I recently came across an instance (and since then, a few more instances) of a school district announcing plans to change their school librarians' focus away from books/reading and changing them into "Innovation Specialists." Uhhhhhh. What?! ...This trainwreck of an idea is still unfolding....
Read MoreThe answer to “What do you want?” is most often not what we think we want. Here’s the gist of the book: “To recognize the limits of knowledge is not to embrace ignorance. We don’t need less than knowledge; we need more. We need to recognize the power of habit” (6).
Read MoreWhen we read certain books at certain times in our lives they smack us right in the face. Had I read some of these books a few years earlier or later, they would have objectively been just as good, but perhaps they wouldn’t have had the impact on me that they did then.
Read MoreI was going to start writing about how to keep a reader interested in your book. How to make sure that page one is interesting enough for them to turn to page two, etc. But instead I thought it’d be more fun to flip the coin over and look at the places most readers usually check out… And then encourage the bookmakers of the world to address them with each aspect of their books.
Read MoreAuthors of great books know it takes a certain amount of smarts on the reader’s end to be picking up a book in the first place. The great ones don’t start at the very beginning of time—explaining all the background details in order—for no reason. It needs to be less “classroom lecture” and more “guided historical monument tour.”
Read MoreOur goal should be to buy the things we buy at a great value. That doesn’t mean cheap, necessarily. It just means the price is below what you’d expect to pay based on what you get out of it. We’ll call this efficient spending. And, yep, you guessed it…
Read MoreMost conversations that involve more than three people and that last longer than five minutes experience a notable lull.
Read MoreBooks are your SCUBA equipment for diving deep into ideas. They are the 4-hour, or 6-hour, or 10-hour commitment to a single enterprise. They often represent years of work culminating in a powerful biography or a masterpiece of personal development.
Read MoreWhen given unlimited choices, the kinds of choices that technology offers, for things like used cars, video rentals, vacation opportunities, and, yes, books… We don’t need more and more things to choose from. What we need is need help with all the sifting!
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