How to get the most of your business book

Reading is one of my passions, and I am a voracious reader. I absolutely love books, but it hasn't always been like this. Let me take you on my memory lane.

I remember I was in the second year of high school when I got the book assignment. It was some literature book. I so dreaded reading that book. When I was younger, truth to be told, I was not too fond of books that teachers gave me to read. I thought there were so boring and not practical. I was thirsty for information to be applied in the real-world. Isn't that the point of reading books? For someone ambitious and action-driven like me, I wanted to be super-successful but I was being limited by my teachers. The internet was still in its infancy in those days, and I got the first computer when I was 17. Since that time, nine years passed until I discovered the magic of non-fiction books (biographies of successful people, general business books, self-help books) thanks to the internet and kindle.

In this article, I will focus strictly on how to get the most useful information from a business book and apply it to your own business. These principles and reading can be applied to other books as well. Over the years, I have developed a system that I have been using in my life and business that I decided to share in a booklet coming out on February 15th. It's called, How to get the most out of your business book.

Five steps to get the most out of your business book read:

1. Select the credible books that will help you the most.

I call the book credible if it has been written by a credible author, someone with the extensive experience in that field. For example, if you want to learn about Marketing pick up the book The 22 immutable laws of marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Another credible book would be Screw it, let's do it by Richard Branson. You get my point. What you want is to gather the information from the most experienced individuals in the field of business.

2. Learn the skill of skimming pages.

I believe that in most of the books, 20 % or less of the content is the most valuable and conveys the main author’s message. You just need to find that 20 %. When I was starting to read, I read everything in every book (acknowledgments, preface, introduction, etc) then I learned that I don’t find any value in spending so much of my time doing this.

?What I do is when I pick up a credible business book, first I will start to read chapter names to get an insight into the structure of the book. Second, I will start reading the beginning (1-2 pages) of the chapter, then I will start skimming but still reading through, you may call this also a speed reading. When I get to the end of the chapter I will stop skimming and then finish that chapter (last 1-2 pages) in a normal read mode. One caveat, when I find something useful, a gem while skimming, I will stop and focus my attention on that part before continuing to skim again. My brain is engaged all the time when reading. I believe strongly that the brain is connecting the dots between each chapter.

3. Read with the pen in your hand.

Reading with the pen in your hand is a great technique signalizing to your brain that something is important and that needs to be memorized. If you haven’t tried this before, try it and see what happens.

Reading isn’t passive, it’s an active conversation with the book that you are reading.

The way you make active conversation with the book is through highlighting, making notes for yourself, etc. Engage with the book, take in the most important parts that resonate with you, like a sponge. Don’t worry about scribbling or making notes all over the book. That is another great way to repeat and learn over and over again.

4. Combine your most relevant highlighted notes and put them in one place.

When you finish the book then it’s time to combine all your highlighted notes and put them in one place or write them down in your journal. What I usually have is a journal or notebook especially for the notes from the books I am going to read. I write down all my highlighted words and sentences from the book that resonated with me, in my book journal.

Please avoid using digital tools to record your highlighted notes. You will learn and assimilate information much better when you put the pen to paper. According to the research that the university of Stavanger completed in 2011, when writing by hand, our brain receives feedback from our motor actions, together with the sensation of touching a pencil and paper. This kind of feedback is significantly different from those we receive when touching and typing on a keyboard.

After you have combined all your highlighted notes from the book, it’s time to put up an actionable real-world implementation plan. You will do that in Step 5.

5. Make a real-world implementation plan

This is the part where you take gems from the book and put them to real use in your life. Sometimes it will be just 1 or 2 things and other times there will be dozens of useful lessons. Here is my framework on how to make a real-world implementation plan. This framework I have been using for years and it works every time.

First, you need to know your goals, where are you heading with your business? What is the vision? Or maybe you haven’t even started your business, what would you like to accomplish? What would you like to experiment with? What would you like to improve?

Now that you have a goal, purpose, and know what you want to do, improve, or learn, it’s time to write a plan. Take a look at the highlighted words, sentences, notes from the book that you gathered into your notebook or journal Step 4.

In the same journal create a table titled My real-world implementation plan. Call your first column Action step where you will record your intentional action steps. Second column is your Why, your purpose why you are taking that action step. Last column is called Deadline to complete by. Here we want to put a date by when we will apply our action step from the first column. If there is no deadline or an urgency, we will easily fall down into inaction.

This was a short overview of my reading framework. For a complete content full of bonuses and additional tactics, pre-order your booklet by clicking the link below:

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PS: First twenty people who pre-order will get their booklet for free in their inbox.

Until next writing,

Damir Pervan, a Croatian entrepreneur and published author.