Read Good Books – In the Information Overload Era, Don’t Load much “Less-Than-Useful/Valuable” Information

Good books are better than not-so-good books. Right?!

Here’s a problem.

If you read about the really smart people from the preceding centuries, they partly got smart by reading books that they had in their house, in their personal libraries. (So, yes, they could afford libraries – and they had the leisure time to read). There were no constantly updated best-seller lists. If a book was published, it was pretty much considered to be worthy of attention. And the really smart people read those books.

In those days, basically every book was a good book — i.e., good = worthy of your time.

In contrast, I have read a lot of sample pages of books, and a few (more than I would like to admit) books cover-to-cover that… how do I say this delicately… were a waste of my time.

My bad. I should have learned better…

One problem in this era of information overload is that there is a lot of information not worth loading into our information reservoir at all.

A lot!

I realized this as I was reading some sample pages of a new, somewhat-touted book. It is a mediocre-to-bad book. (No, I will not identify the book for you). The title showed promise; the actual book — not so much.

On the other hand, the books I choose to present at the First Friday Book Synopsis are a cut above, cut from a different cloth (or, a different computer monitor).

So, what is the point of this blog post? Let me put it simply: there is too much good information out there that will genuinely help you know more, and move forward in multiple ways. Do not waste a single quarter-hour on the less-than-good information.

But, you say, “how can I tell?” That’s the real challenge, isn’t it – learning how to tell?

Here’s one tip — once you realize that a book (or an article, or a blog post, or a tweet) is a waste of your time, don’t waste any more time on it at all.  Just quit reading it. It’s a smart strategy.  Because, every minute you spend reading something that is a waste of your time, you are giving up a minute reading something that could be really valuable.