Self Development

How To Learn So Much And Read So Many Books?

October 23, 2019

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How Do Successful Businessmen Learn So Much?

Once I was able to grow my company big enough to have enough staff to cover most of my day to day tasks and delegate more out, I am now able to do minimal amount of work and work on company growth which includes educating myself, planning new job roles and implementing concepts.

This has meant that I have been learning a lot for the last 5 years at least, I like to learn the following subjects

Trading
Financial markets
SEO, Internet Marketing,
Sales and Marketing
Motivation, productivity, self-development
Wealth accumulation
Psychology regarding employing, helping people grow, team building

My Journey Of Learning and the costs.

I started an MBA which was around 5000-10,000 USD (Bottom level but good if you need a certification)

I realised that I was learning so much stuff that I didn’t need to learn, I had no purpose for a certificate, I was suffering anxiety because I had deadlines and articles to complete that I didn’t want to write. It was a total waste of time and money, I learnt far more online that I could really implement in my businesses.

Expensive Courses 500-1000 USD per course

I started becoming a course junkie, shiny objects and false promises are very appealing when you really want to learn quickly. Alot of these courses are good if you don’t have time or you need to learn stuff but you don’t know what you need to learn, there are lots of categories that we want to master but its hard to search for things we don’t know exist. There are lots of marketers out there offering the world, telling you that you are one payment and one click away from the success that you ever wanted.

Cheap Courses 10-99 USD per course

There are plenty of cheap courses on Udemy, skillshare and many others however people think they are aren’t as good because they are cheaper, but think about how much they are getting paid to write these courses, 10,000 downloads at 10 USD is more than 10 sales at 1000 USD. Also, people pay extra to be in the masterminds that are always empty with little value to offer… but the good thing about paying alot for a course is that you will definitely finish it! I recommend these courses because they are so cheap and saves you time.

Audible.com 14.95 USD per book

I found Audible around 2 years ago and I purchased over 600 books, some of the books can be 7-15 hours long but I managed to listen to many of them at 1.55x to 2x speed, I am fine listening to them if I am walking, driving or travelling but sometimes I am not traveling or driving. When I started these books 2 years ago, my life started changing rapidly, I started feeling the compounding effect with education and I felt so stupid and embarrassed about my past, in fact I was learning so fast, every week I looked back and I was embarrassed about how stupid or ignorant I had been in fact I learnt not to judge people so much because its easy to assume everyone knows what we do, but a lot of people don’t educate themselves or adapt. I put a list of some of the books I read on the main index page of my site, but I gave up listing them.

Audiobooks/books are better and much cheaper than most courses but you are on your own, there is no community, interaction, it may be more time consuming and harder to find the info you need quickly.

Blinklist 4.99 USD unlimited per month!

Blinklist was a very good app that I used to get summaries of books, my time has become more valuable and although I do enjoy listening to audiobooks while I am driving, it uses up way too much time, blinklist has the book shortened into 15 minutes. The subscription fee was very little and they were adding 20 new books every month.

What do I use now mostly? (Top-level learning)

Youtube Channels FREE

For those that say they don’t have the money to get the right education and believe everything is behind a paywall, I have seen a lot of courses that YouTubers have created and most/all of there content is on various videos on their channels, they need to teach to tease people into buying their courses. This just means that they end up giving all their content away but it takes more time to learn it. There are tons of channels teaching out there without courses, they have other ways of making money such as other upsells, business promotion or just carrying youtube adverts.

I have followed many YouTubers for a long time and most of them are just getting information from the books that they read or other content they have found.

Book Summaries on Youtube FREE (Ninja level learning)

The next level after this long and expensive journey is to apply the Pareto rule to your self-education, the difference between a 7 hour book and a 15 minute book summary on youtube, is usually a bunch of stories and evidence backing up why you need to believe the ideas that they are teaching you, if you are open to learning and you have education in many areas already you are already feeling the effect from compounding, a new book or concept can fit in with all your other education and less explaining is needed. So we don’t need 7 hours to explain an idea, skill or concept. If you are learning a category like marketing, you are better off getting 5-10 book summaries of 5-1o books than reading one book.

You can always look at 2-3 book summaries if you wanted to, but it’s better to learn all the key points and skip the rest unless you really need to drill down and convince yourself.

The next level of learning I will write about later

So what is worth paying for?