Sunday, January 25, 2015

How my own war of the roses could threaten to make me smarter!





MY WIFE IS A  minimalist and I am a spreader and I am loosing the battle.

Let me explain.

My wife hates clutter A place for everything and everything in its place. You know the deal. Me? I start in one location and overtime spread.

In a bid for co-existence and harmony I really work hard to comply. But I am now down to one last piece of real estate in my home. My treasured book shelf in my study, which also is our shared office. "When are you going to get rid of that crap?" She regularly asks? Well I have told her I am going to bequest these hundred of books to my children and grand children. She laughs and responds  "what did they ever do to you to deserve that" Not funny! I think.

So to keep my spirit up and galvanise my determination to hold my ground I came with a goal. I have always looked to find the seed of equivalent benefit from a challenging situation. So my goal was to read every book in my bookshelves. Some 500 books and still counting.

I had been a lazy student in my youth. Preferring to play sport and participate in the social side of school. As I got older that changed and I became the eternal student continually looking to improve myself. It has become an obsession and reading books has been a growing passion. So my library is made up of personal development and biographies of the famous and the successful.

Ironically it was one of my heroes and great mentors, leadership guru Paul J Meyer said we should read less books. I was aghast when I heard this as it was totally at odds with my pursuit for greater knowledge. Until I realised what he in fact was saying. That we shouldn't rush from one book to the next without first understanding and  applying  the learnings before moving on to the next wiz bang concept. Everyone seemed to be looking for the quick fix.

Paul was a great advocate of repetition and developing habits to shape character.

So in concert with Paul pleas for us to understand and apply the learning from the reading
I intend to:

* read each book twice
* mark up each book for references so that I might review latter
* build relevant parts into my coaching curriculum
* create a PP and submit to Slide share
* do a workshop on the book to my peers, and finally write a blog post and share on my    LinkedIn profile.


Always up to a challenge I wonder if I have bitten off more that I can read.

In the meantime I would be interested as to how you seek out new knowledge, retain and apply this to your work and life.