Many companies have corporate digital libraries. But not all employees enjoy reading. That said, they recognize the importance of self-study. How to address the issue? Perhaps this article, based on the book Impossible as a Strategy, will clarify some things.
The Deal with the Author
Let’s start with an immutable fact: If you’re determined to learn, you need books. In this digital age, people often admit that they don’t read books anymore. Sometimes people read magazine articles, often blogs. “Reading books and it takes too much effort and commitment” is the most commonly heard argument. According to statistics in the US, for example, most adults spend an average of seven minutes a day reading for pleasure.
You may hear from many people that reading a book requires too much effort. That’s certainly a fair statement, but you get a lot in return. Let’s discuss this issue and present the matter in the form of an agreement.
You are giving the author your time in exchange for his ideas.
Let’s go through the details of such a deal.
Blog
Let’s start with blogs. It is known that the average adult’s reading speed is about two hundred and fifty words per minute. The average blog post involves about eight hundred words. Hence, most of us will read such a post in three and a half minutes.
So what do we get out of it? For example, in the case of the author of this book, writing a post is the result of three days of effort. While working on the text, he usually spends about a day and a half on researching the issue and about the same time on writing it. Research mostly involves reading books and articles on the relevant topic and talking to experts in the field. If the topic is the author’s specialty, usually two conversations are enough, but if almost nothing is known about it, it is necessary to talk to at least three or four experts.
It turns out we are talking about a very profitable exchange. Three and a half minutes in exchange for the author having revised the material of fifty to hundred pages and spent three to five hours discussing it with various people, and then spending another day and a half supplementing the information and finally making it readable.
Article
Consider another option – a long magazine article. Usually there are articles consisting of five thousand words, so it takes an average of twenty minutes to read them.
And what do you get for your twenty minutes? Let’s take the example of the author of the book again. About a month of research before the actual work on the article plus another month and a half to work with new material (include here twenty-five interviews with experts and additional study of materials), the same amount for writing and editing the text. So, in exchange for your agreement to devote twenty minutes to writing, you get almost four months of intellectual work, physical effort, and more.
Twenty minutes for an average magazine article isn’t a bad deal at all.
Sure, your reading time increases by a factor of five compared to a blog, but the author also spent thirty times as much on writing the article – so it’s a very, very good deal!
Book
In the case of a book, it’s different. If a book is about seventy-five thousand words, it will take the average reader five hours to read it. But what does he get in return? About fifteen years of the author’s life.
Let’s summarize.
Blog: three minutes of your reading – three days of the author’s efforts.
Article: twenty minutes of your reading – four months of effort.
Book: five hours of your reading – fifteen years of effort.
So why is it better to read books than blogs?
Yes, because they have a high concentration of knowledge. Let’s do a simple calculation. If you devote five hours to reading a blog, spending three and a half minutes per post, you will read about eighty-six publications in that time and, accordingly, exchange five hours for 257 days of effort by the author.
But if you spend the same five hours reading a book, you’ll get as much as 5,475 days of author effort in return.
Books are the most concentrated form of knowledge.
The return on investment is simply cosmic. Of course, there are other sources of information. Maybe you are not a reader by nature and prefer lectures or documentaries. Although both of them, of course, arouse curiosity, but they are not comparable with books by brevity and content.
According to the book Impossible as Strategy.
The post Return on investment in reading: counting hours and benefits appeared first on Business.
