I like reading and listening– especially if the authors talk about new and different ideas. But I admire people who study rather than read. I realise that the authors write some things (insights or facts) in their books that the reader might take casually but a student wouldn’t. BTW, I don’t read fiction. So I am talking about business related non-fiction.
When I read Peter Drucker’s statement that business is about finding out what the customer wants and giving it to them I didn’t really get what he was saying. Only after several years did I understand what that really meant. When we find out what the customer says they want, we interpret those statements in a way that is convenient or conducive to what we are doing in our business then we put our own bias on those statements. We then end up developing and delivering something they were not expecting. Makes sense?
Business is about understanding truly what they want and giving it to them. There are tools to understand what they say they want. But if we don’t delve deeper in to the statement ‘understand what they want and give it to them’, we will never look for the tools and keep carrying on with our own interpretation.
Guy Kawasaki once suggested ‘Eat like a bird and poop like an elephant’. Maybe he had different point in mind when he wrote that in his book but I think the statement it is relevant here. In this information era, a new information product or training comes out every other month claiming of a new and improved way to succeed in your business (whatever type of business you are running – whether it is an online business or an offline business). We open our wallets and buy them to read. As we keep reading (or listening) to the new or re-hashed ideas, we never get time to implement them. Wouldn’t it be better to implement what a small proportion what we read? Wouldn’t it be better to study, maybe one or two ideas, and implement them?
Pooping like an elephant is implementing a lot of ideas (small and big) we study, testing them, tweaking them. That is the way to make a difference.
You agree it is better to study than read?
