Over the past few years I’ve been feeling as if my life is going nowhere. I’ve had some key accomplishments, yet I still feel this way. I look around me, and I see the same-old, same-old, and would welcome something refreshing. The tagline for my business is to learn, stretch, and grow. The intent is to provide my readers with content that will help them to learn, stretch, and grow. To get rid of this inertia, I decided to spend the time reading diverse books, pulling ideas from them. This was a sabbatical leave.
I believed that going through this process would help me to write more interesting content, as well as share from I learned from the process. But the key to making this sabbatical leave a success is to read the right books.
Over the years, the media has reported that Bill Gates took Think Weeks where he consumed a lot of information. This new knowledge helped him to be a better leader and get new ideas to implement at Microsoft. You can read the article, “Bill Gates took solo ‘think weeks’ in a cabin in the woods—why it’s a great strategy” by Catherine Clifford.
I tried this project before, but I didn’t take things to the finish line. I honestly can’t say what went wrong. This time around though, my intent is to read to learn, which I usually do, but I also want to read to see what others miss. At the end of the process, I wanted to have fresh blog posts, articles to publish on Forbes and Medium, as well as some new products, tools, and resources to help my readers. I guess this time around, I’m more focused and I have a compelling ‘Why’ for investing in this project.
I’ve consistently been reading every day this summer and taking notes. In 2018, I was sick all the time and didn’t work much. I also gained weight because I was unable to exercise. This summer, every morning, I’ve been walking for about two hours. And in areas on my route there are inclines, so it makes the walk more challenging. After my walk, I start reading.
You cannot accomplish your goals if you don’t have good health you need to work on important projects. So, that’s why I make sure that I walk every day. When I tried this project before and didn’t follow through, I didn’t do much with my notes, except use them for book reviews. That’s not a bad thing though. However, I want to do and be more.
Using the Haystack Method and Intersection Thinking to Make Sense of the Information from the Books I Read
In the book Non-Obvious by Rohit Bhargava, he introduces a model, the Haystack Method that he uses to curate trends. The model has five steps:
- Gathering
- Aggregating
- Elevating
- Naming
- Proving
Have you read?
Non-Obvious: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas and Predict the Future by Rohit Bhargava
Bhargava publishes a new edition of the book every year. It has two sections, the first explains his process for curating trends, and that section is included in every edition. The second section has the trends he curated for the previous calendar year. Although I’m not curating trends, I thought the model would be useful to help me make sense of all the information that I’m learning from the books I’m reading.
I’m in the gathering stage right now. I intended to work on the other stages after I’d read about 60 books. In the latest edition of the book, Non-Obvious 2019, one of the curated trends is intersection thinking. When I read the details of the trend, I realized that I struck gold.
Intersection thinking helps you to discover what others may miss when reading books. Since my plan is to read diverse books to identify ideas to combine, intersection thinking would work well for my needs. Imagine going through the steps of the Haystack Method, then introducing the concept of intersection thinking.
“Intersection thinking is a method for creating overlap between seemingly disconnected ideas in order to generate new ideas, directions, and strategies for powering your own success.”
While on my walks, I think about a lot of things. And on one walk, it occurred to me that although I was following the Haystack Method, I still needed to have a few articles written, so I could start publishing them when September started. Remember that I mentioned earlier that one outcome from reading so many books is to write articles using my newfound knowledge. Also imagine the quality of the articles I could write if I added my insights gleaned from intersection thinking.
I had to make changes to my schedule to include time to write in addition to the time I invest reading diverse books. That means that I could be creating some products during my sabbatical, instead of waiting until the end.
How I’m Choosing Which Books to Read on My Reading and Learning Sabbatical
I have over 10,000 books in my Kindle app. I opened up the app to remind me of some of the books I owned that I wanted to read, but hadn’t done so yet. I recorded the names of close to 200 books in my notebook. I knew that I would be unable to read that many books during the summer, but I wanted to give myself options. I could also stop reading books if I wasn’t finding them useful. For the purposes of my reading and learning sabbatical, I decided to take the popular Francis Bacon quote on reading, to heart.
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”
What that meant for me, was that I would read only the sections of the book that could help me to learn, stretch, and grow. I want information to help me to accelerate my career. Have you ever read a good book, and thought, “What now?” I am looking for strategies that I can use to grow my small business. What some people do not know, is that publishers have word counts for different genres.
In one book that I read, the author says that when he wrote what he had to say, he only had 50 pages – that’s about 25,000 words. Unfortunately, for his genre, the publisher expected 100,000 words. He had to find a way to get his word count up so that the publisher would accept his manuscript. The implication is that most books are filled with extraneous information. As a reader, it’s important for you to figure out what’s important and not important in every book you read. Focus on the important information.
That’s what I’m doing during my reading and learning sabbatical.
According to Mortimer Adler, in his classic, How to Read a Book
, there are three reasons for reading: Entertainment, Information, and to further your Knowledge on a topic. I read for all three reasons and even when I’m reading for entertainment, I’m still looking to learn from the book. But for this personal project, my main reason for reading is to further my knowledge on several topics.
In the next segment of my journey during my sabbatical, I’ll write about which books I’m actually reading. Things often look good on paper, but during application, you have to make adjustments.
