Here are five strategies to consider that we think will make this book a more powerful part of your transition to leadership. The more of these ideas you apply to this book (and any other books you 20
h ow t o g e t t h e m o s t f r o m t h i s b o o k 21 will read in your personal and professional development activities), the better.
Read with a Purpose
Any speed-reading or reading acceleration program will teach you to prescan a book before beginning it. Although the techniques may vary, the basic concept is to look over the book, read the table of contents, and scan the chapters, subheads, and sidebars before beginning to read. The strategy is to give you a sense of the book and its purpose, messages, and layout before you begin.
These strategies will help speed up your reading, and they also help you answer this most important question: What do I want to get from this book?
Spend a few minutes after your initial scan to think about your goals and fondest wishes for the book. If you have a journal (which we highly recommend), write down the key questions you want answers to or what you want to learn. Specifically write down the top three to five questions you have as a new leader. With this list in hand, you can focus your attention on the items that are of the most immediate concern to you as you read the book.
Books can surprise you with knowledge or ideas you didn’t expect (and we hope that happens here), but having a clear purpose at the start, rather than just sitting back and waiting for the big ‘‘aha,’’ will help you maximize what you can glean from a book.
Read with a Pen
In school you probably read with a highlighter to highlight key passages you thought might be on a test. While this advice may seem like a ‘‘back to school’’ comment, it really isn’t. To get the most from your reading, you may want to highlight ideas that you can use. Highlight not for a test, as you did as a student, but to capture the things that will make a difference for you. Although a highlighter is great to focus on our words, we suggest that you use a pen or pencil to write personal notes as well. Lose the belief that you can’t write in a book. Litter these margins with questions, thoughts, and connections. If you use a journal or a notepad, you can make your notes or expand on the ideas there.
Most important, remember that your notes should be about actions you can take in connection with your purpose for reading this book.
Read Through the Filter of Your Goals
Even with a great prescan, you don’t know exactly what is in the book or what it will teach you. So as you read, keep thinking about questions such as
❍ How can I use this?
❍ How does this relate to my goals?
❍ What is the big message for me here?
Asking questions like this as you read allows you to synthesize what we are thinking for your purposes, rather than just accepting or letting our words bathe over your brain. When you read through the filter of your goals, you begin to actively use the book for your purposes.
Read to Translate
As you read, look for the action steps. We hope the Now Steps will help you with this activity. This is a very helpful component of the book, but it is still incomplete. We don’t know your situation or goals perfectly, and so it is your responsibility to determine exactly what you can do with the ideas. Reading to translate is about determining what actions you will take as a result of what you have read.
These four ideas are important strategies, and although they will help you improve the value you get from this book, it is the final item that will make the real difference.
Transform Your Ideas into Action
This is the logical extension of the last point but with an important difference. If you want the book to make a difference, you aren’t done when you read the last page. Your most important task has just begun!
Take the notes and ideas you wrote in the margins and rewrite them in a journal, notebook, or computer file. This rewriting and review process is important to help you lock in the knowledge you gained from the book. This step is about more than knowledge; it is about action. As you are taking your key learning points from the book and putting them down in your own words, also create the short list of actions you want to take.
h ow t o g e t t h e m o s t f r o m t h i s b o o k 23 Here is where the first step, ‘‘Read with a Purpose,’’ is important.
We hope you gain many great ideas from this book. Your job now, in terms of taking action, is to prioritize the best, most important, and most valuable actions you can take to move you closer to accomplishing your goals.
Yes, you may get many other cool suggestions, and perhaps one or more of them warrant your attention. But you must start in relation to your goals, because otherwise you will get overwhelmed by the number and quality of the ideas and do. . .nothing.
This book can’t change your life and make you a better leader. Only you can do that by applying what
you learn.
If all of these ideas seem like work, it’s because they are. The bottom line is that if you want to have a book be the impetus for change, you must do more than read it. You must use it as a tool to fuel your personal growth and development, and this means that you must engage in an active process of learning. Of course, maybe you ‘‘just want to read,’’ and this is fine. Just don’t expect that type of reading to lead to significant change, growth, or development.