The Human Goldfish

“What book are you reading right now?” was the question I was asked the other day, and not for the first time, I felt straightaway guilty.?

I stand amongst more literary colleagues, but I for one, am struggling to do more than just stay up to date and on top of stuff.?

But why ever wouldn’t we want to take time out and read??It’s not like I’ve always been like this; I used to have two or three novels on the go at once and regularly ploughed through long articles on a whole broad range of topics well beyond the world of business or politics.?

The sales pitch for books couldn’t be stronger, after all they transport us to different worlds far removed from our own; worlds that can help us to think bigger and let imaginations run riot. As a colleague said to me the other evening, “when we read a book we don’t come back the same person.”

So why am I not reading like I used to? Some read in the tube on the way to work. Some read before bed. Some read at weekends. As my weekly iPhone screen-time summary shows, my record on this topic isn’t good.?

Am I really alone in finding life to be time-poor and way too distracting?

Going by the recent study by Microsoft, I’m not alone. It revealed that the attention span for the average adult has reduced 25% in five years and now extends to only eight seconds, less than the eponymous goldfish.?

If right, it means the chances of you reading the full length of this article without zoning out are low!

Increasingly we feel the need for the stuff we read to get to the point, for facts and counter-arguments to be clear and sharp, and for conclusions to be quickly drawn before the next text, tweet or app notification pings.?

So why write about this in an article focused on wealth management??

Quite simply because it’s of huge relevance and huge concern to our industry. If we disconnect the way we communicate from the way our clients take in the information they need, we’ll have failed in one of our most important goals.?

Every day our team at Julius Baer has to summarise complex economic and markets research and intra-day analysis into succinct and to-the-point analysis and insight, and then tailor that for the way in which each client will understand.?

And it’s hard to do.?

As Winston Churchill once said, “If you want me to speak for two minutes, it will take me three weeks of preparation. If you want me to speak for thirty minutes, it will take me a week to prepare. If you want me to speak for an hour, I am ready now.”??

We rarely have weeks to prepare and to make concise and yet our job is precisely that: to make the complex simple and to make the simple snappy.?

We are going to need to go to the advanced school of brevity if we’re to keep pace with an increasingly time-poor and tech-distracted client base.??

A study done by the Nielsen Norman Group showed that people rarely read the material they look at. On average people actually read only 20% of text, and almost never more than 28%.?

That creates one heck of a challenge for wealth managers like us at Julius Baer. Simplifying and distilling at times a confusing world of knowledge and wisdom into no more than a handful of clear English bullet points without jargon is hard work!

But it’s a real skill that we have to master as an industry if we’re to keep the attention of our clients, whether in prose or podcast or post. Attention spans are, after all, unlikely to expand in our always-on, always-connected world.

All well and good but for all that, a bit of me feels slightly sad.

Are we at risk of losing the sometimes slow intellectual journey and the persuasion that comes from a steady flow of logic and reasoning that books contain?

Real depth of understanding and breadth of insight comes not from tweets but from taking time out; from reading slowly, broadly, and setting aside the quiet time to think.