You’ve Read the Books, Now What?
Non-Obvious 2019: How To Predict Trends And Win The Future (Non-Obvious Trends Series)
You’ve been reading books like you’ve been told to, yet nothing has happened. I hear what you’re saying. Reading is your passport to the world of opportunities. But unfortunately, you haven’t been able to capitalize on any of those opportunities. Going forward, I’d like you to follow the sequence I’ve outlined in this series of blog post that I’ve been doing on reading. It’s important in learning how to synthesize information to see what your peers don’t. When you synthesize information, you make sense of it.
What You’ve Learned So Far About Reading a Book
But let’s recap what I’ve covered so far. First before you start to read any book, write your one-sentence purpose for doing so. The next step is to preview the book before you actually start to read. After you’ve done that, decide whether you need to do more.
Sometimes a preview of a book is all you need. However, a part of the process of previewing a book is learning how to zero in on what’s important and what’s not. This is essential to taking notes so that you will remember more of what you read. This can lead to building knowledge to accelerate your career.
Have you read?
- Read with Purpose to Get the Most Knowledge from Books
- Getting the Most from the Books You Read in the Time You Have
- How to Decide What’s Important and Unimportant Information in a Book
- How to Take Powerful Notes to Remember More of What You Read
- How to Actually Build Knowledge to Accelerate Your Career
Something I Haven’t Mentioned Before
Something that I haven’t mentioned before, is that before I start previewing the book, I prepare my mind to learn. You need to be in a state of relaxed alertness – the alpha brainwave state. To do that, I listen to binaural beats audio. It has a calming effect on me, and I also listen to the audio, when I’m writing. Although I have some audios that I purchased, I mostly listen to the audios on this website. For starters, listen to numbers 8 and 10.
Additionally, there are some specific exercises you can do to prepare your mind for learning. If you can get your hands on a copy of Brain Gym: Simple Activities for Whole Brain Learning, please do so.
Understanding Bloom’s Taxonomy: How to Synthesize Information to See What Your Peers Don't
I’ve read over a dozen books on reading, learning, and memory because I wanted to discover effective strategies to accelerate my career. I also wanted my readers to benefit from my investment in reading time. If you think learning how to learn is important to you, you can participate in the program that I designed.
After reading so many books on reading, learning, and memory, I realized that Bloom’s Taxonomy needs to be part of the conversation. Professionals need to understand the levels of learning, so they can rate themselves.
3 Characteristics of Bloom’s Taxonomy
- Hierarchy of learning levels.
- Move from shallow to deep learning.
- From rote memorization to highest levels of understanding to application.
What the 6 Learning Levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy Mean
- Remembering Phase: You’ve memorized facts, formulas, and definitions.
- Understanding Phase: You can explain the information to a child or to an elderly person using analogies.
- Applying Phase: You can use the concepts to solve problems.
- Analyzing Phase: You can break down concepts into their components.
- Evaluating Phase: You can critically and objectively look at what others propose and determine what’s likelier.
- Creating Phase: You can get ideas on how to solve a variety or problems or design different ways to achieve a good.
If you want to master a subject, you need to get to the top level of the hierarchy at the creating phase. This is also the phase where you can learn how to synthesize information to see what your peers don’t.
To get to the creating phase of Bloom’s Taxonomy, it’s important to do the things that I mentioned you should do before you start reading a book. Additionally, when reading a book, tie the new information to what you already know. Review what you’ve learned from the book then do a memory recall. And teach the information to a real or imagined friend.
Summary of the Categories of the Human Mind
“According to Russell Ackoff, a systems theorist and professor of organizational change, the content of the human mind can be classified into five categories:
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Data: Data is raw and isn’t significant. An example is a symbol.
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Information: Process data so that it’s useful. It answers “who”, “what”, “where”, and “when” questions.
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Knowledge: This is a collection of information. When you apply data and information it can lead to knowledge. It answers “how” questions.
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Understanding: Appreciation of “why” leads to understanding.
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Wisdom: When you evaluate your understanding of knowledge it leads to wisdom.
I mention the categories of the mind because it is a part of the process in learning how to synthesize information. You need to understand these basics.
Predict the Future: How to Synthesize Information to See What Your Peers Don't
The blog post, How to Actually Build Knowledge to Accelerate Your Career, alludes to reading across disciplines. In this series, I’ll build on this notion, but not today. When you read across disciplines, you’re better equipped to see what others miss. Let’s take a quick at the automotive industry. If you were studying the automotive and the insurance industries, you’d have discovered that driverless cars would result in less insurance policies because of the reduced numbers of car accidents. See what I mean?
What are some industries that are adjacent to yours? What are industries that impact every or nearly every sector? This is worth thinking about and exploring. What’s the history of your industry? You MUST understand the history to predict the future. This is something that I need to do more of.
In the book, Non-Obvious: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas and Predict the Future, Rohit Bhargava outlines a process to synthesize information to see what your peers don’t. He developed the five-staged model, the Haystack Method. You can learn how to synthesize information by using the Haystack Method consistently.
5 Components of the Haystack Method
- Gathering
- Aggregating
- Elevating
- Naming
- Proving
To master a subject, I read somewhere that you need to read five of the best books on the topic. It’s also important to read books on adjacent topics. You’ll know what those are for your industry or niche. What you need to understand is that every subject is a system. And that system if part of a bigger system. The more you about a subject, the more information you can add to your tree of knowledge.
When you’ve read about five of the books you’re interested in, I recommend that you use the Haystack Method to synthesize the information. To do this, it’s important to extract the key and secondary ideas from the books. What information from the books align with your reason for reading them?
Step 1: Gathering
Gathering is the stage where you read the books to get the information you need. When I’m gathering information with the intent to learn, my primary sources are books, articles, and YouTube videos. You can also collect stories and ideas from your interactions with people or with content. There are many encounters with others every day. People have conversations with you, you watch TV, read books, travel around your city, go to museums and art galleries. These are sources Bhargava recommends, to collect ideas.
Step 2: Aggregating
When previewing books, I recommended that you look for the main idea and the secondary ideas that support it. I also demonstrated a way for you to determine what goods ideas are. Remember to read the previous posts in the series. See the links above.
- Take individual ideas and disconnected thoughts and group them together based on bigger ideas.
- After gathering ideas, choose a time to combine early results of your observation and curiosity with thoughtful insights about what it means and how it fits together.
- Aggregating means adding meaning to the ideas and stories. This personalizes things when you add your impressions.
Step 3: Elevating
What interests you most about the idea? What is below the surface? What's the bigger picture? Think about the underlying themes that relate one group of ideas to another, to describe a broader idea. Elevate an idea to make it bigger and more encompassing. Make connections across industries. Aggregate multiple groupings of information together into something that might be a trend.
Step 4: Naming
- Involves describing an elevated idea in an easy to understand and memorable way.
- Shares a specific point of view.
- Great trend names convey meaning with simplicity.
- Finding the name for an idea is important.
Step 5: Proving
Ensure that there are enough examples and concrete research to justify why the idea does indeed describe an accelerating present enough to be called a trend. Something is not a trend because you say it is. Find supporting documentation. That’s why it’s important to keep track of gathered information in a folder.
What Does the Haystack Method Mean to You?
In this context, Gathering represents the detailed notes that you take from each book you read. After reviewing your notes, you extract the five big ideas from each book. When Aggregating the five big ideas from each of the five books, connect them with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
When it comes to Elevating, you have 25 ideas to combine after reading the five books. You can combine ideas across skills and industry, or whatever way you choose. Naming your idea makes it easier for you to explain it. And choose a name that people will immediately understand the meaning of the idea. In Proving the ideas from the books, some of that may be done for you, based on the author’s credibility.
Final Thoughts: How to Synthesize Information to See What Your Peers Don't
I’m still working on mastering the Haystack Method. The author of Non-Obvious: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas and Predict the Future created the Haystack Method. And he uses it every year when he publishes a new edition of the book. There are other techniques I use to synthesize information. But you can use this one to learn how to synthesize information.
You can learn what these techniques are by joining my Performance Accelerator Plan.
