“I wish there was a way of extracting the information I want from all books so I could consume more”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Wow. I didn't realize that the sole purpose of reading was information extraction. Maybe the great novelists and non-fiction writers had it all wrong. Pamphlets would have saved us from wasting time on their long books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n TL;DR<\/a> (too long didn't read) is a favourite acronym of interwebbers. You might have seen it. I want to rename it TL;DR (too lazy didn't read).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here's another acronym:<\/p>\n\n\n\n AI – Artificial Insemination (of bullet points into our brains)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Here's an idea, let\u2019s get Artificial Intelligence bots to read books for us. They can then create book summaries and present short versions of people's hard work. Oh, an app already does this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As you might have guessed by now, this is not a guide to the best book summary app. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Blinkist book summary app<\/a> is huge right now. People love it because people have no time. The same people stuff their heads with surface-skimmed tidbits of information\u00a0they will forget quickly, rather than learn something. Want to learn something, I mean, really learn something? Skip this app. And skip Uptime, a competitor that basically turns books into a collection of tweets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n People who blog about Blinkist (they're called affiliates) and people will no imagination peddle the notion that reading is tedious. Fans of this “self-improvement app” write boring blog posts about why reading entire blog posts is a waste of time. Ironic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “You need book summaries!”, they claim. And there\u2019s an app for that\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Book summaries will not make you smarter or improve your life. Here's why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are two ways of learning (I'll use my ironical bullet-points to illustrate):<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apps like Blinkist offer neither of these learning methods. So why use book summary apps?<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are two scenarios where you might want to memorize random quotes and messages from a book:<\/p>\n\n\n\n How cool we look on dates when we can spout meaningful ideas on life from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck<\/a> by Mark Manson. This is a great book, worthy of everyone's time but show-offs skim the book for things to impress people with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What about Seneca? The writings of this 2000-year-old darling of modern-day Silicon Valley bros offer us bite-sized quotable statements about life. Do questions is do we even need to read Seneca\u00a0when Blinkist can give us the quotes? Those 10 or 20 lines to live by are all we need for a better life. And to impress other people with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This obsession with removing the fluff is just adding to the distracted-mind problem we modern humans battle with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Entrepreneurs now boast about how short their advice books are<\/strong>. Yep. They do this. Like a reverse dick-measuring content. The guy with the shortest one wins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let's take this concept of ever shorter books even further. The fact is that you don\u2019t even need business books to get the best bit of advice. Here, let me help. You just need this one nugget of information:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Create products that people want to buy!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s it. An entire encyclopaedia of books in one sentence. But clever people need context. Soundbites don't cut it. Like the motivational quotes on Twitter and Facebook (a practice I\u2019d love to see filtered out by bots – there\u2019s a business idea for you), words out of context mean nothing. Bashing us over the head with quotes won\u2019t help. It's just more noise and less signal<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The human brain craves context<\/strong> to make sense of things. Memory experts use mnemonics as a way of remembering things. Good business books might appear to be filled with fluff but this “padding” is there to give context. If we strip out the context we\u2019re left with a heading and some main points. Skimming books leaves us with a Buzzfeed-level of understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some time ago, a guy called Harold Pollack wrote a few rules about finance on an index card<\/a>. Pollack then posted a photo of the index card online. It went viral (meaning a lot of people shared it). Major news site picked up on the index card and journalists admired its simplicity. That\u2019s a great example of a business book (on finance) condensed to the size of a Facebook post. Oh yeah, the fluff was well and truly removed on that topic. The next thing Pollack did was to write a book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What? A real book? Isn't that going backwards?<\/p>\n\n\n\nBlinkist: Surface-Skimming Technology For Busy People<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Now, give me your money!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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