Strategy is often used as an umbrella term – a term that through familiarity and use in multiple contexts means different things to different people. Moreover, strategy has morphed over the decades, with research and application in diverse contexts. It is important, therefore, that we get to a common understanding of what strategy is, and what it is not.
STRATEGY IS WHAT GETS YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GET TO
Humans have two ways of getting to a destination – navigating or wayfaring. When you follow a map, whether on paper or through your device, you are navigating from A to B. In the span of human history and evolution, this is a relatively new way of finding our way, where we rely on external knowledge almost to the exclusion of our own thinking and perception.
Image depicting wayfaring which is symbolized through an abstract movement in which action and perception are intimately coupled. Generated with Gemini.
Wayfaring, the dictionary will tell you, is when you travel on foot. But it is more than that. In his book, Being Alive, Tim Ingold, an anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen, calls wayfaring “our most fundamental way of being in the world.” Immersed in the landscape, attuned to its textures and features, the wayfarer enjoys “an experience of movement in which action and perception are intimately coupled.” Wayfaring becomes “an ongoing process of growth and development, or self-renewal.”
When you navigate, you are moved, like a passenger in your own body. But when you are a wayfarer, you are moving, with awareness, deliberation, and intention.
In yesterday’s world, navigation was the most efficient way to get from A to B. Just like you would have a map in a physical journey, a plan was the most effective way to navigate through life. But in today’s world, with an everchanging landscape replete with pitfalls and goldmines at every corner, a plan is insufficient. Strategy is the wayfarer’s toolkit. In an unexplored or changing terrain, it is what gets you from where you are to where you want to get to.
Many tools need to come together in a good strategy, but none of these tools are a strategy by themselves. Strategy is not a vision or a dream for one’s life. It is not a personal mission, or a passion that you follow. Neither is it your habits nor the routine that you follow every day, though a plan that you execute may well be the outcome of a good strategic process. Strategy is not an elevator pitch, or your brand or how you communicate with the world.
Strategy starts with the articulation of a goal and ends with the achievement of that goal. A good strategy validates your goal, focuses it, increases your odds of success, builds in risk buffers in case of unexpected events, identifies and gathers the resources you need, sets up the system and environment needed for you to succeed, and keeps you on track while you go about the work of achieving the goal. It is a process and a product, it contains a plan, and a series of tactical ploys. Most of all, it is a coherent companion that you can rely on, for the duration that you need to achieve your goal, however long that might be.
Centuries ago, kings and nations had a strategy. Mostly it had to do with winning wars and maintaining power and peace. As countries became democratic, and wars became less common, power moved away from royalty to governments and increasingly, to corporations. The market capitalization of some of our largest corporations exceeds the GDPs of small nations. To survive in competitive markets, companies needed not just talent, resources, and capital, but a winning strategy.
Through these periods, ordinary citizens or employees had very little agency or degrees of mobility from their current situation – whether it was geographic, social, or economic. You could think up the best strategies, but there was very little you could do with them if you were not in the right place at the right time. Geography, social structures, gender, or educational qualifications by and large dictated what we could or could not do at any given time.
The world has changed. First slowly, and then rapidly. Of course, the starting point still makes a big difference even today, but rags-to-riches stories have become increasingly common, as have stories of fall from power to poverty.
We are the generation that lives in a world of possibilities, where more than ever before, we have the freedom and the opportunity to choose what to do, and then change what we chose to do. These opportunities, choices, and freedom also bring with them uncertainties, anxiety, and the need for individual agency. The same global interconnectedness that opens up the entire world as an audience to a social media entrepreneur based in Gurgaon can, for example, also make them susceptible to the whims of the technology giant that runs the platform. Strategy is what allows you to jump onto opportunities when they arise and stay afloat when things go belly up all around you.
Any context that has uncertainty, complexity, and agency requires a strategy.
Uncertainty
Image depicting uncertainty symbolized through many open doors with no focal point in subdued and clashing colors suggestive of turbulence. Generated with Gemini.
Humans have two ways of thinking – slow and fast. They are not just two speeds of thought, but fundamentally different ways in which we operate. In his seminal book Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman calls them System 1 and System 2. According to Kahneman:
“System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary mind. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.”
When we find ourselves in a situation that our brain considers dangerous, System 1 gets triggered. This is a vestige of the brain we inherited from our ancestors. Our response mechanism mirrors what our ancestors did when they encountered a lion. Panic. Run. Climb up the nearest tree.
Today, millions of years later, uncertainty triggers exactly the same response in our brains as if we were to see a lion. But the kind of danger and uncertainty that we face is fundamentally different from that of the eras before. What we need to do when confronted with uncertainty, therefore, is exactly the opposite of what our ancestors would have done. Pause. Think. Act. Slowly and deliberately. Consistently, but with agility and flexibility when required. We need a System 2 response.
You can think of strategy as the instruction manual prepared by System 2 that System 1 can rely on. Never has this been more critical than it is now. Why? Because we have never lived in an environment such as now when we need our System 2 the most, while our System 1 responses are constantly being triggered by anxiety and stress caused by the uncertainty around us.
COMPLEXITY
Image depicting complexity symbolized through spiraling fractals, that are emergent and seemingly chaotic but with subtle underlying patterns. Generated with Gemini.
Complexity is one of those words that gets tossed around a lot, and as a result, has begun to lose its meaning. It also often gets confused with complication. Complex situations can often get complicated, and vice versa, but they don’t need to be.
My favorite articulation about the difference between the two comes from Neil Johnson, a professor of Physics and pioneer in the field of complexity theory:
“Making a pizza is complicated, but not complex. The same holds for filling out your tax return or mending a bicycle puncture. Just follow the instructions step by step, and you will eventually be able to go from start to finish without too much trouble. But imagine trying to do all three at the same time. Worse still, suppose that the sequence of steps that you follow in one task depends on how things are progressing with the other two. Difficult? Well, you now have an indication of what complexity is all about. With that in mind, now substitute those three interconnected tasks for a situation in which three interconnected people each try to follow their own instincts and strategies while reacting to the actions of the others.”
Globalization and technology have increased complexity to unprecedented levels, faster than our brains have been able to evolve. You might have heard of the Butterfly Effect often used to describe complexity and chaos theories. When it was first formulated in the early 1970s by Edward Lorenz, it would have been hard for most people to believe it or to understand its implications. But since then, we have had numerous instances of specific actions, or groups of actions causing events of global reach. Subprime mortgages, COVID-19 pandemic, the rise and fall of cryptocurrencies – all these are examples of worldwide events that can trace their origins to unrelated events that came together to create cascading effects leading to complex situations.
The natural instinct of our brain, when confronted with a complicated situation, is to reduce it into simpler steps or blocks that it can process. Reduction could work well to solve a complicated problem, but it can be extremely misleading in complex systems. The answer to complication may be simplicity, but the answer to complexity is nuance.
A good strategy allows us to build up a response to complex situations with the required granularity and nuance.
AGENCY
Image depicting agency symbolized through a dynamic human-like form made of keys representative of choices and action. Generated with Gemini.
Uncertainty and complexity make it seem like things are getting worse, the world is becoming a more hostile terrain, and that we are struggling to cope. But that is not the full story. The flip side is that we have much more freedom and ability to design our own futures than ever before.
When referring to human psychology, agency refers to an individual’s capability to influence their functioning and the course of events by their actions. Research has consistently shown that those with high agency have a high probability of success. The trait is often also referred to as self-driven or intrinsically motivated. But agency goes a little deeper than that, and in fact, is the cause of self-motivation. It is the deep-seated belief that we can make a difference in our own lives. This is not a mental attitude we can change with positive thinking; it needs to be supported by external circumstances. A person in prison can have all the self-motivation that they like, but until they get out of captivity, they are severely limited in what they can achieve. Circumstances, undoubtedly, play a role in determining how much agency we can have.
Compared to a few generations ago, we as a society have much more freedom, flexibility, and opportunity to shape our destinies. The lockstep career paths – where everyone followed a fixed path through education, employment, and retirement, with a clear hierarchy of desirable professions and roles – are fast becoming a thing of the past. However, our ability to recognize, acknowledge and exercise our agency has not caught up with this brave new world. And understandably so. Exercising one’s agency, especially with a lack of role models, or a culture that supports it, can be scary. But there is no doubt that those who can exercise their agency, and drive on their own road, will have more possibilities for success.
A traveler on a well-trodden path can rely on someone else’s map, but explorers in new frontiers need to devise their own mechanisms for navigation. We no longer need to be travelers on old paths, we can be explorers of our own lives.
In the classic book on reading “How to read a book,” Adler distinguishes four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical.
Syntopical reading (an arcane term, in our view, that requires an update but a useful concept nevertheless) is the kind of reading where a specific topic, and the readers’ concerns with that topic, take center-stage over the book that is being read. In other words, “it is you and your concerns that are primarily to be served, not the books that you read.”
In other words, “it is you and your concerns that are primarily to be served, not the books that you read.” In this type of reading, it is you, the reader who is in the drivers’ seat, not the author. According to Adler:
Syntopical reading is not an easy art, and that the rules for it are not widely known. Nevertheless, syntopical reading is the most active and effortful kind of reading.
It is also the most rewarding kind of reading, if only you know how. This is the kind of reading that is most useful in today’s world, but the kind that is rarely taught in schools or universities. So how do you read “synoptically”?
There are two main stages of syntopical reading. One is preparatory, and the other is syntopical reading proper. I would add a step 0 to this, which is about identifying and articulating your topic – something that is not as trivial as one might think. But let’s assume for a moment that you have a good definition of the topic you want to tackle, and you acknowledge that your ambition to understand it goes broader and deeper than any one book would be able to satisfy. Let’s proceed to Step 1.
Stage I. Preparatory: Survey the Field
1. Create a tentative bibliography of your subject.
In the world of Adler, this was done through a recourse to library catalogues, advisors, and bibliographies in books.In modern world, this would be more of the art of the internet search to shortlist the books and articles you want to read. Personally, I like to tackle this with a list of prominent thinkers in the field and tracking down the bibliography of the author. Start with books or start with authors – the intent is to have a first list of good reading material.
2. Inspect all of the books on the tentative bibliography to ascertain which are germane to your subject, and also to acquire a clearer idea of the subject.
Inspecting a book has two stages to it – systematic skimming and superficial reading. The intent here is to get, in as short a time as possible, a good understanding of what this book about, what kind of book this is, and whether you want to spend more time on this book. Inspectional reading is done quickly because the goal is to get the gist of the book and the overarching idea.
You could also read abstracts or reviews (even though Adler warns against relying on them too much, and I concur with it to some extent – someone else’s interpretation of the book might not be the same as what the author intended). The trick to using abstracts and reviews correctly is to read them with a critical mind, even more than you would do with a book.
A particularly useful aid, which was probably not as easily available in Adler’s age, is short talks/videos, long form articles and reviews with the prominent thinkers/critics. This could help you get the gist of a writer’s work, at least to the extent to decide whether you want to dive deeper into it.
Stage II.Syntopical Reading of the materials from stage I
1. Find the most relevant passages:
Based on the inspectional reading you did in Stage I, figure out which are the most relevant passages/sections to read. Don’t try to read them all and be as selective as you can be. Less is more, in my opinion, in this step.
2. Bring the authors to terms:
This is Adler’s way of saying – establish your own terminology on the subject. Keep is as neutral as you can, which will help to translate and synthesize multiple authors towards a structure or system of your choosing.
3. Frame a set of questions:
I find this the most important step of the process – whereby you establish the questions and sub-questions you want to answer. These questions may not be directly answered by the authors, but the “detective work” of reading will be to find the indirect clues that provide the pathway towards them.
4. Define the issues:
This is about finding answers to the questions you framed in step 3, but in a way that is your interpretation of it. An independent perspective is key to this step.
5. Analyze the discussion:
This is best done by ordering the questions and issues in such a way as to throw maximum light on the subject. The key output of this step has to be an orderly arrangement of the different issues/arguments on the topic, organized in a way that it answers your questions and makes clear their relationship to each other.
2 Stages. 7 steps in total. Syntopical reading is not for the casual reader, but if you are about to tackle a new topic, or would like to deepen your expertise in one you are merely acquainted with, following this steps would be to your benefit. It would give you breadth and depth, with minimal time spent. Try it out!
Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.
Khalil Gibran
Consider two stacks of books – one with all the books you read in 2010, and the other with all the books you read/ plan to read in 2020. Are you reading more or less? Are you reading the same topics, or have you broadened your reading repertoire? Has your depth and expertise, and ability to absorb complexity of the topics or the storyline increased?
If you don’t see much progress between the two points in time, don’t fret – you are in good company with most other adults. However, if this were the case with your bank account, you would likely not be so indifferent. To at least keep up with the rate of inflation, you would insist on the growth of your material wealth over time. The same concept, though much less understood, applies to our intellectual wealth.
Intellectual inflation – whereby what we know in 2010 is not as valuable in 2020 – is just as real as economic inflation. It has as profound an impact at the individual level. But it is a concept that is hard to comprehend, and harder still to quantify. Unlike the currency of economic wealth, intellectual wealth is not valued in absolute terms but in relation to its ability to bring about change and improvement in a person’s life. This depends on each individual’s specific context, capabilities and goals. In other words, while you can measure money against commonly accepted standards, your intellectual growth is up to you to measure.
Tip #1: Chart your reading trajectory Take any two points in time – say A and B – between which your life has significantly changed. It could be a transition from student to working life, one job to another, one country to another, or just a period before and after an emotional personal transformation. List out the books that you were reading at point A and point B. Try to capture 4-5 books in each period. Without much scientific or quantitative rigor, assess for yourself your reading trajectory – essentially a gauge of the progress you have made. Treat it as a moment of self-reflection on whether you are satisfied at the progress of your reading journey.
The concept of growth lies at the heart of charting a trajectory – the fundamental assumption being that during the course of a lifetime, we make small steps of personal elevation, each making us a better person than we were. Our markets and our economy are obsessed with growth, however at closer examination, growth is not necessarily a fundamental imperative but a cultural construct.
Smil’s latest tome “Growth” covers the concept of growth from megacities to micro-organisms. The book, through rigorous analysis, tries to make the point that the end of growth is inevitable. However, I read Smil because he is a historian, not necessarily a futurist, and what I particularly like about the book is its rigorous examination of the concept of growth as applied to both nature and society.
t examines the rules and patterns of growth in energy consumption, human artifacts, and human populations, societies and economies.
Bill Gates warns that “Growth” is not a book for everyone, but if that statement makes you feel apprehensive to pick up the book, I would suggest reframing that comment to – what would it take for me to read this book with the same ease and absorb as much from it as someone like Bill Gates?
You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Peter Drucker
If you are like most people, you would go about such a task starting with goal setting, and then tracking your progress to your goals. Tracking reading progress is often reduced to just measuring the number of books you read. That measure is too coarse to serve any real purpose. Websites like GoodReads offer reading challenges (I confess, I do take part in them) which are purely based on number of books read. While some measure is better than no measure, we believe that there is a need to measure all facets of a reading journey.
Tip #2: Quantify your read Start small – if you have never measured your reading, start with a simple reading journal. As you get comfortable with this, try out goal setting with a broader personal purpose in mind and then documenting your reads by genre and topic you would like to cover. As you get more comfortable in quantifying your read, or if you are already a QuantifiedRead practitioner, assign each book a progress score – whereby it is a measure of how much the book contributed towards your own personal goal, whether it is information, understanding or transformation.
A side note to this – reading fiction is often associated with reading for entertainment. This could not be farther from the truth. Studies have, time and again, showed that fiction can have a transformative experience in individuals, and if read right, it can result in as much personal growth, if not more, than non-fiction. However, in case of fiction, the writer is often less explicit on what is it that you might gain from a book, leaving it more up to the reader. Therefore, the concept above is as relevant for fiction, it just requires a more objective and astute assessment on the part of the reader.
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
Isaac Newton
Growth and elevation are individual concepts, but they also have a collective aspect to them. Reading is the ultimate act of standing on the shoulders of others. It is how we acquire the foundational knowledge in a topic where much work has been done before. But once we are there, we have a responsibility. An obligation to contribute.
Tip #3: Contribute to collective human progress Go on, be audacious! We are all on earth for a unique purpose – just because we may not have unearthed it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Which is that specific field that you are so passionate about that you are a fount of knowledge? And could you, in that topic, be the person who pushes our collective understanding beyond what those who have come before us have done? The chosen area could be small or big, that is immaterial as long as it is yours for a unique reason.
Our recommendations list covers the topic of Growth – it is a broad topic that can be interpreted in many ways, we have tried to cover the different aspects of this theme.
If you would like to get more tips to be a better reader, download our practical guide – Read It Right. Free for all subscribers!
Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.
Warren Buffet
“Learn to Read to Read to Learn” is a concept that most educators, and many parents are familiar with. The fundamental premise here is that “Learn to Read” occurs during the early years of a child’s education and consists primarily of decoding and memorizing basic words. They continue progressing through this stage until they achieve “fluency” (expected around age 6-8 in most education systems) at which point they’re ready to tackle increasingly difficult text and begin to “Read to Learn”. From then on, for the rest of our lives, we are expected to be fully equipped to read to learn.
This system, which many of us have been part of whether it was called this or not, is fundamentally flawed. Specifically for (at least) three reasons:
Continuous parallel processes: More recent studies have pointed out that learning to read and reading to learn occur not sequentially, but in parallel, and they don’t stop at a certain age
Contextual knowledge is critical: All prose has factual gaps that must be filled by the reader. The more you know, the more you will get out of your read
Technological advances: Twenty years ago, the “readTech” (our term for tools and services to aid reading) we had was limited. Most of us have not taken the time to change or update the way we read, while those who read best are those who use technology to their aid.
So what does this mean? As adults, as we continue to read to learn, it is important to take the time to also learn to read. To consider these as continuous parallel processes, which we deliberately improve with increasing age, knowledge and technological advances. In today’s age of information overload, rapidly changing expectations and increasing uncertainty, it is more of a critical skill than ever before.
Tip #1: Continue to learn how to read Knowledge (like wealth) follows a compounding principle – knowledge accumulation, just like wealth accumulation, favors the one who already has more. The more you invest in learning how to read, the better you get at it, thus setting in motion a virtuous cycle of personal growth and development. So it makes sense to continue to learn how to read.
“How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren is an old classic – when it was first written in 1940, it became a best seller to even the author’s surprise. He later updated it in 1972. The book is a little outdated, but there are some good concepts and approaches in there on how to read better.
The book distinguishes between four levels of reading— elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical, and also recommends when to apply which level, and how to approach different kinds of reading materials—practical and theoretical books, imaginative literature (lyric poetry, epics, novels, plays), history, science and mathematics, social science, and philosophy.
I like good definitions, Adler defines 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.”
In other words, the mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. Our mind elevates itself; we grow as individuals. That is, in essence, the act of reading. However, to achieve an elevation from “reading” requires a broader definition of the activity of reading than the physical act when you are in front of the book.
Tip #2: Don’t forget the Pre-and post-reading phases Think of your reading workflow from beginning to end. We suggest five phases:
Goal setting (where you decide whether to read or not and how much)
Planning (what to you want to read and in what sequence)
Reading (how do you read a specific book – we discussed different reading styes in Issue 2)
Retaining (how do you ensure you remember what you read) and
Applying (getting to insights and action)
Here are two excellent articles on enhancing the pre– and post- reading experience.
Armed with an ability to read and learn, it is possible to read about and learn any topic you set your mind to. In keeping with the theme of this Issue, here are a few recommendations on learning and reading. including one for a younger audience( “learning to read”).
Armed with an ability to read and learn, it is possible to read about and learn any topic you set your mind to. In keeping with the theme of this Issue, here are a few recommendations on learning and reading, including one for a younger audience (“Learning how to read”).
Tip #3: Augment your reading Technology has evolved significantly, and “readTech” has much to offer these days. Take the time to review your end-to-end reading workflow and to consider if any of the tools available out there could help you make your reading more pleasurable and productive.
In the last Issue, I wrote about how I highlight and re-read my books, and a couple of you reached out to know how I do it. So here goes.
I highlight and make notes as I read (across platforms and devices) and at the end of the book, I email them to MyZenith.io, where I then get a consolidated overview of all my annotations. If needed I also add extra notes at this stage. I review them periodically – this helps in both retaining the key concepts, but also to discover unexpected connections across my multiple reads.
The tool is right now in beta version, but you can join the list to get access when it is available.
The science of learning suggests that connection and repetition are the two important means to help us get the most out of our reading. Tools like MyZenith use recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help us connect and enhance across our reading and thus get even more out of the reading. Check it out!
If you would like to get more tips to be a better reader, download our practical guide – Read It Right. Free for all subscribers!
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reading, like any other activity, has its ups and downs. Reading is joy, solace and happiness. It can also feel like a chore, a to-do, a task in the service of something else. My own experience in keeping the balance between the pleasure of reading and extracting the full benefits of reading is to read what I need, at any point in time (we talked about mindful reading here). Usually, I read to a plan and schedule, but I do happily abandon plans, often enough. But then there are weeks where you let go of plans and read to my heart’s desires.
Read with the times Everywhere I look, I am confronted by top-ten lists of Pandemic-related books.
For the last five weeks, I’ve resisted the temptation to pick up any of those, until I finally gave in, and re-read Camus’s The Plague. This book needs no introduction – an account of life in Oran, a city in Algeria in the middle of a deadly epidemic. I was struck by how beautifully Camus captures the absurdity of life, its irrationality, and human reactions to things beyond our control.
The book reaches its epitome of eloquence in Rieux’s thoughts, almost towards the end of the plague, when the town had begun rejoicing over the imminent freedom from pestilence:
“But what had he, Rieux, won? All he gained was to have known the plague and to remember it, to have known affection, and to have one day to remember it. All than a man could win in the game of plague and life was knowledge and memory.”
A sobering thought, but relevant nonetheless. Instead of pointing to Pandemic-related literature (as the Plague being the only one I have read myself), let me point to some goodlistsinstead.
Tip #1: When you find yourself in a reading rut, perhaps because you are in the middle of a hard book or the noise around you is too hard to ignore, give yourself some permission to read whatever you feel like. And if you don’t feel like reading anything, maybe just pick up whatever everyone else is reading, or talking about reading, even if it is not your genre or your type of book.
Read to travel
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.
Dr. Seuss
Most of us are trapped in the four walls of our home, and we are looking forward to venturing out. It feels uncouth to complain about the lack of travel – but as they say, “To see the world is to love the world.” Now more than ever, I feel love for our world. I feel a deep gratitude for our fellow beings, those who are in the critical services that keep society going and those who are staying at home. I feel an empathy and compassion across borders best ignited by hard and intense shared experiences. Just because we can’t physically transport ourselves, it does not mean we can’t learn and experience other cultures and places.
I turned to the next best thing to seeing the world – to read about the world. I picked up Patrick Jered’s “Finding the Demon’s Fiddle.” Part travel-writing, part detective work and part exploration of mythology, the book is about the writer’s journey to find the origins of Ravanahatta, a predecessor to the violin, and invented, supposedly by the Demon King Ravana.
Jered manages to interleave philosophy, mythology and humor in a long book that feels surprisingly short. Imagine yourself in an old colonial house in coastal Sri Lanka when you read this:
“Colombo House had an off-white silence, like a Proustian sense of regret; a faded youthful decadence – not quite managing to feign responsibility in its old age. Its huge room with tall ceilings and period furniture whispered the conversations of long past.”
It is a book to savor, to absorb, and let yourself go along in the obsessive quest of the writer to get to the bottom of the mystery of this ancient instrument.
Tip#2: If you are feeling walled off physically, let your mind wander the world by picking a book about a place that you would love to visit – perhaps a place that was in your summer plans for this year, or perhaps the place hardest to reach on your bucket list. Or perhaps pick up a book about a place where you’ve already been and relive the memories and be surprised by things you may not have noticed when you were there. Here are some recommendations for interesting reads about interesting places.
Read to re-live: Interestingly both the books I reached out to this week for comfort were books I had read previously. I wanted to read something that I knew for sure that I would enjoy, something that fit my mood just right. There is no way to be sure of that unless you had read it before. In a way, it also meant I didn’t need to read the book sequentially and entirely as I would do on a first read – I dipped in and out, and I read my own highlights and notes. A book like Finding the Demon’s Fiddle would have taken me a while to read from beginning to end, but going through parts I curated helped me remember and re-live the experience in a shorter time.
Recently I have been experimenting with highlighting the favorite passages of my books and revisiting them. It feels as if someone who knows me intimately (my own past self in this case) has carefully curated the best parts of my favorite books, and even left me little notes on how that relates to my life and thoughts – the best of the best, personalized, just for me. Now, isn’t that a luxury!
Tip#3: Highlight passages, sentences or even just phrases that you find striking. Most ebooks have a feature to add notes to your highlights too. Take the time occasionally to review and savour your annotations. I am often surprised by the new perspective that I get on a re-read, either because it is the second or third read, or because I am just reading it in a different context which gives a new meaning to the text. In my experience, this works just as well for fiction as for non-fiction. Repetition has proven to be one of the best ways to retain knowledge, the more often you review, the more you get out of your reading.
If you would like to get more tips to be a better reader, download our practical guide – Read It Right. Free for all subscribers!
Most of us read when we are children. We read to learn the basic skills of literacy, to acquire some level of general contextual knowledge, and later specific knowledge about a field we choose to specialize in. The adults around us insist that we learn and read so that we can be “ready” to face the world. And then, one day we leave our educational institutions and the safety of our homes behind, and declare ourselves ready to face the world. For most of us, the time we spend on productive reading decreases dramatically from then on. When it is no longer required of us, other priorities take over and reading gets relegated either to the realm of pleasure activities or to the bottom of a to-do list, as an item that we rarely get to.
In the book The 100-Year Life, professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott talks about a multi-stage life (as opposed to the three-stage life of education, employment and retirement that our grandparents experienced). A child born in 1914 had a 1% probability of living to 100 years old. A child born in 2007 has a 50% chance of living to be 100.
For most of us in between, there is a more than reasonable chance that we will live to more than 90 years old, if not 100. Yet, we are not prepared. Our lifestyles still reflect the three-stage life, where learning and reading are predominant in just the first stage and we expect a sequential, predictable and lockstep path through life stages. This is one example of a profound change that has already happened, but one we haven’t adapted to in response. Many such changes abound – from climate change to urbanization to most technological advances.
Society will eventually catch up and politicians and corporations will adapt policies and job requirements to new realities. But that is unlikely to happen at scale in our lifetime, or to our individual advantage. What’s the alternative, and what has that got to do with reading?
Read for foresight:
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
Sherlock Holmes
None of us have crystal balls or time machines. But that does not mean that knowing the future enough to be prepared is a fool’s errand. We may get the specific dates and specific events wrong, but the general trajectory of human development and future opportunities follows predictable paths, if only we know how to look for it.
Reading for foresight has as much to do with analyzing the past as it has with predicting the future. While the past cannot be changed, our understanding of the past certainly can, and in that also lies a way to predict the future. Understanding the past, its relation to the present and extrapolating to the future is closest to detective work, perhaps a lot more exciting endeavor than reading.
Reading Tip #1: Read like Sherlock Holmes: Peering into the future has many similarities to solving a mystery. Here are the seven strategies of Sherlock Holmes as applied to reading for foresight: Define the question, Approach the question with a blank mind, Learn how to read relevant material, Use logic, Never give up an opportunity to listen while you read (aka close reading), Never underestimate anyone, and Learn how to recognize vital facts from incidental facts. Seeing the future is quite elementary, don’t you see?
You could consider that each book you read is a piece of evidence, and what you glean out of it is a clue to solving the mystery of what the future holds. Exciting! To get your started, here are a list of books that could give you some clues on what the future will bring.
Read to pivot: Let’s assume you have formed your views on what the future will bring thanks to your good detecting skills. Now comes the hard part – for most of us, acting on the knowledge of the future would mean changes. That’s got nothing to do with what exactly you do now or who you are, but more to do with the fact that the world is changing faster than ever, and whether we accept it or not, we are already living in a multi-stage world.
We are in that exact generation where we were not prepared to live a multi-stage life when we were children, which means it falls on us in our adulthood to acquire the skills to change and adapt. Pivot — I would like to call it, because it is not all that different from a start-up which has discovered that it needs to re-imagine its talents and assets to capture a different opportunity than it had originally intended. Applied to an individual level, it is about how to use your skills, talents and passion to a new area or profession?
Reading Tip #2: Read it when you need it. Reading is best approached when there is a purpose to it, not as a vanity metric to hit a certain number of books in a specified period. It is also helpful to seek out books that answers your questions or help you out in the specific context you are currently in. If you are trying to pitch your new start-up, don’t just read a book on marketing, but rather a book specifically about writing business plans and to approach investors. The more specific you can be, the better. That’s why you should choose your books based on what you need to learn right now, so you can use the information you consume.
You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that.
Roald Dahl
Before any major change, lies a decision. If you are contemplating changes or would like to read up on effective deliberation and decision-making, here are a few relevant recommendations.
The world is always changing – “change is the only constant” is an enduring cliché for a reason. What is relevant now is that crises accelerate change. Contrary to popular thinking, the world doesn’t change dramatically because of a crisis, the change was always afoot. But the crisis forces us to accept it and change ourselves, sooner than we would have liked. Now that we are living through a drastic, pervasive change like none of us have ever experienced, what will you do about it? The concepts here – to develop foresight and pivot (if/when needed) – are hopefully helpful. There are many means to do these, and several of the approaches often need to be used together, but reading is usually the efficient, first and no-regret step that supports other actions.
If you would like to get more tips to be a better reader, download our practical guide – Read It Right. Free for all subscribers!
Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
Daniel Kahneman
A good read is a good reason to read
A good read is one that changes you, has an impact on you, ideally in a way that you want to be changed. But is that always the case? Depends on what you read, and how you read it. Gone are the days when there were trusted gatekeepers to the written word – when editors and publishers (supposedly) safeguarded the interests of the reading public. With the ease of publishing these days, writers are dime a dozen, fake news artists even more. We are left to our own good senses to make sure what we read is indeed a good read. We like to call these good senses a matter of perspective.
Perspective (noun) \ pər-ˈspek-tiv \ : a particular way of thinking about something, especially one that is influenced by your beliefs or experiences
Let’s talk about reading and perspective. Three things about perspective, really, since all good things come in threes.
First is about forming an Independent Perspective. We consume information throughout the day, whether it is from a book, a long-form article or short snappy news. We believe that learning more about the world keeps us better informed. Optimistic, but sadly untrue. To see the world as it is, and not as others want us to see it, requires a rather uncommon skill of putting things in perspective.
One of my favorite books about perspective is Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Rosling was a medical doctor, a global health professional and the founder of Gapminder Foundation, an organization whose mission is to fight devastating ignorance. If you don’t believe the widespread lack of awareness, try out the Factfulness Quiz here.
While the quiz may seem like it is about general knowledge, the book addresses much more than that – it explains ten “instincts” that make it difficult for humans to have a fact-based view of the world, and goes on to explain practical ways to avoid the pitfalls.
It is an excellent read for our times, to help us sift out the fact from fake, the detail from the drama, the right from the rhetoric. Now more than ever, we need to train our own ability to put things in perspective. And this book is an excellent guide to replacing our faulty instincts with critical thinking so that we may develop an independent perspective and see the world for what it is.
The second concept is Plasticity of Perspective. Try to think back to the last time you learned something radically new? The last time you were willing to let go a firmly-held belief and replace it with something that you had not previously considered or had judged inconceivable? Children find it easy to learn and change their mind, most adults don’t. As we age, our brains tend to get more fixed in our neural pathways. However, recent studies have shown that it can indeed be altered, but with deliberate efforts.
It is not the most intellectual or the strongest species that survives, but the species that survives is the one that is able to adapt to or adjust best to the changing environment in which it finds itself.
Charles Darwin
Without getting into a discussion on neuroplasticity here, let’s talk about retaining our ability to change our opinions, to learn something new, to be surprised. I like to think of this as collecting “aha-moments.” That moment when you learn a new concept, when you understand something for the first time, when you see something in a new light – that’s pretty close to bliss. But those are hard to come by as we age, unless…we go looking for it.
Let me share with you the source of my most recent aha-moments – Ted Chiang’s short story collection “Exhalation”. Exhalation is a wonderful collection of stories that make you think, it opens and bends your mind. My favourite is the story titled “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”, about a near-future in which fallible human memory is superseded by searchable digital video.
Chiang in his masterful prose takes us not only forward, but also backward to reflect on how the written word is really an augmentation of human memory. While most of us hold the “truth” in high esteem, the story also forces you to think of the concept of the absolute truth as a cultural construct, and as the title suggests, there is the possibility of the truth of the fact and the truth of the feeling, and one need not be better than the other even when the two don’t agree.
Last concept to consider – Heterogeneity of Perspectives. Quite simply, this is about not living in our own bubble. We all live in bubbles of some sort, and the ones who deny this most vehemently usually inhabit the most impenetrable ones. Algorithms that govern what we read – from the Facebook newsfeed to the book recommendations of Amazon – dictate what you see or read next based on what you read and liked before. They play on our instinctive need to be in our comfort zones, to not have our views challenged. Yet in the future that we cannot yet see, the ability to know and hold differing perspectives will be critical not just for success, but for survival. How do we pull ourselves out of the self-reinforcing mechanisms (internal and external) that drags us deeper and deeper into what one already knows and away from experiencing differing viewpoints?
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A simple way to overcome this – stick your head out of the bubble once in a while. Actively seek out books (other sources work as well, but this newsletter is about reading after all) that challenge your perspective. How about picking up a book or an author you know you will hate? How about getting inspired by the reading choices of someone who represents the polar opposite of your views in the political spectrum? How about trying a genre you would never have considered?
Ray Dalio’s Principles addresses this topic in what he calls radical open-mindedness – the ability to explore different points of view without our ego or blind spots getting in the way. Principles is a clear and candid account of how Dalio started and grew Bridgewater Associates to be the largest and most successful hedge fund in the world.
It is rare to get a view of the mistakes and learning of someone of that stature and achievements, even rarer to then have them abstract those and distill down into principles that you and I could apply.
To summarize:
Seek out multiple viewpoints, even (and especially) those different from your own (Heterogeneity of Perspective)
Develop the ability to rationally make up your own mind after considering different viewpoints (Independence of Perspective), and
When appropriate, be willing and able to change your mind (Plasticity of Perspective).
If you can master these three – which are really skill sets that can be honed by deliberate practice – you are well on your way to making sure that everything you read is indeed a good read.
If you would like to get more tips to be a better reader, download our practical guide – Read It Right. Free for all subscribers!
We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love — a connection between things. This arcane bit of knowledge is respoken every day into the ears of readers of great books…
Mary Ruefle
A good reason to read, if ever you need one
Connection. Humans crave connection, and it especially becomes apparent when we are deprived of it. Isolation cells are one of the most feared of punishments, often dreaded more than physical torture, by even the most hardened of criminals. In his book Social, Matthew Lieberman argues that our brains are literally “wired” to connect, and it is a need more fundamental and more basic than our need for food or shelter.
Reading is an act of connection – to the author who wrote the book as we are welcomed to the inner world that he/she created, to our inner selves as we read and reflect and get to know our own selves a little better, and to others around us as we learn to empathize more and perhaps, even share what we read and learn.
You are what you read, choose wisely
Our need for connection may be universal, but the way we connect is anything but. The Culture Map is categorized as a business book, and it is primarily aimed at decoding how cultural differences impact work across different countries. But we chose this book for this Issue’s recommendation because it is ultimately about connecting. Specifically about connecting across cultures, and that felt relevant in today’s global world, where when we wake up from this hopefully temporary restraints, more than ever, we need to keep the connection and compassion across borders.
In The Cultural Map, Erin Meyer uses eight “scales” (e.g. communicating, trusting, persuading), where each scale is a continuum with the two ends, to describe a specific aspect of culture. While this may come across as a recipe for stereotyping, Meyer is clear to point out that it espouses just the opposite – people are ultimately treated as individuals, with her approach as a crutch to understand their cultural contexts better.
Understanding humans is a tricky business, connecting deeply is even more so. Books can help us along this process. For a longer list of recommendations on connection that cuts across genres go here.
Some tips and some tricks
Reflect as a you read – Connecting well to others requires a strong sense of connection to our own selves. Reflective, or even meditative reading is an excellent medium to increase self-awareness, and to connect more deeply to who we are. Reading allows us a safe haven to explore our inner selves: fiction often allows us to examine harsh truths about ourselves through the stories of others, non-fiction provides us with insights or theories to explain our own struggles, which may otherwise seem impenetrable. Regardless of what you read, it does require an introspective mindset and the willingness to dig deeper, with the express intent to get better acquainted to one’s own self.
Practice prosocial reading – One of the implications of the social wiring of humans, as covered in Social, is that we learn better when it is done in order to teach someone else than when we learn in order to take a test – i.e. “prosocial learning” that relies on the social networks of the brain are more effective. This has a practical application in the Feynman technique of learning. Named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, this technique proposes an approach where you try to explain what you learn to someone else. Next time you read something, perhaps try and explain to someone else, or share your learning with someone else in an easy to understand way. That way you learn better, you help someone else, and you fulfill your brain’s primitive need to stay connected.
Connect with authors – Writers are notoriously recluse. Just twenty years ago, connecting with the author of your favorite book would have required hunting down book tours or obscure email addresses. Today though, most writers have an active internet presence and often actively engage with their audience. I have been happily surprised by responses I received to random emails I sent off to authors whose works moved me. I have no idea whether this has any effect on making you a better reader, or to help you to read more – I just find it super cool when famous authors reply back! Try it, it’s fun.
If you would like to get more tips to be a better reader, download our practical guide – Read It Right. Free for all subscribers!
We are all leaders in our own right. Whether at work, in our family or community, or just being in charge of our own life – we are all expected to lead. How do we become better leaders? Who is a good leader? Is leadership innate or nurtured? We may have various and differing opinions on these questions, but what is harder to disagree is that leaders of all stripes have relied on books. Bill Gates reads about 50 books a year, Warren Buffet reads 5-6 hours a day, Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day. And it is not all about reading non-fiction or business books – Steve Jobs had an “inexhaustible interest” in William Blake, Sidney Harman called poets “the original systems thinkers,” quoting freely from Shakespeare and Tennyson…the list goes on and on.
So what is it about reading that makes good leaders? Smarts – that’s the obvious one. Reading improves intelligence, reading broadly across subject areas allows us to see unexpected patterns and connections – it improves innovation, insight and creativity. Of course, there are many ways to get smarter, but from an end-to-end Return-on-Minutes (ROM) perspective, reading is the clear winner in acquiring information and enhancing intelligence.
Equally important, but perhaps less appreciated, is the role of reading in developing ‘softer’ skills. Reading literature helps to improve our empathy, appreciate social cues better and ultimately be more compassionate leaders. Many management studies have linked higher emotional intelligence to organizational performance. Not to mention the positive impact of a regular reading habit on self-management – reading is meditative and works better than listening to music or going for a walk to reduce stress.
Fun Fact: Did you know that Winston Churchill won the Nobel prize in 1953 in Literature and not Peace?
You are what you read, choose wisely
Traditional books on leadership – the kind that you find on most management shelves – are prone to theory, and often wonderfully divorced from the reality of everyday challenges. It is incredibly hard to distil down leadership as a course or a secret sauce. Real leadership is forged through everyday experiences, real leaders are often born by living through the metaphorical fire of crises – small, big and disastrous.
So how do you instruct someone in the science and art of leadership? Joseph L. Badaracco, Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School, has an interesting approach. In his book “Questions of Character” Badaracco uses protagonists from literature to examine well-rounded, complex pictures of leaders in all walks of life.
The lawyer who commits an undetectable crime in I Come as a Thief, a novel by Louis Auchincloss, is an excellent warning about the influence of success and the dangerous undercurrents that come with it. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a brilliant study on the need for adaptability in the face of change, something any leader in our times would appreciate. One of the thinnest lines a leader is often asked to walk is between principles and pragmatism – Antigone, the ancient Greek play by Sophocles finds its parallels in today’s leaders who are sometimes unable to master their own dogmatism.
Literature does not shine a happiness cannon on our world, it doesn’t give leaders the “seven-step program to success” or a burst of motivational bravado. Instead it chronicles struggles, choices and sometimes, failures. It shows how humans climb out of difficult situations and face the world around them, the world in all its beauty and gore. That’s what a real leader needs to learn, and for that – we recommend this book.
You can find more of our recommendations on leadership here.
Some tips and some tricks
The two main concerns we’ve heard since we started the Reading Retreat is – how do I make time for reading? How do I get more out of what I read? There are many tips and tricks for these two problems, and it often takes some trial and error to find the one that works for you specifically, but let me continue to share some that have worked for us:
Choose one thing to give up – Warren Buffet has attributed his success to reading copiously and admitted to reading 600-1000 pages daily when he began his career as an investor. When asked how he does it, his answer was, “It is a top priority.” While many people would like to be well-read, most don’t allocate time or priority to the activity of reading. In the book, Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits Of Wealthy Individuals Tom Corley studies the daily activities of 233 rich people and 128 poor people over 5 years. He found that 67 percent of rich people watch TV less than one hour a day. The intent here is not to say don’t watch TV, but I used the example because TV is the most commonly cited reason people don’t read. If you examine your own day, what is it that you are going to give up in your day-to-day routine to make room for reading? For me, it was scanning the news endlessly and playing computer games (especially games meant for 6-8 year-olds) – now with the lockdown, there was significant risk that these two unproductive activities would naturally take over the time freed up by lack of commute and social activities. It took some deliberate planning (and this reading retreat) to reroute that time to reading.
Use multiple formats – I must admit, I am still experimenting with this. I often have an ebook version and a physical book version of the same book – it helps for some books, doesn’t work for some. I almost always have multiple versions of the ebooks I am reading in all my devices and I switch seamlessly between my phone, tablet and computer when I read (if you use Kindle app, it syncs automatically, joys of technology!). The one I use less, but might work well for you, is to use audio versions too. When I am cooking, driving or folding the laundry, I like to switch to an audio book. I am still figuring out how to do that seamlessly within a same book, but what works for now is that I have 3-4 books I am reading in parallel in any given period, and at least one of them is an audio book, which allows me to “read” in any context. Try it out, having a good read at hand always (and multiple formats make this possible) can make a real difference in how much you read.
What is in it for me? – Previously, we talked about making each book your own. This time, I am going to ask you to go one step beyond. After reading (or while reading) a book, reflect deeply on what the book means for you. We call this concept Applied Reading – when the purpose of reading is not just for information or entertainment but for insights, decision or action. It is not always a linear step from reading to action, but the approach of applied reading recommends that after every book or article you read, you take a pause to translate its relevance to your own personal life or situation. In our household, there are eight scissors, each placed close to the location where they are used most. And we have expensive designated containers for the things which are most likely to be displaced or lost. Both of these were changes I put in place based on recommendations from The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin, who applies cognitive psychology to everyday problems. This is just a small example, but I try and make sure there is at least one impact in my life from each book I read – whatever form it takes. So the next time you finish a book, ask yourself – what was in it for me?
We hope this inspires you to read and to lead, to take charge of your situation regardless of how out-of-control it feels like and to get more of your reading to help you be a leader, whether it be of an organization or your own life.
If you would like to get more tips to be a better reader, download our practical guide – Read It Right. Free for all subscribers!
