Another way to determine whether you should buy a book is by looking at the number of books that it has sold, especially if it has come out in a paperback version. Any book that gets into a paperback version has usually sold well in hard cover. This is not a guarantee of quality, but it is a helpful guide.
9. Build Your Own Library
We are all creatures of habit. When we are young, we often develop the habit of going to the library, checking out books, reading them and then returning them to the library. There are many adults who continue to do this, even when it makes no sense at all.
Your time is your most precious resource. If you earn $50,000 per year, divided by approximately 2000 working hours, this means that your time is worth $25 per hour. You must think continually in terms of your “hourly rate” in the way you use your time. Some people will spend two or three hours going to a library, browsing, checking out a book, taking it home and then returning it to the library. It is much cheaper and more efficient for you 248
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to buy the book, take it home and have it at your fingertips for the rest of your life.
When you read, get over the idea you were taught in school that you must not leave any marks in your textbook. Instead, use a red or blue pen to underline and mark the key ideas and concepts that you come across. Turn down the corners. Write exclamation points and stars in the margins.
Personalize everything you read so that you can quickly go back and access the most important ideas.
Many people will read a book, making notes throughout of the important points. They will then go back through the book with a Dictaphone and dictate all the key ideas. They will have a secretary type up this synopsis of the book which they will then 3-hole punch and put in a binder. From then on, you can go to that binder and quickly review all the key points that you discovered in your reading. Each time you review these points, you will have new ideas and insights on how to apply them to your work or business.
10. Join Book Clubs
Join the book clubs in your field. Get on their lists. You will often receive solicitations in the mail offering you three or four free books when you join new book club. Take them up on their offer. Each month after that, you will receive recommendations for what they consider to be the top books published in that area in the last few months.
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Book clubs tend to be very selective in the books they choose and recommend, because they depend entirely for their income on selecting books that you will buy and keep. They read an enormous number of books before they select the ones that they recommend to you.
11. Read and Listen to Book Summaries
Subscribe to Sound View Executive Book Summaries. This company selects and condenses three or four top business books each month and sends them to you in a six to eight page condensation that enables you to quickly get the best ideas of the book in just a few minutes. With book condensations, you can pick out the most practical and usable ideas that the book contains, and then determine whether or not you would like to read the entire book.
You can also get book summaries on audiocassette or CD each month. You can listen to them in your car as you drive to and from work. Each time you do, you will pick up some of the most current ideas on effective business operations.
12. Open Internet Accounts and Use Them
Open an account with Barnes&Noble.com and Amazon.com. Put in your address and credit card number. Whenever you hear or read about a book that maybe of interest to you, pull it up on the Internet and read a brief synopsis of the book. If you like what you read, you can order the book and it will be delivered to you in 3-4 days. This is a great saving in time from 250
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visiting the library or driving around to the bookstores. You can accomplish the same results that might take you an hour or more in one or two minutes.
13. Take a Speed Reading Course
One of the most valuable things you do in your adult life is to take a speed-reading course to learn how to accelerate the amount that you read and retain. Most speed-reading courses are based on similar principles. You can actually triple your reading speed in the first lesson or class. These courses are given in every city and are usually advertised on the Internet or in the yellow pages.
With a good speed-reading course, you will quickly learn how to read at 1000 words per minute with about 80% retention. You will learn how to plow through large quantities of magazines, newspapers and books. You will learn how to get through more reading material in two hours per day than many people get through in a week.
14. Learn How to Read Efficiently
Learn how to read a non-fiction book efficiently. Perhaps the best method I have found is called the “OPIR Method.” The four letters of OPIR stand for Overview-Preview-Inview-Review. Here’s how it works.
Start With an Overview
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When you pick up a book for the first time, instead of opening it up and reading it from front to back the way you normally would, you instead begin with an “overview.” Read the front and back covers. Look at the flaps inside each cover, which contain important information about the book and the author. Read the table of contents from beginning to end, looking for a subject or heading that is of special interest to you at the moment. In the OPIR method, you then flip through the pages quickly, one at a time, to get a feel for the way the book is structured.
You look at each chapter heading and the way the pages are laid out. Read the subtitles and look at the charts, graphs or visual elements. Get a sense for how the material flows in the book. This entire overview will not take you more than about 10 minutes. As a result, you can now read “on purpose.”
You can establish a clear purpose for reading the book by deciding in advance what it is that you want to get out of the book.
Preview the Book Before You Read It
In the second part, the “preview,” you flip through the pages one at a time to get an even better feeling for the layout and content of the book. During the preview phase, stop and read an occasional sentence or paragraph, usually the first sentence or paragraph of each section. If there are questions or summaries at the end of the each chapter, read them through carefully to get a better sense for what you will learn when you start to read the book seriously.
Read the Book in Depth
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In the “Inview” stage, you sit down and read quickly from page to page. The overview and the preview will have aroused your interest and triggered your curiosity. In the inview phase, you will be looking to fill in the gaps in your knowledge. You will actually be engaging in what is called “anticipatory learning.” This is where you are searching for information and ideas that are contained in the text.
During the inview, use your hand to move down the page just below the sentence you are reading. Read with a colored pen in your hand and make notes whenever you come across an idea that you find interesting or important. Turn down the corners of pages if the material is important and you want to come back to it at a later time.
Review What You Have Read
In the final phase, the “review,” you go back through the book again, from cover to cover, page by page, and reread the parts that you noted that are most important to you. Remember that repetition is the mother of learning. It usually takes between three and six exposures to a new piece of information before you internalize it and transfer it into your long-term memory.
This four-step method, Overview-Preview-Inview-Review (OPIR) will reduce the amount of time it takes you to read a 300-page book from 6-8
hours to 2-3 hours. The more often you practice this method, the faster and more efficient you will become and the more you will actually remember and retain from each book. Using the OPIR method repeatedly will enable 253
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you to read 2-3 books per week. If you then follow through and then dictate the key notes from each book, you will develop a personalized library of notes that will enable you to reread the key points of any book months or years later, in just a few minutes.