The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘How to Read a Book’

Some books are great mentors, and we know instantly while we are reading them. Other books become mentors after we have read them and have a delayed reaction. All Fall Down by Megan Hart was a great mentor after I had my delayed reaction.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I love reading because it gives me pleasure, and it is one of the things that I will carve out the time for, even if it means that I get less sleep. See my blog post 2011 Books for Mentoring.

According to How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, there are three main reasons for reading a book: to further knowledge, for information, and entertainment. I read for all three reasons, and I also find that even when I am reading for entertainment, I am always learning new things.

The day before Christmas 2011, one of my friends gave me about a dozen books and All Fall Down by Megan Hart was among them. I devoured all the books from my favourite authors first, then I started to read All Fall Down. The more I read, the more upset I got and yet I continued to read. I didn’t find All Fall Down entertaining, and I wasn’t reading it because I wanted to further my knowledge, or gather information about cults. 

So why was I reading Megan Hart’s All Fall Down?

Sometimes when we resist things in life, we need to probe further, to see if it’s time to step out of our comfort zone. All Fall Down by Megan Hart is a novel about the Family of Superior Bliss, which is a cult, led by the charismatic zealot, John Second. Originally, the basic belief of Family of Superior Bliss was to take care of the earth and our bodies, which they call “vessels”. They did this through taking care of the environment and not consuming toxins. Along the way, the message got twisted and they lost their focus.

One morning quite early, when it was still dark outside, Sunshine’s mother, Trish, wakes her up, and tells her to take her three children and leave the compound. Sunshine is confused because the compound is the only home she has ever known. Her mother has packed a backpack with clothes for them, and gives Sunshine some money and the address of her real father.

Sunshine is confused, but listens to her mother and escapes to a world that is very unfamiliar to her. Unknown to her, shortly after her escape, John Second and his cult followers commit mass suicide. In the mean time, Sunshine shows up on her father’s doorstep with three children in tow. Sunshine’s father didn’t even know that he had a child. When Trish decided to leave him nearly 20 years earlier, she claimed that the child she was carrying wasn’t his, and he took her at her word.

Hart uses a lot of flashbacks as a literary device to tell her story, and I hate them, I like it when a story is told in chronological order. Even though I do not like flashbacks, they happen to work well in this instance. The story unsettled me and I got upset with Sunshine and wanted her to get on with it. But she cannot get on with it because she lives what she knows, and that’s life.

Sunshine grew up in the community of the Family of Superior Bliss. The family unit teaches us how to live and interact with others for meaningful relationships. The problem is that the Family of Superior Bliss has a misguided view of the family and the way it should work. Sunshine is not quite 20 years old, yet she has three children, who have different fathers. She is sexually abused, but she doesn’t know that, because that’s what happens in the community in which she lives.

The Family of Superior Bliss is very patriarchal, and they withhold information from the followers, which takes away choices from them, and makes them dependent on the leader. Sunshine has a touch of rebelliousness inside her, because she would often steal some of the food because they were never fed sufficiently. The people in the community were brainwashed, and if they did something wrong they would confess, but Sunshine never did, so that says something about her character.

Most of the story focuses on after she leaves the Family of Superior Bliss compound, and you get to see Sunshine struggling to fit it. She is quite vulnerable, and the unfortunate thing is that the leader of a splinter group that had left the Family of Superior Bliss refuses to leave her alone, and keeps on showing up at her place of work. She breaks down and goes to see what this new community is like, but she doesn’t take her children with her.

Sunshine doesn’t join the splinter group, though she talks to Josiah, the leader, on the telephone. She is hospitalized and receiving counseling, while her father, Christopher, and his wife Liesel take care of her three children. They shower a lot of love on the children. Sunshine needs some time alone to heal and to get to know herself. She became a mother when she was still a child – John Second and his other sexual predators robbed Sunshine of her childhood. At first I hated the way the story ended, but upon reflection, it was very hopeful, and I realize that she was going to make it. After all, she is indeed a rebel at heart.

After deep contemplation, I realized that the greatest lesson in All Fall Down  by Megan Hart is that if you want to get rid of a bad habit, make sure that you have a better one to replace it with. If you leave a void, more than likely you will go back to the old, because it’s familiar and what you know.

Sunshine was brainwashed at The Family of Superior Bliss community, and after she left, she had some sessions with Dr. Braddock, who helped with the deprogramming process. Sunshine needs to experience how a real family functions as a unit, to succeed in the world. Eventually she will get there.

All Fall Down  by Megan Hart will be out this month, I got an advanced uncorrected proof copy. I recommend All Fall Down by Megan Hart though I won’t say that I enjoyed it, but sometimes we have to read difficult material to get a better sense of this world that we live in.

Interesting Tidbit About All Fall Down by Megan Hart

Some of you may be wondering about the title of the book. It so happens that in the story, Sunshine’s children played “Ring a Ring o’ Roses”, which is a nursery rhyme.

“A ring, a ring o’ roses,

A pocket full o’posies-

Atishoo atishoo

We all fall down.”

If you cannot view the YouTube video of “Ring a Ring o’ Roses”, click here.

There are a few versions of the nursery rhyme, but the one I have included is the one I played as a child growing up in Jamaica.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Book links are affiliate links.

Video Credit: Uploaded by Jangiankotla on Apr 12, 2009

Image via Wikipedia

In case you missed it, here is what we talked about this week on The invisible Mentor Blog.

Mondays at the Salon

There are times when we have to master a topic of interest so we have to read several books at the same time, a process Mortimer Alder calls reading syntopically.

How to Master a Topic of Interest.

Booked on Tuesdays

We reviewed Hugh MacLeod’s Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination which teaches us to strive for the excellence in us and be remarkable.

Review: Evil Plans by Hugh MacLeod.

Wisdom Wednesdays

We profiled the physician William Harvey, who paved the way for modern medicine with his careful experiments and dissections. He made sure that his experiments were repeatable, and he was a rule breaker and wasn’t afraid to depart from the status quo.

William Harvey Paved the Way for the Practice of Modern Medicine.

Perspective Thursdays and Workshop Fridays

From conducting interviews over the years, one of the things I have learned is that we can learn from the experiences of others. We featured Part One and Part Two of The Invisible Mentor interview with Delane Cooper an entrepreneur who is a goldsmith and jewellery designer. Delane moved from a tech job into a more creative one. How many of us have the courage to give up the steady paycheque and pursue our passion? Delane made it work for her.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Image by ario_ via Flickr

This is a continuation to last week’s post How to Summarize a Book for Professional Development. It builds on how to read. In How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren, the authors talk about the three reasons for reading and the four levels of reading.

Three Reasons for Reading

1. Information
2. To further knowledge
3. Entertainment

Four Levels of Reading

1. Elementary
2. Inspectional
3. Analytical
4. Syntopical

To master a topic of interest requires reading to further knowledge and reading syntopically, which is reading several books at the same time about a specific topic, and looking at them in relationship to each other. To demonstrate, let’s pose a scenario.

Issue

You are a woman who hasn’t received a salary increase in seven years beyond the yearly cost of living increase. You are known as someone who always gets the job done, but your salary does not reflect your experience and education. You know that others with your experience at other companies earn at least $30k more per year than you do. To top it off, you are introverted and do not know how to negotiate.

Solution

There are many solutions to your dilemma, and an obvious one is to get a coach or mentor. But let’s not choose either of those, how about if we decide to first learn how to negotiate by reading a few books on the topic of negotiating. You believe that by learning to negotiate, it will help you not only to get a salary increase, but will also help in other areas of work and life.

Let’s say a colleague at another company referred the following books for you to read.

• Her Place at the Table: A Woman’s Guide to Negotiating Five Key Challenges to Leadership Success
• Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and Gender Divide
• Ask for It: How Woman Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want
• Negotiating With Giants

Before you dive into the books and start to read, you need a plan. What information do you need to learn? Start to brainstorm, and look at the Table of Contents to get ideas. You would probably be interested in:

• How to overcome objections
• Why women are hesitant to ask for salary increases
• Where to gather information on salary ranges in your industry
• How to build a business case for why you should be given a salary increase
• How to present your case to your boss or the person responsible for signing off the salary increase
• Decide on the least amount you will accept for an increase
• How to respond if you are not taken seriously

I am sure that you could add a lot more to the list, but this is for demonstration purposes only. Start reading the books with the specific goal of extracting the information that you need. And because this is such a critical situation, theory shouldn’t be enough. You could find a trusted advisor or friend to practice your pitch, ask for honest feedback and make adjustments along the way.

So if you want to read to master a topic of interest, you must have a learning goal. You have to know what you want to accomplish, what ways you will gather the most appropriate books to read. You can ask colleagues, friends and family for recommendations.

See the post How to Master a Subject for another way, a more in-depth one  to approach this issue.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

The Precursor to How to Master a Subject
How to Master a Subject
How to Fill the Information Gap
How to Fill the Information Gap (when you don’t know there is a gap) Part Three

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The summer is here and it’s the time when most people get caught up on their reading. Why do you read? Do you read for entertainment, for information, or for knowledge? How often do you read a book? What kinds of books do you read? Do you read books that stretch and grow your mind?

What would you do if you were offered $5 billion to stay on a deserted island for five years with only some articles and 15 books? You wouldn’t have access to any modern day technology such as the radio, television, telephone, PDA, iPod, iPhone – nothing. Which books would you take? Which books would you be willing to read over and over? And if you had access only to the internet, how would your choices change?

Years ago while studying the program “Lead the Field,” Earl Nightingale stressed the importance of learning and growing. He suggested that we read a book a week and learn a word a day. Do you think that’s good advice, and relevant today?

I mastered reading a book a week, and now I try to read two books a week since I write book reviews for the Invisible Mentor Blog. I subscribe to two vocabulary builder websites that email me a word every morning. I also purchased a vocabulary builder system. How easy is it for you to expand your vocabulary by a word a day?

The book Superlearning 2000 suggests that the best way to learn words is to hear them on a tape, while playing 60 beats per minute baroque music in the background. Even though I wasn’t exposed to a lot of classical music while growing up, like most things, the more you are exposed to them, the more comfortable you become with them. I now play baroque music while I do my work, and I have noticed that it has a calming effect, while heightening my alertness. What about you, what type of music heightens your awareness?

YouTube video of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons

If you cannot view the YouTube video of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, click here.

The interesting thing is that you notice the difference in your writing when words pop into your head and you suddenly realize that your efforts to expand your vocabulary are not in vain.

If you do not read many books and are wondering how you can read a book a week as suggested by Earl Nightingale, perhaps, the best place to start is by reading How to Read a Book. And, say for instance, at work you are working on a project which requires you to amass large amounts of data on a specific topic, how do you read through all that information? You would read syntopically to be more effective. All this and more is covered in How to Read a Book.

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren was originally written in 1940 and updated in 1972. It’s packed with lots of useful information, and it isn’t the type of book you read once. It functions best as a reference book and you would find it beneficial to discuss the contents with a group of people to fully grasp and make use of the wealth of knowledge that it contains.

The stated primary goal of How to Read a Book is to “know how to make books teach us well” if we are open to continuous learning and discovering. Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren define the art of reading as “The process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more…” Adler and Van Doren suggest that before reading a book you should decide if you are reading for entertainment, information or for the sake of understanding. Making this kind of distinction determines how you would read the book.

The authors describe four levels of reading – Elementary Reading, Inspectional Reading, Analytical Reading and Syntopical Reading. Elementary Reading is the level of reading that you learn in elementary school. There are two types of inspectional reading, (1) systematic skimming or pre-reading and (2) superficial reading. With inspectional reading, the emphasis is on time – getting the most out of a book within a short time frame (this is ideal for students who have to complete assignments in a specified period of time). Analytical Reading deals with classifying the book, coming to terms with it, determining the book’s message, criticizing the book and the author. Analytical reading is a very active type of reading. And finally, syntopical reading or comparative reading, the most complex form of reading, is the reading of multiple books on the same subject and placing them in relation to each other.

If you actively read a book, you should be able to answer the following questions – (1) what is the book about? (2) What is being said in detail, and how? (3) Is the book true, in whole or in part? (4) What of it? If you are able to answer these questions, you truly understand what the author is trying to say.

Adler and Van Doren suggest that if you are reading to become a better reader, or in other words reading for understanding and enlightenment, you cannot read just any article or book. You must read material that stretches and grows your mind.

I recommend this book, but be prepared to read it at least twice to get the most out of it. This extra effort will save you lots of time later when you are using the information to read other books.

Book List

How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren

Superlearning 2000, Sheila Ostrander & Lynn Schroeder with Nancy Ostrander

All book links are affiliate links.

Book: The Next Big Thing: Spotting and Forecasting Consumer Trends for Profit
Author: William Higham

I was delighted that someone decided to write a book about trends, how to spot them and how to exploit them. There are many websites and books about trend spotting and trend hunting, but I have never been able to wrap my head around how to exactly use the information, and many times I felt quite helpless. In an age where things are changing so rapidly, the ability to spot trends and exploit them is a skill that would make any professional more marketable, because they are equipped to accurately predict client attitudes and behaviours, and assist companies with product development strategies.

And, William Higham, the author of The Next Big Thing: Spotting and Forecasting Consumer Trends for Profit is qualified to write a book on trends because he has consulted in the area for 10 years, but more importantly, the area of trends has always been his passion, so he has studied it for many years. I found The Next Big Thing on http://www.netgalley.com, and was able to download a copy for review using Adobe Digital Editions. The book is very well researched, and while reading it you get a sense that the author knows what he is talking about.

The Next Big Thing is 272 pages in length (over 40 of which are used for the Appendix and Index) and divided into two Sections: Trends and Trend Marketing and six Parts: The Value of Trends, Beginning with Trends, Understanding Trends, Identification, Interpretation and Implementation. According to Higham, the objective of the book is “To use my experience and knowledge of trends to strip away the ambiguity and mystery that surround them, to provide a straightforward introduction to the topic, to clarify meanings and debunk myths. I also want to offer some suggestions for standardized trend analysis and implementation process that I call “trend marketing”, and show how it can be learned and practised and incorporated into everyday business practice.”

So what is a trend? William Higham defines a trend as, “A long-term change in consumer attitudes and behaviours that offer marketing opportunities. Trends are the manifestation of change.” He adds, “To identify a new trend, marketers need to look for any signs of change among consumers. These can be change in behaviour or attitude.”

The author spends a lot of time going into the nitty-gritty of trend marketing providing a multitude of examples to build a case. This is good for most people, but for me it was too much information. I wanted him to get on with it, and that’s my bias because I have over 15 years of research and analysis experience, I know many websites that spot trends, so all I want to learn now is what do I do with them. How do I move forward with trends to provide better services to my clients? For me, the meat of the book started at page 115. Your response to the detailed information will depend on what your needs are.

In The Next Big Thing, the author provides many examples of consumer changing tastes and how companies are responding to these changing tastes, or even predicting where their customers would be, similar to the way Wayne Gretzky would skate to where he anticipated the puck would be, which made him a very successful hockey player. I liked the idea of heritage marketing where brands would use their rich heritage, their founders and history to market to consumers. And even those brands that haven’t been in existence for a long time would create a heritage for their clients. How can you use heritage marketing, even if your company and brand haven’t been around for a long time?

Savvy companies that know how to use trends can capitalize on trends such as Trading Up, Come Together and Gender Blending.

Trading Up Trend: Consumer across socioeconomic categories buy more premium products, and you exploit this trend by having products at different price points to create ranges. Think how you might expand into other complementary or even non-complementary product categories.

Come Together Trend: The growth of building community and social networking is staggering, how can you exploit that trend?

Gender Blending Trend: There is a growing trend for gender neutral products. Recently more women have been buying technology products and more men are purchasing and using skin care products. If your products are not gender neutral, how can you make them so? And could you create a line that’s targeted for the “other” gender?

For The Next Big Thing to be truly useful to me, it had to teach me how to do three things, and I suspect it would be the same for most people who are interested in trend marketing.

1. How to research trend activities
2. How to interpret and analyze trends
3. How to implement trends

The book delves into how to create a Trend Marketing Department including the skills needed for every stage of the trend marketing process, as well as how to hire a consultant who specializes in the area. Higham also talks about how trends come into being, “Trends do not just appear spontaneously. They are driven by specific environmental or individual changes. What is happening around consumers affect their thoughts and actions. Trends start when an environment shift disrupts consumers’ normative attitudes and behaviours. And they typically occur as a reaction to something a consumer experiences.” The book also goes into fad versus trends, micro vs. macro trends, national vs. international trends. Several chapters are devoted to identifying, interpreting and implementing trends.

Identifying Trends

Who to Study

Consumers

• Innovators
• Influentials
• Early adopters

Observers

• Journalists
• Academics
• Researchers
• Entrepreneurs

How to Study

• Practical identification
• Theoretical identification
• Behavioural identification
• Attitudinal identification

Finding Data

Statistical: research reports, government reports, press releases

Observational: focus groups, clubs

Media: news media (mainstream consumer, alternative consumer), non-new media (books, films)

Interpreting Trends

• How do trends spread?
• What are active trend drivers?
• How will the trends develop tomorrow?
• How to map trends against the key drivers

Implementing

• Potential impact of trend
• How to benefit from trend
• Feasibility
• Consumer demand, relevance, interest

There is a lot of content in the book, and this review should not be used as a substitute for reading The Next Big Thing. Though the information is overwhelming, if you are serious about the entire trend marketing process you have to read the entire book once and use it as a reference guide. William Higham could have easily upped the perceived value of The Next Big Thing by simply including a five page summary of the trend marketing process. He already knows that there are lots of resources out there that spot trends, but people, myself included, do not know what to do with them.

I recommend The Next Big Thing: Spotting and Forecasting Consumer Trends for Profit. Before you read The Next Big Thing, ask yourself the following three questions, and keep a notebook and pen handy to take notes and capture information that’s relevant to your situation.

Questions to Ask & Answer

1. How are my customers changing?
2. Which trends will my customers respond to?
3. How can I exploit the opportunity to identify new markets as well as better service my current clients?

Note: For readers who haven’t read How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler, it’s the perfect time to do so. The book provides strategies on how to get the most out of what you are reading. And if you haven’t done so already, create Google Alerts for the trends or other important information that you are interested in to flag articles, studies, blog posts and so on.

Further Reading

Trend Analysis Expert William Higham Forecasts Major Changes for Marketers and Consumers Alike
The Next Big Thing Blog

All book links are affiliate links.

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Book Review: The Next Big Thing (businesspundit.com)