One of the things I always try to instill in those I mentor and talk with about work is the power of reading. There is a great post over at The Optimized Life called The Power of Reading. I think my favorite quote is:
In today’s society, lifelong learning is a necessity.
Self-education has become one of the greatest factors of
success. Those who are most successful in today’s world are
those who know how to find the information they need and
apply it to their situation. Today’s ever-expanding technology
requires us to be lifelong learners. Otherwise, our jobs and our
paychecks will both become outdated.
However, today’s most successful people are not necessarily
those who have the highest ACT scores, but rather those
who have learned how to learn. Passion and curiosity always
surpass IQ. This passion is engrained through truly great teachers
who challenge their students to think deeply.
Filed under: currently reading, mentoring, personal improvement
August 20, 2006 • 8:10 am
… not indigestion! In discussions with my coach/mentor he mentioned that he thought I read incredibly broadly and wondered aloud where I find the time. The answer is simple: I trained myself to read quickly and “shallowly”, and I use public transportation (DC Metro) so I often get about an hour a day to catch up on my reading! The power of not reading too deeply (i.e: not evaluating every argument/hypothesis/conjecture in detail) is that you can scan an entire subject area, then aggregate the best practices from it quickly. Here’s an example:
I am interested in database and there are free database magazines and several database aggregator/RSS web sites that I know of. I subscribe to all of those magazines: Oracle, Teradata, DB2, MYSQL, and add the aggregator sites to my RSS reader (Google homepage). I scan these publications quickly: I don’t care about obscure PL/SQL syntax, but I do care about an article title or neat trick to do with PL/SQL. I can then locate the detail if I need it, or pull out the common themes and best practices across all those technologies.
This allows me to ingest (find, read, process, “index”) information very quickly.
Filed under: consulting, currently reading, deano diagrams, mentoring, personal improvement
I just finished reading Many Unhappy Returns, by Charles Rossotti. Wow, what a read! This guy from AMS after 25 successful year in computer consulting goes to spend 5 years trying to turn around the IRS from the late 90's till 2002. It reads like a text book on how successful government change can occur. It strikes me that my current client is almost following the text, he either read it or learned a whole lot from it. It is a surprisingly easy and quick read with some deep insights into how/why things changed. Being in the field I desperately want to know exactly what Rossotti did to change things but of course a book that long would be longer than the tax code! I highly recommend the book to all those in the field of Federal consulting.
Spoiler warning!!! His fundamental tenets of successful change are … Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: currently reading, happenings
