“…lest it change the way you think.” I once read that in one of those personal-development books.
The new year begins, and after eating so much roscón de Reyes (a traditional Spanish cake that marks the end of the Christmas season), you realize it’s already January. You’re back at work, and that huge list of resolutions and projects you cheerfully made in December is right in front of you. It’s time to start doing things.
In other words, the usual routine: we set off on the journey so that, at the end of the year, if we still remember that list, we’ll realize we haven’t achieved even half of half of it. In fact, I think those promises to improve in the new year are mostly a way of putting things off and an excuse to justify how hard it is for us to act and do what we should and want to do. Isn’t that right?
Okay, yes, I’m the first to use those lists; I’ve been using them for a long time, with varying degrees of success. One of my resolutions this year is to keep reading more and better books on all the subjects that interest me: many about technology, others about personal development, and so on.
Could it be any other way? Can any business or profession move forward without continuing to learn? Everything evolves, and if we don’t keep pace, we may end up trying to sell something to customers in a market that disappeared or changed long ago.
I disagree when I hear people say we’re living in a knowledge society. Maybe we are, and the economy is increasingly based on knowledge, but people in general are far from realizing the impact this has on the way we learn and develop professionally. If businesses change, naturally their professionals have to change too.
It’s true that we now have enormous learning resources at a ridiculously low cost: blogs, webinars, podcasts, seminars, video courses, and wonderful books on Kindle or Google Play for as little as €0.99, which we can read on our phones. Maybe we tend to read more than we used to, and maybe we read and get informed in different ways. But, paradoxically, we accumulate so much information that this very information overload is becoming a problem: we’re unable to extract knowledge from it all. Information overload (and addiction to it) is beginning to be considered pathological.
The important thing isn’t to fill your head with facts, but to know what to do with them—unless you have a parrot complex and enjoy repeating whatever you read, of course.
In my opinion, reading every feed in your reader every day—or every two hours—is not the same as immersing yourself in a serious book by Jeremy Rifkin that analyzes a particular subject in depth. Yet for most people, being better informed means doing exactly the first thing, and only the first thing.
You can’t make progress on any subject without reading about it in depth. That takes the structured organization of a good book: one that analyzes the context, the argument, and the different experiences in that field, and even dares to make some kind of forecast. The book is not dead—not at all. The print format may be in intensive care, but structuring knowledge in the form of a book will, I hope, survive for many years. To me, jumping from headline to headline is superficial and gets you nowhere.
The same is true in software. Learning a new technology by reading tutorials here and there that only scratch the surface isn’t the same thing. It can be useful for experimenting or solving specific problems once you already know the technology well. I do it a lot and will keep doing it, of course. There are also some extraordinarily good posts and tutorials.
Nevertheless, if you really want to explore a technology in depth, pick up a good book and read it from cover to cover. In fact, I recommend using more than one reference book, since a single book rarely covers everything relevant (no matter how much it calls itself “The Bible of…”).
At least, that’s what I do whenever I feel the need to get to the bottom of something: I might browse blogs by people who know more than I do about that particular subject, but I’m always looking for a good bibliographic reference to start with. Then I bombard myself with information about the subject for as long as necessary—including books—until I feel knowledgeable enough to move on. It’s not learning for learning’s sake; it’s learning so you can do something with it all.
With a first book, you’ll get an overall understanding of the technology, and you’ll surely find plenty of references to explore related paths when the time comes.
You can’t seriously learn something just by dipping into five-hundred-word tutorials. Sorry, but that’s not how it works: books are still essential because they give you the big picture you need to use whatever you’re learning properly. To me, a book is the author saying, more or less, “Hey! I’ve worked on this subject a lot, and everything I’m telling you here comes from my experience with it.”
So here’s the paradox: we think we live in an information society when what we really mean is that we’re now overloaded with information about many things, yet we still know as little as we did twenty years ago. This happens everywhere: technology, business management, marketing, and so on. Knowledge is available to us instantly and at very little cost, yet the average person generally doesn’t use it and sticks to the headlines. It’s a shame.
Please write to me and tell me I’m wrong!
I’ve started the year by treating myself to two books that sound very promising.
One is Lazlo Bock’s book about how some companies are changing the way work is organized. The other is El mundo que viene, by Juan Martínez-Barea, which discusses how meritocracy will be a fundamental value in the future (well, finally).
We can’t make progress in a constantly changing world while knowing only what we know today.
I’m sorry, but we have to read. Even if you read a lot, though, you can still feel overwhelmed and fail to develop a solid understanding of anything—one that’s sufficient to take action and achieve new results. That’s why reading well-structured books with enough depth is essential. It’s nothing like the instant gratification of technology blog headlines, which we’re all so fond of (myself included!), and which are useful, of course, but not enough to explore anything in depth.
The book is not dead—not at all. The person who is dead is the one who thinks they’ll get better results without learning anything new.
Wow, that turned out rather serious.