn’t bad. The problem is that it can create some bad incentives, particularly later in the year. I know one person that was short of his goal in December, so he read a bunch of short books in order to get there. Does that really count?

Related, I talked to another friend that never uses that metric specifically because he doesn’t want to limit himself. He reads more than anyone I know, but it often reads huge, long books. Those should count for more, right?

Other metrics

I see three other ways it could be measured:

Pages (or minutes): You could just look at the total number of pages read, or if you do audiobooks it could be minutes listened. That’s not bad.

Highlights saved: This is something pretty easy for me to measure with Readwise, but it measures the wrong thing. This measures how much value I’ve discovered in the books, but not how much total reading I’ve done. Value is the real goal, though, so maybe it counts?

Of note, my previous high had been 51 highlights with “The Personal MBA” from a few years ago, but “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” just blew that away with 94 highlights. Those are a few great books!

Blog posts created: For me, much of my reading leads to writing blog posts from topics on a particular book. This is somewhat hard to track, because sometimes I’ll share multiple highlights in a post, or share highlights from multiple books in a post. Still, this is another good way to measure how much value I get out of any given book.

Ultimately, I think I’ll keep an eye on two things:

1. While it’s not a perfect metric, “number of books read” is easy enough that I’ll use it.
2. Of those books, sorting by “highlights” is a great way to see what had the most impact on me.

We’ll see how it goes.

What metrics do you use to track your reading progress?

Reading Time: < 1 minute

There are many things that I can’t do, and a subset of those are things that I’m trying to learn to do. The difference is subtle, but can make a huge difference.

In “Excellent Advice for Living“, Kevin Kelly shares:

The fact that you “can’t do” something can be embarrassing. But if you are “learning to do” something that is admirable. There are only tiny baby steps between can’t and learning.

As he says, the difference between “can’t” and “learning” is just some tiny baby steps.

I can’t play the violin, and likely never will. Perhaps you can’t play it either, but you might be learning to. That puts us in roughly the same spot skill-wise, but you have a much brighter future when it comes to violin playing.

I can’t speak Spanish, but I’m learning. I’m not far beyond someone that can’t speak it and doesn’t care, but I’m heading in the right direction.

It’s ok to have things that you can’t do and never plan to do, but making the “tiny baby steps” to start learning can pay off big time over the course of a few years.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I wish the title of this post wasn’t true, as it’d be quite awesome if you could just push a button to add the knowledge that we want to our brain. Perhaps it will be possible in the future, but it’s certainly not here yet.

That said, it sort of is already, at least compared to our ancestors. While we can’t put info directly into our brain, having things like smartphones and Google puts all of the world’s information just a few seconds away.

To really learn something, though, takes time. In Adam Grant’s new book “Hidden Potential“, he explains it like this:

Learning from multiple guides is an iterative, interactive process. It’s not as simple as going to people and asking, “Can I pick your brain?” Also, the image of picking a brain is gross. The information isn’t just sitting there, waiting to be extracted. We don’t live in the Matrix. Guides can’t simply upload their insights for us to download.

The recent passing of Charlie Munger got me thinking about things like this. The man lived 99 years, and read as much as any human in history. He was brilliant and articulate, even at his advanced age. Then one day he’s gone, and all of that knowledge goes with him.

Thankfully, he left a lot of his knowledge behind, but it takes work to actually make use of it. One of my favorite books is his “Poor Charlie’s Almanack“, which covered much of his life and wisdom. My only problem with the book is that it was difficult to read; not in terms of the words, but the format. It’s literally a huge book (10″x10″, weighing over 5 pounds), and the book is full of call-outs and pull quotes and other things that mean you really need to take your time going through it. Here’s an example:

Fortunately, they just released it on Kindle last week and it’s a much easier read. The content is all there, but it’s laid out end to end so you can just work through it. If you want some wisdom from Charlie, that book is fantastic place to start.

This is also why I love podcasts like “Founders”, where the host walks through biographies of hundreds of different people. Even though the host gets more out of it than we do, it’s still a tremendous way to learn from those that have come before us, and it’s the closest we can get to downloading their wisdom into our brains.

Perhaps someday we can plug ourselves into a system to upgrade our knowledge, for now we can be thankful for things like Google, smartphones, Founders, and Poor Charlie’s Almanack.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, commonly known as the “frequency illusion”, is typically nothing more than annoying. It’s when you buy green Ford Explorer to be a little different, and then suddenly you seem to notice green Ford Explorers everywhere. Whatever is top of mind you tend to notice lot.

However, I’m finding that intentionally manipulating this illusion can be kind of handy. I’ve watched the show “Timeless” a few times, but something happened the last time I watched it. Somewhere between watchings, I came across Eldridge Cleaver and his work during the civil rights movement. I didn’t really notice the role he played in Timeless before, but because I had heard of him elsewhere his name stuck out during the rewatch of the show and I become more interested.

I’ve seen this happen a few times in various circumstances — names seemed to pop up a lot more often once I knew a little bit about them. Once I learn a bit about someone, it’s no longer just noise in a story like it was previously.

Make it intentional

I thought it would be neat to make this more intentional, so I’ve spent some time building a new Anki deck to help with that (more about Anki here, and the deck is here). I searched for lists of top authors, journalists, civil rights leaders, company founders, astronauts, explorers, Olympians, inventors, painters, and others, and put them all in this deck. There are 371 people in there now, and I’ll likely add a few more as time goes on.

The questions I wrote for each one are very simple, as I’m mostly just using it to stick their names in my head. Some I might go deeper on, but most I simply want to have some awareness of them so that I’ll notice when they pop up in TV shows, podcasts, or other places.

Is it possible to intentionally create the frequency illusion? I honestly don’t know, but I’ll be studying this deck for the next year or so (just one new card per day), so we’ll see what happens!

Reading Time: 2 minutes

As I’m reading and learning, I try to spend a lot of time finding where the gaps are in my knowledge. There are lot of them, to be sure, but some stay hidden quite well. Those are usually the result of an area that I’m not very familiar with, so I don’t know where the gaps are. If I’m not careful, that can lead to some illusory superiority, where I think I know more about an area than I really do.

It reminds me of when we were hiring for a position at GreenMellen a long time ago, and a skill needed for this role was the ability to read and write CSS code. In one interview, a woman said “I’ve never used CSS, but I can learn it this weekend if I need to“. She may have been bragging about her ability to learn, but I think it was really more of a case of illusory superiority — she didn’t know any CSS, so she didn’t have a scale of what was involved in learning it. My CSS skills have always been somewhat decent, but it helps me know enough that it’d take far more than a weekend to really level them up.

In Natalie Nixon’s book “The Creativity Leap“, she shares a snippet from Ian Leslie’s “Curious“:

In his book Curious, Ian Leslie explains that curiosity is the result of an information gap. To be curious about something, you must know just a little bit about it. He writes, “In order to feel curious—to feel the desire to close an information gap—you have to be aware of a gap in your own knowledge in the first place.”

I find the best way to find gaps is to learn in broad areas. Knowing even just a little bit about a particular area will give you some insight into what’s required to master it. I’ll go deep in some areas, but I try to keep my reading and podcasts fairly broad so I can better identify those gaps.