A Very Short Path to...Depth

This will be short and sweet because it's about...short. What is the shortest path, the quickest way to get smarter in a part of smart often ignored.

It's wonderful, the desire of all of LinkedIn to approach and even attain expert knowledge. It's all the rage. Great, but away from the expert how do you strive towards a breadth, a depth of knowledge? How to go deeper in a time-crushed expert-only world? Here is one approach and even better, it is dirt cheap and borders on the effortless.

I read at all times, many of the Very Short Introductions of the Oxford University Press.

Here are the key steps to ingrain this habit and get on a fast six-month or one-year track to boost your depth quotient.

At $6 dollars the Kindle and less than $10 the throw-it-in-the knapsack paperback, they are beyond affordable. The single-best reason to go VSI is the great Oxford University Press secret. These 120- to less-than 200-page briefs are written by academic heavyweights (see below, where I walk through one VSI). 

One tact is to have one VSI going at a time and read it cover to cover. Nothing wrong with this approach. You can plow through a VSI, JFK-to-LHR or three LGAs-to-DCA or, a week of subway commutes. Note, audible VSIs are available.

I find far, far more valuable the idea of having three or even five VSIs going on the Kindle platform at any given time.

So take the uproar of say two years ago over socialism. In the distant past I, and you, wandered through the philosophy of socialism. We forgot it near-all. How to get an update and gain immediate depth on this or any other topic?

The paperback is 192 pages, and they are smaller-sized pages. Bonus round! The font is fossil-eyes friendly. The author is Michael Newman. He is not some slug slapping together a slap-dash effort out of the Mass. Ave WeWork in the People's Republic of Cambridge. He is Michael Newman, Emeritus Professor at London Metropolitan University. He is the real-Socialist deal. He has written on Harold Laski and is giving a seminar at King's College, London in a few days. You get his definitive primer on socialism for $6 on your Kindle.

Depth: It's Out There Somewhere

First, read every page. The VSIs are so terse, the power-skim isn't necessary. Read every page. Mark up the paperback with pencil or better, highlight the Kindle version using the four colors say, pink for key sentences, blue for geography, orange for names and yellow for new words and phrases. (It's assumed your Kindle is linked to a first-rate dictionary. I use the Webster's.) In a given VSI, read the Wikipedia on say two geographies and three unfamiliar names.

One example of the depth found: Newman's Socialism traces a broad path including the important french connection of Etienne Cabet. Further reading is British...Hobsbawm & Dahrendorf. How do I know this? Because, I footnoted near-every page. Depth to return to.

The real beauty of all this is the 600+ titles give you immediate scope-and-scale to read say, Socialism, Iran, and Nineteenth-Century Britain at the same time. Even better, if Mohamed El-Erian waxes philosophical about game theory, you can brush up with Game Theory.

That's it. We all live and die striving for expert. Keep striving but, do not forget the broader view. 

The Very Short Introduction. Build depth.