How You Can Learn from Successful People when You Have Limited Time to Spare
“The shortest route to success in any field of endeavour and life in general, is to seek the company of those who have a great deal of wisdom.”
~ Anthony Robbins, in his book Awaken the Giant Within
Learning from Successful People
In today’s fast-paced economy, staying ahead of competition has been a great concern to many. The old deal in business has changed. Lifetime employment is a thing of the past. With the advent of automation technology, hard skills can hardly guarantee you a life-long job.
Interviews with top managers have consistently revealed that they want empowered individuals who can take the initiative to make good business decisions. An individual can hardly make a good decision if his mind is blank like a piece of white copier paper.
Unfortunately, it takes time to constantly research; to read up about other businesses; to read up on new industry techniques; to expose our minds to new dimensions of thought.
Learning through the experience of others is the shortest route to filling up that piece of paper. It shows you the right path that has already been bashed through by your forerunner and prevents you from repeating the same mistakes that have already been made.
In an ideal situation, it means getting close to successful people in areas of our lives whom we admire, just to have that little conversation with them to learn how they did it.
It is just a matter whether they have the time for us.
And that is also why successful people publish books.
We do not need to spend years to get a Masters in Computing to become an IBM employee, just to learn how its visionary CEO, Louis Gerstner, made decisions that revived the fading corporation with a 360-degree transformation.
All we have to do is simply to pick up his book “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance” from a bookstore and finish it while sitting in our comfortable little couches.
This, however, has proven to be a challenge to some. Statistics show that less than ten percent of people who buy a book read past the first few chapter, the primary reason being there are too many other distractions in our daily lives that demand our time and attention.
How to Do That if You are Busy
Time is a commodity that is so scarce when we pursue a life of personal growth and career success. The more successful we get; the less time we have. Yet, we need this time to constantly update ourselves to keep ahead of competition.
However, there is way too much information out there for us to possibly keep up on; be it the new business concepts and applications in top business books, or the new time and stress management strategies in top self-improvement books.
It also takes too much time to slowly mill through every single page of a book. By the end of the month when you have finally finished the book, high chance that you will not be able to recall what you have read in the earlier parts of the book.
You can spend some money to attend a speed-reading class and learn how to save time and read a book quickly.
While the shortest route to success is to learn through the experience of others; the quickest route to learning is to read summaries.
Alternatively, you can pay for someone else’s time to read and write a summary for you.
A summary helps you to bridge the gap between desire for more knowledge and constraint of time.
A former President of the U.S. once said that it is this service that kept him in the loop on news and profiles of people. It is also one of the things he really missed after leaving office.
The service of summarising books has traditionally been available only to the top 10% of the world’s most influential people. This is what our ministers have been doing.
We can now enjoy this high-value summary service. Do a search on Google with the word “book summary” and you will be able to see for yourself.
