We humans are social animals. We need to belong, love and be loved, we need to thrive, create and grow with other human beings. Long periods of isolation lead to nothing but depression, loneliness, poor self-image and other related mental issues.
If you want to be happy in life, you need a team of people with whom you work and create on meaningful projects, and where you feel that your contribution is respected, and you need a group of people in your personal life where you share love, affection and have fun together.
There are six key relationships in your life (spouse, family, friends, boss, coworkers and mentors) and the deeper and healthier these relationships are, the richer your life usually is. That’s why you need to choose and nurture relationships very carefully. People are the ones making your life on Earth heaven or hell.
Since we’re all different, for someone two good friends, a coworker and family are more than enough to feel socially satisfied, while others thrive only in interaction with many people. You need to know yourself very well and discover what works best for you in different periods of life. There is no wrong or right answer when it comes to designing your life.
Much like socializing is important, so is regular temporary (active) isolation. If you’re an introvert, temporary isolation is probably something that feels very natural to you. You need it to refill your energy and you have no problem blossoming when you’re alone with books, your thoughts or something else you love and doesn’t involve other people.
But even if you’re an extrovert, you can benefit from short-term isolation a lot. It may be a little bit harder to do it in the beginning, but once you see all the benefits, I’m sure you’ll have no problem sticking to it. Let’s look at the main benefits of temporary (active) isolation and how you can easily do it.
When you feel the urge to be alone, it’s already too late
The main problem with short-term social isolation is the following. When you feel that you need to isolate yourself, it’s usually already a little bit late. In the same way like thirst is a sign that you should have drunk water way before you got thirsty.
As you can easily forget to drink enough water throughout the day, so you can very easily loose the connection with yourself, without even being aware of it. You get a little bit too busy for a week or so and the connection with yourself gone.
Unfortunately, the majority of people live like zombies and have zero connection with their core self. Life is a very busy thing and so you can easily forget about yourself.
Regular isolation is the only way to keep the connection alive. Like you satisfy your thirst by drinking water, so you can only keep your core burning alive with regular active isolation during which you pay full attention to yourself.
Isolating yourself with the goal of devoting full attention to yourself is nothing but a habit. And as every habit, it needs a trigger and a reward to be performed. Potential rewards are colossal.
In addition to that, there is nobody there to bother you so you can create without any interruptions, and if you don’t feel like creating you can improve your competence level (with reading for example), get familiar with a new topic and much more. It all depends on your goal.
As for the trigger, there are three best triggers that can take you into active isolation:
Time trigger – you timebox time in your calendar for when and where you do active isolation.
Thought trigger – you get a thought that leads you into a rich internal world of thinking, analyzing, brainstorming and thus you completely lose your sense of time and your environment.
Location trigger – you have a specially dedicated place where you go work in solitude. I call it a place to escape life.
The time trigger is the most common one. You save a block of time in your calendar for active isolation. It can be time dedicated to planning, working on a meaningful project, reading or whatever.
You can be in your office or at home, it doesn’t matter. When the time comes, you close the door behind you and don’t want to be disturbed. The key is that you’re really alone and that you’re performing a mentally active task that’s connected to your core self.
As an interesting note, I’ve noticed that my time alone is not that quality and deep if there is another person in the room or in a room next to mine. I need to be really alone, knowing that there is nobody who can disturb me. So test if there is any difference for you if you actively isolate yourself when people are present in the room next to yours or when you’re really completely alone.
A thought trigger is when you get completely lost in your own world. I think you know exactly what I mean by that, but let me still give you an example. Here is what Maye Musk, Elon’s mother said about him: ‘
He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world. He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.’ Maye Musk (he = Elon)
You can get yourself isolated, even if you aren’t alone. But you need a vivid internal world and strong inner focus, to not get disturbed easily and to block all other stimuli.
The third thing that has the ability to lead you to active solitude is location – a place to escape. Many successful people have a place where they go alone in order to think, create and reconnect with their true core.
Sometimes they go to such a place based on a plan, a timeboxed time, in other cases spontaneously when they feel like it. They just drop everything and go to the place where they can pay full attention to themselves. A place like that can really do wonders for you.
The main reason for having a place specifically dedicated to active isolation is that you don’t want to run away from yourself and life with drugs, overworking, daydreaming and other addictions, you want to do the opposite.
You want to run towards life and your true self by closely examining who you truly are and what meaningful things you can do with your life. Active isolation is a tool exactly for that. And it’s also the perfect tool to create.
“My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. Creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones.” — Isaac Asimov
Always have a place to escape life and listen to your thoughts
Albert Einstein took long walks on the beach so he could listen to thoughts in his head. Nikola Tesla discovered very soon that being alone is the secret to invention. Pablo Picasso stated that without great solitude, no serious work is possible.
Many successful people had or have a place where they devote complete attention to their true self. Then they use their pure essence to create new masterpieces the world has never seen before.
Knowing that you have a place where you can always go to regroup, reconnect with yourself or analyze and create brings a special feeling of meaning and power into your life.
You know there is a place you can “escape” to, a place where you can be only with yourself and bring your true core to life. It’s a place that belongs only to you and you belong to that place. There are so many different options of how a location can be a trigger for active solitude.
You can go to your favorite coffee shop or restaurant where it feels like the perfect place to create
You can take long walks on the beach or in the forest to listen to your thoughts
There might be a place you rent for an extended weekend to have alone time
The road or, to be more exact, driving in a car can also be a great place to reflect
Another way to do active isolation is to travel alone
Or maybe you can have a creative corner where you sit when you need time for yourself
Options for where to do active isolation are endless. You can have several of them.
I have an office called the “man cave” where I work without any distractions. No phone, no email, no visitors.
I have no problem getting lost in my mind in a single second no matter where I am, thinking about the outline of my next article or a new idea I want to play with.
I climb mountains to completely lose myself and relax. I take almost daily long walks to listen to my thoughts.
Now I’m even thinking about having extended weekends only for myself. I’m just searching for the perfect place I could rent every quarter. I want to always be in the same place to anchor the location to active isolation.
In my case, I’m an interesting mixture of an introvert and an extrovert. I need the time alone to think and create, but I also have a strong urge to be connected with other people. I thrive in a funny mixture of solitude and teamwork. So I do both, strategically and planned.
Consistency is the key to not losing connection with yourself
Much like you have to drink water daily to stay healthy and avoid thirst, in the same way you need to take regular time in active isolation if you don’t want to lose the connection with yourself.
Consistency is the key to many things, and the connection with yourself is no exception. There are several patterns for assuring regularity:
Homework
Take an hour of power every day, existing in active solitude.
Turn one day of the weekend or at least a few hours to be completely with yourself.
Have a place where you go alone for several days in regular intervals, like every quarter.
Devote 6 – 12 months of your life at some point to be in monk mode and create like never before
Use all the options or a few of them to construct an active isolation pattern that works best for you.
If you’re a complete extrovert and being alone is something alien to you, you might be asking yourself what can you even do when you’re alone.
Here are only a few ideas for what to do in a place that’s devoted only to you (as you’ve probably figured out, I call it active isolation):
Think
Read
Reflect
Create
Write a journal
Plan
Analyze
It’s not easy, but it’s definitely worth it – here is why
For an introvert, it may be easy to be alone and recharge, reading a book or doing any similar activity. For many extroverts, it’s already hard to take time to be alone.
But for both types it’s usually extremely hard to be in active and creative isolation, if you aren’t a naturally born artist. At least at first. With time, it gets easier and when you realize how rich your internal world is, you become kind of addicted to it. You need it like you need the air to breathe.
You are here on this planet to grow, enjoy, connect and create. For the creating part, to really put your talents to work, I think there are two mayor approaches that work by far the best. Almost every great artist, engineer or thinker used these two approaches.
Testing thousands of ideas and creating in solitude, that’s what great minds master.
The first approach is to regularly create and create a lot, I mean really a lot. (1) You have to write down thousands of ideas, outlines, concepts and creative thoughts. You must have no problem with failure, with the fact that the majority of them are nothing but crappy ideas.
But in the flood of thousands and thousands of ideas, one of them is a very original and brilliant one from time to time. And that’s enough. Many times, you only need to be originally creative once.
(2) The second approach is to work and create in solitude as we’ve discussed. Active isolation gives a special edge to understanding yourself, being connected to yourself and expressing yourself in the most genius and unique ways possible.
Both concepts are hard to follow and implement, but they’re the one thing that distinguishes great minds from the rest of the world. You also have a great mind and now you know how to put it to use.
In some way, living a good quality life is not rocket science. With time, good decisions lead you to a good life and poor decisions lead you to a crappy, stressful low quality life. The better decisions you make, big or small, the better off you are. Good decisions accumulate, and with time they bring great yields.
Examples of good decisions are saving money, not overeating, exercising a few times per day, investing into your knowledge, brainstorming ideas, finding and doing a job you love, and so on. Examples of bad decisions are smoking, drinking excessively, eating too much sugar, getting uncontrollably into debt, buying things you don’t need and staying in an abusive relationship, just to name a few.
On a logical level, it’s pretty simple to understand that but in real life, it’s quite hard to follow good smart decisions; simply because you weren’t programmed to make smart long-term decisions.
You were initially programmed for life in a jungle, which means instant gratification (life was short), laziness (energy needed to be saved), overeating (food was rare) and any kind of domination – material, physical, intellectual (the alpha male/female got it all).
That’s why it’s hard to make smart decisions.
The intellectual, conscious, creative and planning part of you has to override the animal instinct that ruled decision-making for millions of years in our ancestors. And it has to do it over and over again, it never stops.
That’s an extremely hard thing to do. It takes a lot of cognitive power and severe self-control, together with constant curbing of primal needs, and never letting the benefits of reinvesting into your tomorrow out of your sight.
Rare are the people who are mentally so strong that they can follow smart decisions in all different areas of life all the time. That’s why I wouldn’t count on self-discipline too much. In reality, counting solely on your self-discipline is not a superior life strategy.
Sooner or later, you kneel down in front of the laws of nature and genes. That’s why you have to be much smarter than relying on your self-discipline. You always have to be one step ahead of life.
Don’t use cognitive power for good decisions if you don’t have to
One way to be smarter than life is to automate good decisions. The idea behind this is pretty simple. No matter if a decision or a habit is hard or easy to follow, automate it if possible.
If you can’t completely automate it, semi-automate it. Make sure it takes zero cognitive effort, or almost zero, to do something smart. Take transaction costs all the way down, as low as possible. Let it happen automatically.
Make sure you don’t have to think about it, make sure that it takes zero discipline and that smart decisions just happen by themselves. Put good decisions on autopilot. You have to be a little bit creative, but let’s look at few examples of how you can do that.
Money
The easiest way to automate good decisions is with money management. That’s because nowadays, money is nothing but some numbers in an online app, and you can do all kinds of transactions and functions simply by using your computer.
Practical examples
Here are examples of good decisions you can automate:
Automate transactions to your savings account every time you get a paycheck.
Make sure you need to get an approval for all costs higher than a certain amount (from your spouse or CFO), especially if you like to overspend.
As an alternative, you may have a rule that you aren’t allowed to make any big purchases if you don’t sleep it over (for 14 days).
Don’t have a credit card with you, but only enough money to buy yourself lunch and a healthy snack.
That way, you don’t have to struggle with decision-making, good decisions are already made for you. Every week, money gets transferred to the savings account and you live with the rest. You can’t do impulse purchases, because you need approval or wait long enough for your emotions to stabilize. If you only have enough money for lunch with you, you can’t do small unnecessary purchases that sum up in high amounts of wasted money with time.
Here’s an article that gives a lot of detail about how to make good automatic money decisions. With money, you can really automate being smart. All other areas can be more or less only semi-automated, still following the basic rules of positive automation – meaning that something good happens with the least effort possible.
Health
You can (semi-)automate good decisions in all three areas of health – diet, exercise and lifestyle. Now let’s not pretend and exaggerate: doing one hour of exercise as part of your morning routine is extremely good for you, but it takes effort and years before the habit becomes such a strong part of you that we could call it automation.
Practical examples
Nevertheless, there are many small things you can do for your health that are pretty much semi-automated and easy to follow:
Subscribe to a weekly fresh delivery of organic vegetables and fruits to your home, and then put it in a visible place. You can also standardize the typical daily meals you like the most.
Eat a salad for one of your main meals. Don’t think about it, don’t decide about anything, for one of your main meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), just order or make yourself a salad. All the effort it takes is for you to say: “And one salad please” to the waiter. You can do the same with one piece of fruit.
Have a strict deadline for the hour after which you don’t eat anymore. “You don’t have to decide about anything, you simply don’t eat anymore. (after 6pm, for example). It’s how intermittent fasting works and it can really do wonders for your health. You can do the same by not eating dessert at all. If you don’t eat dessert at all, there is nothing to decide about.
Every night, prepare your sports bag and take it with you. Just put it in your car. Now, the training bag won’t force you to go to the gym, but it will put additional pressure on you. It’s simple and easy to pack your exercising clothes every night and take them with you. You can automate that. Let’s hope that the rest will follow.
You can automate for all electronic devices to go into sleep mode at a certain hour, let’s say 9pm. Then you can take a book, read for a while and go to bed early.
There are many decisions regarding your health that you can automate. Yes, they are called healthy habits, but the idea is to take transaction costs as low as possible, so that it takes almost zero effort to follow. At the end of the day, the best habits are the ones with which you can follow through in the long term.
Relationships
An important part of quality relationships is putting in all the necessary effort. You have to water a relationship like a flower, otherwise it starts to wither.
You water relationships with attention, love, affection, understanding, care, good communication, by providing value, mutual support and with many other contributions on a physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, material and social level.
It’s not easy to be consistent in relationships and make sure that your investment levels stay the same all the time or even get stronger. You get drained, you have bad days, and your affection may fluctuate.
That’s why you should try to automate some good relationship decisions. Not to make the relationship mechanic, but to protect yourself from your own weaknesses.
Practical examples
Examples of automating good decisions:
If you get upset with something, you tell it to the other person immediately and start looking for a solution.
You never go to sleep on bad terms with your spouse. You always work things out before going to bed. You don’t even think about whether to talk or not, you don’t hold a grudge, you automatically solve the problem before going to sleep.
Every day when your spouse comes from work, you put away all electronic devices, you stop doing whatever you were doing (no matter how important it is), and you talk for a while about your day – fully present.
You book a date with your spouse every first Wednesday of the month. It’s in the calendar, it’s automated, there is no rescheduling and you go someplace nice, just the two of you, without any distractions. In the same way, you can automate lunch with your best friend in regular terms.
You send a creative love message every day to your spouse. Every day, one message, with no exceptions. Get a reminder or alarm saying it’s time to get romantic and creative.
If you get a message from somebody, you reply immediately in an active constructive way.
There are many ways how you can automate good gestures in a relationship. Yes, you have to make sure things don’t get mechanic and that you really do it because you want to. It’s good to keep a creative component or some kind of effort, even if you automate part of a decision. And at the end of a day, if you don’t want to do it, you can stop at any moment. You have to stay agile.
But the idea is to free yourself from cognitive burden and not to rely solely on your self-discipline. Even more, you don’t want to get indulgent and sloppy in relationships with time, when you settle. You want to invest more and more in quality relationships not less, and automation and semi-automaton can help you with that.
Examples of IFTTT Recipes for automating good decisions
Endless options for smart decision automation
Much like we’ve seen for the core life areas (health, wealth and relationships), you can use the same principle in other life areas. There are numerous ways how you can automate and semi-automate good decisions, not only to make sure that you’re going in the right direction and to save your cognitive capabilities for other life matters, but also to simplify your life and make more room for being relaxed and happy.
Practical examples
Here are some additional examples for automating good decisions:
Read every day before you go to sleep, and make sure you don’t fall asleep if you haven’t read at least one page of a book.
Have a few standard outfits for different occasions and put them in a queue. You pick the one that’s waiting first in the queue. Or you can wear the same outfit every day, like Mark Zuckerberg does.
You check email 30 minutes before your work ends and you reply or delete all emails in these 30 minutes. You don’t check your email otherwise.
You simply don’t do meetings. When something needs to be communicated, you use your phone or go for lunch with that person, and when something needs to be solved, you organize a workshop with a strict deadline and a goal to be met.
Every 14 days, you have a planning sprint for the next two weeks. It’s in your calendar, it’s fixed and nothing can get between you and strategic planning of your future.
Put a web nanny to stop you after an hour on social networks and make sure your computer won’t even start before you watch an online course for 30 minutes.
Automatically get the things you regularly buy in the same intervals from Amazon Subscribe
Your plan to automate good decisions
The easiest way to automate parts of your life (smart decisions) is to start with money. Log into your bank account and simply set a weekly transaction to a savings account on the day you receive a paycheck.
Then make sure you don’t spend that money, and watch your savings account grow. Doing automation with money is the easiest because it’s purely based on technology. Starting to automate good money decisions should motivate you to do automation in other areas of life as well.
In fact, you can easily do 100 % automation with all other tech stuff. There are two very popular web apps called IFTTT and Zappier that can automate many of your computer tasks and save you tons of time. With one app or the other you can automate things like:
Save any email attachment I receive to Dropbox or Google Drive
If I star an email, remind me to take care of it
When I’m in a meeting for more than 60 minutes, schedule a phone call to myself and run
Log my working hours automatically in a Google Spreadsheet
Back up Facebook photos I’m tagged in to Dropbox
IFFT has something called individual automation functions recipes. If you check their site, you can find hundreds of them. I really like that name. An automation recipe. It’s time for you to get creative and cook up a few good automation recipes, besides tech and money stuff.
I encourage you to take a piece of paper and outline a few automation recipes you can do in your life. Start with the easy things and ideas you can do immediately. You can use the IF – THEN model and sketch out your ideas for automation.
Homework
Make your fist recipe, and then add new recipes as quickly as you feel comfortable following through with them. The lower the transaction costs and the more you can really automate, the less willpower and discipline you need. If complete automation is possible, it takes almost zero effort to introduce a new habit in life. Look for such opportunities. Be smart and automate good decisions.
I have to be completely honest. I still own a mobile phone. I just don’t use it in the traditional way anymore. I turned my mobile phone into a superior portable educational device. It’s my omni-university that enables me to learn wherever I go; and to create whenever I want. But what’s really important is this…
I deleted all distraction apps from my mobile phone. I deleted the email app, all social networking apps, instant messaging services and basically all other things that are nothing but constant distractions (you can probably see the pattern that they’re all communication apps). I even changed my phone number and only a few people have it (my mom and my girlfriend).
I did it as an experiment. I’m a big fan of technology, but also an equally big fan of technology detox and regularly taking time away from screens. Too much of anything becomes toxic, and today you can find screens shining some kind of a distraction at you on every single step you take.
I was very careful with mobile distractions before. I made sure not to use too many IM apps, to have all notifications turned off, I scheduled daily do not disturb hours, especially when working in the flow, I tried to turn my social networks into an interesting news flow and I made sure I had educational apps on the first screen.
Every month or so, I also did a revision of which apps I was using and which ones I wasn’t, reorganized my screen, cleared the digital clutter, and always tried to make sure that I use the mobile phone to my advantage, not as a burden preventing me from thinking and creating in peace. After every such reorganization, there were fewer and fewer apps that presented distractions.
But now I decided to take everything a step further. As an experiment. Like Louis C.K. did.
What happens when you live without a mobile phone?
The first few days after I deleted all communication apps, I was very confused. I felt kind of lost. I unlocked my phone, but there were no notifications, no communication apps to open, nothing to kill 2 minutes on just to see what’s happening, no one to connect to.
The urge to reinstall the apps was huge. For the first few days, I hated the experience. I felt like an addict without his shot. Even though it wasn’t easy, I decided to persist with my decision, as crazy as it sounds.
And after the first few days, on the fourth day, to be more exact, something magical happened. I got more relaxed. Some of the tension was driven away. A very subjective assessment would be that I got 20 % more relaxed, which is a lot.
After a few days without my phone, I suddenly started to feel much more relaxed.
There was no need anymore for me to look at the phone every 3 minutes and check if there is anything new. Unlock the phone, open apps one by one – mail, Facebook, LinkedIn etc., spend a few minutes on every app, lock the phone. A few minutes passed, repeat the loop, unlock the phone, open the first app, and so on. Like a robot.
Suddenly I didn’t care about the notifications anymore. Suddenly there was no need to start the unproductive activity loop around 300 times per day. Yes, 300 times per day is the number of times that the average smartphone owner looks at the screen.
By ditching the phone, a big part of the brain fog also went away. I could feel more connected to myself. I gained the ability to think better and more clearly. Creating in the flow, knowing that nothing could really disturb me, and that there was no need to check for new notifications led me to a whole new level of focus and creativity.
It’s magic, I tell you. It’s the real life. It’s the good life. You probably heard the expression that no one on their deathbed ever said “I wish I’d spent more time at the office”. I think this has become completely outdated. Now the saying should be:
No one on their deathbed ever said, “I wish I’d spent more time checking notifications on my mobile phone”.
Feeling connected to other people
The primal human need is to feel connected to others. Ironically, the most distracting apps are communication apps. You have a need to feel connected to people, but on the other hand, apps that enable you to be connected with people from all over the world are the biggest distraction.
Well, to be honest, many times these apps are also real work. Email can be real work. Slack can be real work. To get anything done, you have to communicate with other people, from teammates to all the stakeholders. No one can succeed alone on this planet and most things you’re trying to achieve in life include dealing with people. No piece of art can thrive without a proper network.
You must be in touch with other people to be happy. And you must be in touch with other people to get work done. And technology is a great tool helping you with that. That’s a fact. But the problem is that only with self-discipline, it’s hard to set limits for when and how to use technology.
Imagine yourself sitting in an office, working on something important. You know you do the most productive work without any distractions. You may even tolerate a distraction or two doing a few hours of work, either someone calling you or stopping by in your office.
Now imagine someone stopping by in your office every 5 minutes. You’d go nuts. But that’s what technology does in your life. As a leverage and accelerator, it multiplies the number of distractions. There are no real-life limits in the technology world. And because you have to feel connected to other people, it’s addictive as hell, and there is no way you can manage all this only with self-discipline.
Being one step ahead of technology
You definitely want to use technology to your advantage. And you definitely want to live real life, not a fake digital life full of distractions. You surely want to be connected with people, professionally and personally, but you also want the time to think, reflect and create. You want to be and feel alive.
As mentioned, it’s almost impossible to achieve that with self-discipline. The drug is just too addictive. Thus the only sound solution is to have a set strategy and system that enable you to enjoy the best from both worlds – real life and digital life.
I need email to get work done. I need the IM app to chat with people from all over the world. I need social networks to distribute my content and feel the pulse of the world. But I don’t need to check my email every 5 minutes. I don’t need 10 different mobile apps blinking notifications all the time.
To set a proper system and have the best from both worlds, you have to know yourself well, especially when you can stay disciplined and what are your weak spots. You can’t just be reactive and hope for the best.
You have to be proactive, you have to be one step ahead of technology. You have to constantly improve the system, and experiment with new ideas, setups and ways to organize yourself. Kaizen (philosophy of constant improvements) is endless. There is always a way you can improve your productivity, happiness and how you use technology.
Here is how I am one step ahead of technology
My current system is that I check email and social networks only twice a day (on my desktop computer). Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I reply to every email with the shortest response possible. I also follow all other top email productivity tips. That’s just enough so I don’t lose the world’s pulse, can use all the benefits of technology, and don’t get distracted too many times.
I turned my smartphone into an educational device. I read books on it, blog posts, listen to audio books and podcasts, use Lynda and different MOOC apps like Udemy. I also have a few apps for creating and writing and managing my blog. It’s my real productivity and educational device.
I know that I have the advantage of being in monk mode, so I can experiment a lot and I don’t need that much communication with people. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t improve the way you use technology and set a superior management system and some strict limits to also live the real life, not just the digital one.
That’s what’s best in life at the end of the day. Listening to yourself, your thoughts and your needs. Creating in the flow. Meeting with someone you want to deepen the relationship with and actually talk without looking at your mobile phone a dozen times. All these things make you alive, and stop you from being a zombie.
And technology is only a tool, leverage to help you with that. It’s up to you if you’re the master of technology or technology is mastering you. When on your deathbed, you definitely won’t regret not hitting one more like. But you might regret not putting down your phone and living the real life.
Life experiment ideas
Here is some simple homework I suggest you do. Spend one weekend completely without a mobile phone or any other screen. And if you’re quite a nervous and anxious person, consider if you could live without a smartphone. What do you say to being 20%+ more calm every day?
Reading is a very important part of personal growth and continuous improvement. If you are a (non-fiction) bookworm like me, you know there are two big problems when deciding what to read.
(1)There is never enough time to read everything you want and (2) most of the content out there is crappy. Sooner or later, ideas start repeating themselves in books.
Choosing a book that has zero value for you in terms of new ideas is a big cost, not so much financial as time-wise.
Executive summaries are one of the ways to get general ideas what a book is all about and see if it’s worth reading. I tried many different executive summary services and I wasn’t satisfied with any until I stumbled upon Blinkist.
Since I am really enthusiastic about the app, I decided to write a review. Maybe I’ll spread my enthusiasm enough for you to at least try it for yourself.
What is Blinkist?
Blinkist is a web and mobile app that offers more than 1,000 summaries of non-fiction books. They cover different non-fiction categories, from science, politics and economics to personal growth, investing, different business topics, health and biographies. They add new books summaries to their library daily, adding up to around 40 new summaries per month.
They add new books summaries to their library daily, adding up to around 40 new summaries per month.
They offer a free plan, which enables you to read one pre-selected book per day, the plus plan (49,99€), which enables you access to all the books and offline reading, and the premium plan (79,99€), which enables you to additionally listen to books with audio, sync highlights to Evernote and send your reads to Kindle.
Free
Plus
Premium
One pre-selected book per day
Library browsing
Access to all summaries
Highlights
Offline reading
Audio summaries
Sync highlights to Evernote
Send summaries to Kindle
Since I’m a big fan of audio-learning and Kindle, and I also use Evernote as my digital brains, I’m a premium Blinkist member. So here is the Blinkist Review based on my personal experience.
Designed for learning on the go
I use Blinkist only as a mobile app when I’m on the go. When I am at home and have enough time to read, I read books on Kindle. But when I’m on the move, Blinkist comes into play.
Using Blinkist on the move is one of the greatest strengths of the app.
Not only are book summaries very well written, Blinkist also uses a special outline. It takes you around 15 minutes to read a book summary, but what’s so special is that every summary is divided into 8 – 12 key book insights.
That’s where the name of the app comes from. Book summaries are split into “blinks”, short insights. It takes you 1 – 2 minutes to read one insight from a selected book, and then you swipe to the next one. You swipe around ten times and you read the whole summary. If you’re interrupted in the middle, you just end with your insight and come back to the next one when you have time.
You swipe around ten times and you read the whole summary. If you’re interrupted in the middle, you just end with your insight and come back to the next one when you have time.
When you are on the go, it’s guaranteed that you’ll be interrupted in the next 15 minutes. A phone call, your waiting ends, you meet someone or whatever. But it rarely happens in the next 1 -2 minutes. It’s like having small insight blocks you can read all the way until the next interruption.
But it rarely happens in the next 1 -2 minutes. It’s like having small insight blocks you can read all the way until the next interruption.
When you’re interrupted, you surely can’t get lost. I read or listen to Blinkist summaries when:
Waiting
Need new ideas to warm up my brain
Cooking, showering, taking a walk (or I listen to Audible books as an alternative)
Traveling
Who knows where else
Whenever I have at least two minutes of time to kill, I open Blinkist and read at least one insight from a book summary. Sometimes I read only one 2-minute book insight, sometimes I read the whole summary if my idle time is longer, and sometimes I even read several summaries.
Sometimes I read only one 2-minute book insight, sometimes I read the whole summary if my idle time is longer, and sometimes I even read several summaries.
By the way, Lynda.com employs a similar concept in their educational courses, but they have video instead of text, and that kind of format is something that really works for me.
Here are some of the last book summaries I read:
Contagious, Jonah Breger
Breakfast with Socrates, Robert Rowland Smith
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
Why is Sex Fun, Jared Dimond
Smartcuts, Shane Snow
The Social Animal, David Brooks
Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
The One Thing, Gary Keller
The 4 Disciplines of Execution, Chris McChensney, and others
The Introverted Leader, Jennifer Kahnweiler
There is one more interesting thing that I’ve noticed. I usually read like 20 book summaries in a few weeks and then I take a few weeks off.
After a short break, I start reading summaries again. I’m not sure why, but my brain probably needs to get some rest from too many different concentrated ideas.
Grasping new ideas fast
You probably know that you get out only what you put in, right? It’s no different in this case. Don’t expect that you’ll get the same value when reading a summary as you would when reading the whole book. Actually, you get a lot less because you invest so little (15 minutes rather than a few hours).
What I discovered is that I remember little when reading a book summary. Not only from Blinkist but whichever summaries.
For example, if you ask me about the content of the summaries of the books I listed above and their general ideas, I’d be quite lost. On the other hand, I have no problem explaining the main ideas from the last ten books I read.
So you must have realistic expectations. Reading a summary is not the same as reading a book.
The purpose of reading a summary is not to read it instead of a book, but to more easily decide whether you want to buy and read the whole book or to grasp the main idea of the book for whatever reason. After reading a Blinkist summary, there are three potential things I always do:
Buy and read the book, if I like it.
Send highlights from a summary to Evernote and review them from time to time – if there was a cool idea in the book, but I still have other better priorities on my reading list. Reading only about new ideas can definitely open your mind and help you to widen your thinking horizon.
I just forget about it – if there were no new ideas presented to me or if there wasn’t anything I found particularly interesting, I move on.
My all-time favorite device.
Much easier to decide if you should buy a book
Besides exploring many different ideas fast, the important purpose of reading a Blinkist book summary is to decide if you’re going to buy a book or not. By reading a summary, you can quickly grasp if there are any new and interesting ideas for you and if reading the whole book is worth your while.
I bought a few books on Amazon Kindle after being impressed with their ideas in the Blinkist summary.
If you need additional info about the book before buying it, every summary in Blinkist is also accompanied by a short author biography, what the book is all about, who should read it, the iBook rating and publishing year. In that way, you have all the information you need before buying a book.
Well, to be honest, reading the Blinkist book summary (if it’s available) is the first thing I do, but it’s not the only thing. I also check Goodreads and Amazon ratings and reviews.
It does take a little bit more time to go through all the different reviews and to read the summaries, but it’s definitely better than buying and wasting time on a book you don’t like.
Refreshing knowledge from books you already read
I can surely name the last ten books I read and what they were all about. But the more time that passes after reading a book, the faster I forget the main ideas. I always remember the name of a book I read, but after a few years, you can quickly forget what the book was all about.
You can make mind maps after reading a book, to refresh your memory, but it takes quite a lot of time to do that. I only do mind maps for the best of the best. But what you can do to refresh your memory is to read a Blinkist summary long after you already read a book.
That’s also a reason why I find Blinkist very useful. It goes something along the lines of: oh right, I read that book ten years ago, what was it about again? And I read the summary to refresh my memory. It definitely feels good to do that.
Source: Blinkist
Blinkist of my Blinkist Review
Is it worth it to invest around 6,5 EUR per month into Blinkist? Definitely. That’s two coffees per month. We were all born as curious beings, not coffee consumers.
If you read at least a summary or two, you get much more out of a Blinkist subscription per month than you do from coffee or any other bad habit.
We were all born as curious beings, not coffee consumers. Thus be curious and read.
Here is the Blinkist review summary, the final judgment with all the pluses and minuses:
Pluses:
Outstanding user experience (easy to use, nice design,)
The summary outline structure with blinks is really good, especially on the go
Huge selection of books
Quality book summaries
Easy to review your favorite highlights
It gives you a good idea of whether you should buy a book
You can read a summary to refresh the main ideas of the books you already read
Syncing highlights to Evernote (premium membership)
Audiobook summaries available (premium membership)
Audiobooks can be pre-downloaded (premium membership)
Different voices for audiobooks for more variety (premium membership)
Minuses:
It’s not the same as reading a book
It can get boring reading only summaries, especially in the same categories. Somehow all the ideas start to sound the same. You have to combine it with other types of reading materials.
There is no monthly payment available
My final rating is 4.8/5 stars. The Blinkist app absolutely deserves 5 stars, but since I’m quite a critical person, the only app to receive 5 stars will be the one that will enable me to download knowledge straight into my brain, like in the Matrix. :)
There’s one more cool thing about the German company Blinks Labs that’s behind the Blinkist app. They use the Holacracy management system.
The main idea of Holacracy is to eliminate all hierarchies and job titles in the organization, and instead introduce only a set of organizational rules to enable every employee to make quick, smart decisions and get their jobs done. It must be cool to work for the company behind the app.
Try the app and you’ll see how well it fits you to make the best use of the reading time you have available throughout the day.
You can try the free Blinkist plan or the Plus/Premium plan with a 30 Day money-back guarantee, no questions asked. Start your free trial here:
Blinkist links in this post are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and join Blinkist, I will receive 7 days free access to the app. I strictly promote only the things and the services that I also regularly use and like.
This year, I will have a year completely without a schedule. I got this time management idea from the famous Venture Capital investor Marc Andreessen.
He got the idea from Arnold Schwarzenegger or, to be more exact, from a book called A Perfect Mess, which explains how having no fixed schedule contributed to Arnold’s success.
It’s one of the quite radical and messy productivity techniques. But it can give you great results.
The main simple idea is that you don’t commit to any meetings, appointments or activities at any set time or date in the future. The idea is pretty crazy and radical, probably impossible for most standard and structured jobs, but if you can afford it, it can dramatically raise your productivity.
Having no schedule and no calendar enables you to work on the most important things or on the thing that interests you the most every single day. Even more importantly, it enables you to maximize your work in the flow or in the zone, the most productive godlike state, where you just learn, create and enjoy life.
You can also listen to your gut instinct about priorities every day. You can easily make themed days with no interruptions, and spend the whole day learning, writing, coding, designing, researching, brainstorming or working on a project you like. If you also turn off your phone and close your e-mail client, you can really have a whole day without any interruptions and distractions.
When people call you to set a meeting, you have a few options after explaining that you don’t keep a fixed schedule:
Sorry, I won’t be able to join a meeting, simply not interested
Sorry, I won’t be able to join a meeting, is there any other way I can contribute
Do we even need to have a meeting (or can you just let me know now what it’s about)
Let’s meet right now (if it’s really important)
Call me the same day you plan the meeting and I’ll let you know if I’m available
Call me 30 minutes before the meeting and I’ll let you know if I can join
As I mentioned, few people in the world can afford such a time management technique and be completely without a schedule or a calendar. Even if you’re the boss and make decisions for how to spend time with stakeholders and your team, it’s close to impossible to pull off such a thing, if not even harder than for other non-executive jobs.
You have to be in a really unique position with a unique kind of job to pull that off. Since I’ll be in monk mode the whole next year, I can definitely do such a thing. That will be one of my experiments.
Well, to stay open-minded, you can also have a less radical approach with this technique. You can use the “no-schedule philosophy” only to better focus yourself and to more easily say no to commitments and appointments that aren’t the best use of your time.
On the other hand, you can still keep a schedule of really “must do” appointments. But to be as productive as possible, you try to group all of the appointments on the same day. That way, you maybe can have 3 or 4 days without a schedule and 1 or 2 working days full of appointments.
But to be as productive as possible, you try to group all of the appointments on the same day. That way, you maybe can have 3 or 4 days without a schedule and 1 or 2 working days full of appointments. Here is an example how you can organize your schedule if you can’t afford to have no schedule at all.
Here is an example how your schedule should be organized for maximum performance.
I will maximize this technique in 2016 and see the results. My hypothesis for the experience is, to quote Marc Andreessen, “there is nothing more liberating than looking at your calendar and seeing nothing but free time for weeks ahead to work on the most important things in whatever order you want”.
I’ll let you know if that’s also valid for me.
Homework
Homework
There are definitely improvements you can do in your schedule to be more productive and to keep more completely free blocks of time for maximizing creating, delivering and capturing value. Here’s what you should do:
Open your calendar and analyze the past few months.
Look at every meeting and analyze whether the meetings were really necessary, if you had to be present, if the work could have been done in a more efficient way etc.
Brainstorm on how you could group your meetings to have as much free time in your calendar as possible.
Timebox a no-interruption day(s) where you forbid yourself to schedule any task or appointment.
The bottom line is, try to clean up your schedule as much as possible. If you’re super lucky, you may schedule a period in your life completely without a schedule. If not, try to group appointments on the same days in order to have as many free days as possible to create in the flow. If that doesn’t work, try to keep at least one working day as a no-interruptions day.
But really, stay brutal and precise when cleaning up your calendar.
Infostructure is a system and a process of how you consume, manage and share information. In the creative society, a quality infostructure has become as important as a quality infrastructure. What you feed your mind with matters a lot. A quality (good) infostructure will help you become more creative, competent and resourceful. A bad infostructure, on the other hand, is the biggest time waster ever, killing your creative potential, making you into an obedient consumer and a zombie – something that you definitely don’t want to become, but may happen if you don’t put any effort into building an outstanding infostructure for yourself.
What you will learn
In this post, you will learn about the following key things:
The difference between infrastructure and infostructure
Why infostructure is as important as infostructure in the creative economy
Why infostructure is like fire when it comes to technological advancement; nothing more than a tool with which you can either cook yourself dinner or burn yourself badly, depending on how you use it
How infostructure can lower the quality of your life by killing your creative potential, turning you into a consumer and a zombie
How bad infostructure can become the biggest time waster ever and how to avoid that
How you can build yourself an outstanding infostructure that will help you be incredibly more resourceful, creative and competent
How I built my own outstanding infostructure and how you can do it as well
Infrastructure vs. Infostructure
You probably know what infrastructure is and even if you don’t, you definitely use it all the time. Infrastructure are the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society, be it a country, state, city, county or even enterprise. The main parts of an infrastructure are buildings, roads, power supplies, utilities, sanitary systems, and so on.
There’s definitely a big correlation between well-developed infrastructure and efficient productivity. Without sufficient infrastructure, the society is bogged down with higher operating costs, structural production problems and everyday frustrations, consequently suffering from a big competitive disadvantage, especially on the global markets. There’s no doubt that better infrastructure means a better quality of life, higher productivity and efficiency, and generally a better environment for business.
I’m sure you pay a lot of attention to where you live, how you organize your home and your office, what car you drive, how far away your favorite facilities, like shops, are etc. You definitely want to have electricity, water and other housing supplies all the time.
With all the loans, mortgages, rents, housing and transportation costs, you probably spend an extensive proportion of your paycheck for the infrastructure you use (your private and public part of the infrastructure). It’s logical that you do, because a better infrastructure brings a better quality of life, it helps you create more value for the markets, and so on. With a bigger paycheck, people often first invest into better infrastructure.
But we live in the creative economy and post-information age, where is not only infrastructure that’s important. In developed countries, adequate infrastructure is more or less taken care of. So infrastructure isn’t as important as it used to be for competitive advantage and success. You can see that very well in the business world. The best businesses don’t compete with better facilities, plants, equipment and manufacturing machines anymore. The best businesses today compete with creativity, innovation, intellectual property and new business models.
You’ve probably heard that Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.
If the competitive advantage of a business can fall on the CEO’s toes, it’s not real competitive advantage in the creative economy.
In developed countries, you can rent infrastructure when you need it and as much of it as you need it. In some cases, all you need is a laptop and a good connection to the internet, and you can compete on the global markets. Don’t get me wrong. Infrastructure is very important. It’s hard to be creative if your toilet isn’t working, if it takes you hours to get to the office or if you’re freezing in your apartment. But in today’s world, creativity, innovation and information are as important, if not even more important, than outstanding infrastructure if you want to compete, create, deliver and capture (make money) as much value as possible.
What do I really mean by personal infostructure?
If in the contemporary creative economy, innovation and information are as important for creating value as infrastructure is, one of your key competitive advantages is a system and a process of how you consume, manage and share information. That’s your personal infostructure.
Infostructure is a system and a process of how you consume, manage and share information.
The main idea of a good infostructure is that you acquire as much knowledge as possible as quickly as possible. Knowledge is nevertheless an important part of your competence level. Knowledge means knowing a certain field. It means you have a complete set of information that you imprinted into your consciousness. And you can do things with it – you can create and deliver value. A good infostructure also helps you continuously acquire knowledge. It’s called life-long learning based on an informal education.
Even more. Good infostructure definitely contributes to your creativity. Creativity is nothing but the ability to perceive the world in new ways, find hidden patterns, make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and generate solutions. With more information and knowledge, you can more easily connect the dots never before connected . The more right information and knowledge you have (depth, complexity, interdisciplinary …), the more creative and “aha” moments you can have in your life. Because you see connections others can’t see. Because they lack the same combination of knowledge.
Knowledge is power, there’s no doubt about it (actually, applying knowledge is power, but more about that later). Good infostructure means more knowledge, and more knowledge means more power. That’s why you should pay a lot of attention to your personal infostructure if you want to be successful in life. Good infrastructure as part of the outer assets (money, status etc.) is simply not enough anymore. You also need lots of inner assets (competences), and a superior infostructure can help you with that.
But there’s one big trick regarding infostructure. The society (with market demand) has already built one for you; much like it has also built most of the infrastructure. With one big difference, which is that the purpose of the public infostructure is to program you into an obedient and stupid consumer. That’s why I call it bad infostructure, the one you’re pushed into by default.
Bad personal infostructure
As I mentioned, bad infostructure is unfortunately the one that society has already built for you. More than 99 % of people probably use this default infostructure regularly, which consequently heavily contributes towards to living unhappy, average or even zombie lives. If you do what other people do, you get what other people have; and that’s usually an average life. And you don’t want that. So what is the default bad infostructure that society has built for you? Well, there are a few core media used in the default infostructure that are programing you into an obedient consumer. In addition to that, they more or less help you only with mental masturbation and are big time wasters. Here they are:
Television and radio
TV is nothing but a “multimedia ad player”, since you more or less only watch ads that are programming you into a good consumer. The content is usually no better than ads. Reality shows, watching other people play sports, watching people who live the life you probably want to live, be it the leading superheroes in a movie, saving the world, or the main actors themselves having fun filming and making millions. You’re obviously on the wrong side of the screen.
Here’s another trap. Maybe you haven’t turned on the TV for decades and you can tell yourself that you don’t watch it. But on the other hand, you still watch movies and TV shows, just not on the TV. We know video on demand now, we have Netflix, iTunes etc. Or you can even go to the movie theater too often. So you don’t have to sit in front of the TV to watch “TV”.
It’s pretty much the same with channels like Discovery, History and other “educational” channels or even MTV. They play nothing but semi-reality or reality TV shows. You either watch other people travelling, cooking, exploring or doing other amazing things or, on the other hand, you watch them get humiliated in front of a few judges and thousands of people so you can feel a little bit better about yourself. No thanks.
Don’t get me wrong. A good movie or an episode of a TV show can be very relaxing from time to time. And we all need some relaxation; we aren’t robots. But spending hours and hours in front of the TV watching commercials is definitely not the life you want to live. Wake up.
Radio is not much different from TV. You listen to thousands and thousands of commercials and stupid talk shows. You maybe hear a song you like once a day, after listening to hours of useless content. On the main radio stations, you can listen to the same bad news every half hour (it’s like it’s really programing you to be negative), and most interviews and discussions have zero valuable content and are only there to entertain the masses. I don’t remember the last time I heard something useful on the radio. And if you want to listen to music, you have iTunes and other music streaming services.
News (print, online) and most magazines
The daily news gives you a sense of connection with the world as well as a sense of urgency and importance. You feel like you’re in the flow of global happenings. In addition to that, we’re all prone to drama in life, from the evolutionary point of view. Drama and negative information raise your adrenalin levels and make you feel more alive. They make you feel like you’re running from a virtual tiger. Something important is happening, you better pay attention. Not. Most news pieces are negative because your mind loves negative information. You don’t want to fill your mind with negative information. It will only bring the negative into your life.
You can’t live a positive life, with a negative mind. You can’t have positive mind if you constantly consume negative information.
Additionally, news is history. It already happened. You have zero influence on that. And everybody reads it, so it brings zero competitive advantage into your life. Even if you spend hours and hours catching up on tech news, startup news or whatever, the value added of that kind of information is really low. If you want to co-create the future, you need to empty your mind, make some creative free time, read some heavily useful stuff or level up your skills and focus on your goals. Only your goals, nothing else. No drama.
The good thing (somehow, I guess) is that you don’t have to worry at all: even if you unsubscribe yourself from all the news, the most “important” (the most negative or shocking) news will definitely reach you sooner or later. Because everybody shares it, 99 % of people are little beacons of negative information.
Social networks
Social networks have become an important part of our lives. People spend hours and hours on social networks. For most people, it’s extremely hard to escape from being on the most popular social networks. This means at least Facebook and Twitter, but I can probably also add Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and many others to the list. It won’t get any better in the future. There will be even more websites fighting for your time and attention.
Now ask yourself honestly, will hours and hours of looking at pictures of what your friends and acquaintances are doing really help you progress in life? Definitely not. And to be realistic, Facebook and other social networks aren’t even close to showing the real lives that people are living. People are only posting beautiful moments, the few peaks they get in their lives. Behind these beautiful moments, every human being must face challenges, disappointments, struggles and other burdens.
At the end of the day, looking at the good moments of your Facebook friends makes you feel like you’re the only weirdo who doesn’t enjoy life to the full. Not a perception you want to program your mind with. And a big distraction from your own goals.
Pub debates
An important source of information for everyone are also their friends. That’s why social networks are so popular. Because people love to “stalk” other people and they’re so interested in what other people are thinking or doing. The same mental masturbation effect often also happens in real life, especially in pubs, coffee shops and similar locations. People love talking about politics, big world problems and negative events, and we can also add gossiping, criticizing, whining and complaining to the list.
A debate among a group of friends is rarely about brainstorming new ideas, challenging beliefs, pushing each other to the next level, looking for positives in life, and so on. I see that only among really successful people who sit at the same table, without any bozos present.People you spend time with are an extremely important source of your information and therefore also an important source of your motivation and creativity. You can’t live a positive life with a negative mind. In the same way, you can’t live a positive life being surrounded by negative people and participating in stupid pub debates.
Numerous trashy internet sites
Like every technology, internet has brought a lot of good, but also a few bad things into our lives. Just to mention a few good ones: internet has enabled us higher productivity, faster access to quality information, new ways of communication, and so on. The bad, on the other hand, is especially the fact that internet also gave everyone very easy access to shitty content and shitty information. With a single click. People are spending hours and hours on the internet browsing stupid internet sites.
From watching porn, arguing on forums, posting hateful comments and reading tabloids to watching “funny” vines, browsing through thousands of social network statuses, and so on. Well, at the end of the day, most people consume on the internet what they used to consume only with TV, daily news, magazines, gaming consoles and pub debates. Now with the internet, everything is intensified and accelerated.
You simply don’t want to have that kind of an infostructure in your life. Much like you want your toilet to work in your home, have nice roads without holes and bumps when you drive to your job, like you want lights in your office when it gets dark and a nice working car, why wouldn’t you want to get the same from the infostructure that feeds your mind and consequently also defines your quality of life, happiness level, competence level and potential?
It doesn’t make any sense to fight for outstanding infrastructure and not pay any attention to your infostructure.
Outstanding personal infostructure
Now we know what the bad default infostructure that society has built for you looks like and how it influences your life. Something that 99 % of people use and something that’s very hard to avoid in everyday life. Why? Because people like it (demand) and everybody profits from you using the default bad infostructure. Producers, advertising companies, media houses, even your country and your neighbors (so they don’t have to be envious), everybody profits. Except you.
Therefore, you have to put an enormous amount of energy, will and self-discipline into changing the default infostructure to a better one and regularly using it. The good news is that people have also built and created the good part of the infostructure, available to you with one click. Unfortunately, the masses just don’t use it as much as they use the mainstream media, so it takes a little bit more effort to surround yourself with the right content. That’s the beauty of today’s world: you have choices and you have the power to decide what you’ll consume. Fast food or quality stuff.
To be fair, there are temptations every hour of every day, fighting for your time, attention and money, trying to make you to go back to the default bad infostructure. But you have to be strong. You have to make the right choices most of the time (let’s say 95 %). You can never completely run away from a bad infostructure (there’s always a movie or a TV show you really can’t miss). But you can definitely build yourself an outstanding system for consuming and managing information that will help you achieve your goals and become the best version of yourself.
Here’s how your infrastructure should look like:
Books and carefully selected blogs and magazines
By far the best text source of knowledge and information are still books. You should read at least one book per month. Even better if you read one book per week. Some people read one book per day. You can take a speed-reading course and join a “one book per day” club. I should do that. An average person spends hours in front of the TV every day. Imagine if all that time were spent on reading top books.
I guarantee that if you read a quality book per day, then you will definitely become a lean, mean, creative knowledge machine in a year. And it never takes a year to get obsessed with reading. In a few months of regular reading habits, you’ll automatically start reading a book every time someone in the family turns on the TV, simply because you’ll see and experience all the benefits of reading.
What about other reading material? Well, the general rule is that you acquire a lot more useful knowledge by reading a quality book than by reading dozens of blog posts. Nevertheless, some blogs are pure gold (like this one :). You should find those rare ones and follow them. The same goes for magazines. You can find magazines of really high quality in some industries and for some topics, while for others not so much.
Always follow the rule to go for the best (knowledge) and forget the rest.
Before you buy a book and start reading it, check the reviews and the table of contents. Make sure the book is really something that will help you advance in life. Maybe you can read a summary of the book and then decide. The idea is that by reading a book, you “download” an upgraded software version of a specific topic to your brain. You must get creative ideas and learn new and better ways of doing things in life. And then do them. Apply them. Only reading will probably only bring you better language skills.
Audiobooks and carefully selected podcasts
We all have very busy schedules. Consequently, it’s often hard to find the time to sit down and read in peace. Well, if you really want it, you can make it. Anyhow, audiobooks are also a good way to accelerate your learning. You can listen to audiobooks when you drive, wait in queues or take a walk. You can simply buy and download audiobooks to your smart phone, and listen to them when the opportunity pops up. There are more and more audiobooks available, no matter the topic you want to listen to and get educated about.
Much like the comparison of books and blogs, the same goes for podcasts compared to audiobooks. There are only a few podcasts that are really good and useful. The reason for that is probably the fact that most podcasts are free. And as we said, because people love to consume useless information (demand), other people (producers) are producing tons of useless content (because as a producer, you have to listen to the markets). Therefore, you have to put in the effort and break through all the bad content in order to find the best one.
MOOCs and educational videos
Massive online open courses have become an extremely important source of learning for successful people. The good news is that you can find many quality courses, even from the best universities like Harvard, MIT and the best worldwide experts from many industries and life areas. You can follow the selected material at your own pace, you’re usually connected online with a group of peers who try to acquire the same knowledge as you, and so on. In short, it’s a great way to learn from the best.
The bad news is that the majority of people who subscribe to MOOCs never really take and finish the course. They only subscribe and participate in a lecture or two at the most. Some research shows that only around 2 % finish the courses they subscribe to. Well, to be honest, it’s not easy to finish an online course. It takes effort, self-discipline, motivation, there’s no teacher to motivate you etc. It’s much easier to turn on the TV and watch a reality show than to listen to an open course. But those 2 % are the ones who do advance in life while other people stagnate. It’s what separates successful people from average ones. You have to decide for yourself. The trick is that the hard road becomes easy with time and the easy road becomes hard.
Besides MOOCs, you can find many motivating and educational videos online. When you have only 20 minutes to do something useful or when you’re waiting at the doctors, you can plug in your earphones and watch a talk online that will help you with your goals and progress in life. There’s so much useful content online, you just have to put in the effort to find it and avoid all the crap.
Seminars, lectures and carefully selected conferences
An important part of your infostructure should also be seminars, lectures and a few carefully selected conferences that you visit as an individual as well as for business purposes (you should only work for a company that’s prepared to invest into your knowledge). Sometimes even advancing in formal education makes sense. The main problem with previously mentioned MOOCs is that you can get bored easily, especially if you’re not an introvert. Being in a group of people with the same goal and with dates and times set in advance in the real, not virtual, life helps a lot with motivation and self-discipline. And you can make new business and personal connections more easily.
This is why you should make offline seminars and lectures an important part of your infostructure, especially if you encounter problems with self-discipline behind a computer. Conferences can also be useful sometimes, but more or less for motivational purposes, networking and having fun. If you go to too many conferences, you often start wasting your precious time. Here’s why.
A mastermind group and a mentor
The most important part of your infostructure should be your mastermind group and your mentor(s). Your mastermind group are all the people you ask for advice and go for important information from your industry, about life, and so on.
Your mastermind group are your trusted coworkers, hopefully your boss, your ambitious and educated friends as well as the best lawyers, doctors and consultants you can still afford. People that help you grow, progress and advance in life.
Part of your infostructure system should also be your personal mentor. You should always have a personal mentor. Someone who pushes you, helps you to focus, does introductions to help you expand your professional network and directs you to the right information resources. Instead of gossiping in the pub and complaining about life, brainstorming about your next move in life with the right mentor could change your life forever.
Group discussions (online and offline)
Besides all the hateful comments on the internet and useless forum arguments, there’s also a positive side to group discussions. You can find many useful forums and communities online and offline. They should be an important part of your infostructure.
We love to belong and being part of a community enhances your desire and discipline to learn and acquire new knowledge. Therefore, online forums and offline meet-ups can be a great way to learn and to meet new people with the same interests as you. Again, you have to very carefully select where to join and where to invest your energy. If the quality of information starts to decline, you shouldn’t have any emotional problems finding new better groups.
Other resources
There are, of course, many extremely useful internet sites, eBooks and other resources you can find online (and offline) with only a few clicks. If you have high enough standards for what kind of content to consume, you’ll be fine. Just remember that you become what you consume. So go for the best and forget the rest.
The process of consuming information
The sources (specific media) where you go get information and how you get it (type of media) is a system you set as part of your infostructure. As already mentioned, even if you don’t build your own system consciously, your environment (family, society etc.) has built a system for you. The other part of the equation is when, how often and for how long you consume information as well as how you manage what you’ve read. It’s called the process, and the purpose of the process is to help you with self-discipline and to stay away from the default bad infostructure.
Here are the general recommendations for the process (and also system) you should set for yourself for acquiring and managing knowledge:
Go for the best (knowledge), forget the rest. Carefully chose what you consume. Help yourself with reviews, summaries etc. before you really bite into anything. Sometimes the best knowledge is a best-seller book, other times a blog post you find after hours of browsing.
Especially consume information that you can apply to your life and then apply it. At the end of the day, knowledge is not power. Applying knowledge is. When reading material, you should get new creative ideas or ideas for how to do things differently.
If possible, do a mind map or structure the new acquired knowledge in some other way after reading specific material. Connect the new acquired knowledge with what you already know. Write down the best new ideas from the material and try to come up with your own new ideas.
If you start reading something and you figure out it has no value for you (nothing new), stop reading it. It sounds funny but for most of people, it’s not an easy thing to do. We have the natural psychological tendency to finish what we start. For example, you rarely leave a theater, even if the movie sucks. Don’t do that. If the material sucks, move on. Don’t move on because a page loads for a second longer than you expected, but because of the bad quality.
Don’t read the material you already know. People have a tendency to read the stuff they already know over and over again. Because it’s easier. Don’t do that. The exception is if you’re refreshing your knowledge or revising material.
Read materials from very different areas you’re interested in and try to combine the knowledge in new ways. That’s called creativity. Don’t consume material only from one topic or industry. Be a curious human.
Try to structure the most important knowledge you have in your own presentations, blog posts, lectures etc. Teaching others is a great way to reinforce and structure the knowledge you possess.
Consume more difficult subjects when you’re well rested and lighter material when you’re already tired. You have to push yourself, but don’t push yourself over the limit. An important part of acquiring knowledge is that you enjoy it.
Read something positive and motivational the first thing when you wake up.
Don’t go to sleep if you haven’t read at least one page that day.
Read for at least one hour per day.
Read at least one book per month.
Take at least one day per month only to upgrade your competences. Mark a no-interruptions day in your calendar and focus just on learning.
Go to one educational seminar or do one MOOC at least once every six months.
Go to one motivational conference at least once a year, especially for motivational purposes.
A good way to learn is while you earn. Your work should always be slightly more demanding than your skills, so you have to learn while you work. Also make sure to work at a company that’s prepared to invest in your knowledge, if you aren’t your own boss.
Limit mental masturbation (consuming useless content, social networking etc.) to 5 hours per week at the most.
Sharing is caring. Share and spread good information. People desperately need it.
Well, reading can also mean watching, listening or participating in a group discussion.
Sharing information
An important part of infostructure is also sharing information, not only consuming it. The first rule is that you should produce only quality content. The world is already polluted enough with shitty content. So no hateful comments, no gossiping and talking about reality shows.
You should become a human beacon of positive and quality information and knowledge.
The second rule is that sharing is caring. If it’s not exactly a trade secret, you should share quality information with people. There’s this karma rule regarding knowledge. The more knowledge you share, the more knowledge you get. But also don’t have any constraints to charge for your knowledge.
You should be aware that in the information age, you share information and content all the time, with every move you make behind your computer and, of course, every time you open your mouth. Every e‑mail, every social media update, every blog comment and content recommendation is part of your infostructure. Much like you should be very careful about the content you consume, so you should carefully watch what you share
At the end of the day, what comes out of your mouth is more or less determined by what goes into your mind.
Practical example
My personal infostructure
Now let’s get on the practical level. Let’s look at my own personal infostructure, the system of how I get information and how I handle it. First of all, I follow the asset-light living philosophy, so I have everything digitalized and own no physical books, magazines, CDs or any other material (except an exercise book for language learning). An important part of my infostructure are also my digital brains.
I buy books on Amazon. I have a Kindle eReader and a Kindle app on my smartphone, tablet and PC. I try to read at least one book per week. Books are my primary source of acquiring new knowledge. The only magazine I read is the Harvard Business Review.
Before I buy a book, I read the summary. I use Blinkist for book summaries and, from the bottom of my heart, I can say that it’s a really awesome app. If I like the summary, I buy and read the book. Next to that, I try to read at least one book summary per day. I read books/summaries at every opportunity I have. When I wake up, before I go to sleep, when I wait in lines, when I have a few minutes to waste, I open the Kindle app or Blinkist and I start reading.
My favorite apps
I use Feedly as a RSS app for the few blogs I’m subscribed to. I used to be subscribed to more than 100 blogs but I felt overloaded. Now I’m subscribed only to a few really good blogs from different niches (startups, internet marketing, personal development, productivity …). To be honest, I often run out of time to read the blog posts and I don’t put pressure on myself to read all the blog posts. I have no problem with having many unread blog posts as long as I read books on a daily basis. I used to be a big fan of reading apps, like Flipboard, etc., but now they’re more or less no different from reading the daily news. So again, I go back to books.
I use Audible for audiobooks. I listen to audiobooks when I walk, wait in a queue and sometimes when I’m driving (if I’m well rested). I also listen to audiobooks when I’m doing the dishes and other chores. I don’t really listen to podcasts, except to Tai Lopez sometimes (or similar authors).
MOOCs are an important part of my infostructure. I regularly buy courses on Udemy. I’m subscribed to Lynda, Threehouse and Tutsplus, especially now when I’m leveling up my IT competences. As a source of motivational talks, I watch TED Talks from time to time.
I don’t watch TV at all. I don’t listen to the radio. I don’t read the daily news. I don’t participate in useless debates. And I don’t visit useless internet sites. I do watch TV shows from time to time, but with an upper limit of 3 hours per week (except when I’m ill and can’t do anything else than stare at either a TV screen or a wall). I’ve turned my social networks into a source of quality content. I do visit 9gag from time to time. That’s my weak point, I guess. When in any kind of dilemma, my philosophy is to go back to quality books. An even more important part of my philosophy is to apply the acquired knowledge and experience it for myself.
