By Patt Flynn
Not much in this one. When people make fun of self help books for being money making schemes light on actual help, they describe books like this. A large portion of the book involves the author patting himself on the back for his many successes. Hooray. There is some common sense good advice within it, but it could’ve been a listicle rather than a book.
- Take action. This is a worthy reminder for researcher personalities. Reading endlessly has diminishing returns. To get actual results and progress, you need to move forward with imperfect information. That’s really the whole concept of Lean Learning. It’s not wrong, but it’s also not a real revelation.
- Flynn compared productivity to a boat race. The crew needs to maintain a sustainable pace, or else they’ll burn themselves out too early and lose. However, there are times when they will row as hard as they can for shorter intervals. Learning/productivity/life can follow the same pattern. You can’t go all-out, all the time. However, sometimes you need to suck it up and power through. Fair enough.
- Focus matters. You can’t grow in all directions at once. Not to a helpful degree. You are better off committing to a specific improvement, until it is achieved, and then moving on to another specific goal. Multitasking doesn’t work in the immediate sense (what are you doing this hour) and it doesn’t really work in longer time windows either (what are you trying to achieve this month).
Those aren’t bad reminders. I knew and agreed with those points before reading the book. It doesn’t hurt to be reminded. I’m glad the audiobook was short. I listened to the whole thing at 2x in about one day.