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How to Start a Book Club at Your Workplace | Sam Thomas Davies
How To Start A Book Club
- Decide when to meet and for how long. For example, a monthly one-hour meeting so that each team member can read the book, write a book summary, and give their inputs.
- Choose a book selection.
- Decide on a meeting format. During the meeting, each team member will share their feeling about the book - what they liked, disliked, how the department could benefit from its idea, how it relates to other books you've read as a department.
- Assigning one person to take notes can be a good idea. Every person will give unique perspectives about what is relevant.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Getting to a deeper understanding of a subject
- Understanding the basics. This is a key element of effective thinking. Understanding a simple idea deeply builds a solid foundation for complex ideas.
- Build your foundation. Be honest with what you really know by using the Feynman Technique (by teaching others). It will reveal any gaps you have in your knowledge.
- Obtain the basic mental models from multiple disciplines. You don't need to understand everything on a subject, but you should understand the basic concepts from various disciplines.
- Understanding the basics allows for a better understanding of second and subsequent order consequences.
The "Lindy effect"
This is just a fancy way to say what has been will continue to be.
Time can predict value. Some things, like books, increase in life expectancy as time goes by. If a book has been in print for forty years, we can expect it to be in print for another forty years.
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Fighting For Our Focus
Scheduling of work falls into two broad categories: Makers and Managers. Most of us are either managing people and projects or making something, like documents, apps or other creat...
Different Jobs See Time Differently
- Managers can work in time blocks of 30 or 60 minutes, scheduling meetings or sending emails.
- Makers need almost half a day to get down and create something, requiring an uninterrupted focus mode that is nearly impossible.
What complicates matters is that many managers who are managing the makers think of time as short blocks and try to break the focused time of the makers, requesting them to juggle work or multitask, which kills any productivity or quality with the unending context switching.
Schedules And Productivity
None of us can get creative in short 15-minute bursts of work sandwiched between a mandatory meeting and a sales team call. It is also a myth that people work for 8 to 10 hours a day.
Most people are productive in sporadic periods of time, like 15 minutes, followed by an interruption, then for 20 minutes, followed by a commitment/obligation/meeting and so on.
We need to align our schedules with our goals and create a strategy that helps us focus on deep work.
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The maximalist philosophy of reading
The modern world equates the intelligent person will the well-read person. It's difficult to think of anyone arriving at any worthy insights without having read an impressive n...
Reading in the premodern world
The premodern world was obsessed with asking, "what is the point is of reading?" They had answers too.
- For example, the value for Christians and Muslims was holding up one book - the Bible or the Koran - as more important than anything else. This book was read repeatedly and with great attention.
- In the Ancient Greek world, one focused on just two books: Homer's Odyssey and his Iliad. These were all that was needed to impart the Greek code of honour and the best guides to action in military and civilian affairs.
- In the 18th century England, the ideal of reading was focused on Virgil's Aeneid - all a gentleman required to pass as cultivated. More reading was viewed as eccentric.
Why the modern world read so much
The modern world has adopted an Enlightenment mantra that states there should be no limit to how much we read because we read in order to know everything. We don't read to understand God or to follow civic virtue; we read to understand the whole of human existence.
This maximalist legacy of the Enlightenment idea of reading is present within the publishing industry, within the way books are presented to the public at school and in shops, and within our own guilty responses to the pressure to read more.