Motion Brings Clarity - continued...

I always wanted to be somebody.  I should have been more specific.  

Lily Tomlin

Books give you knowledge.  The news gives you awareness.  The latter is a measurement of today.  Knowledge is a measure of yesterday, today, and tomarrow.  Awareness if finite.  Knowledge if forever.  The books you read today will fuel your leadership and earning potential tomorrow.

There are two types of workers in this world.  Those who work for money & those who work to grow and master their current roles.  Those who work for money never have enough.  To them they do a job and get paid for it.  There is nothing wrong with that.  However their focus is on their current income and current needs.  The second group of people work to grow and master their current roles.  Their goal of their current job is to add to their current knowledge everything they can to master it.  For this group of people...they can  never get paid enough.  They will not be average - they will always rise to the top of their organization or community.
They will always stand out from the crowd.  Like a purple cow among browns-everyone will know and see the difference!  You won't have to tell them you are different, they - they will know and they will tell the world!

Here is a practical four-step program designed to make knowledge work for you:

1. Aggregation - how to know which books to read?

When a football coach tells a player he should own the game, he wants him to know more about his position than anyone else on the field.  For example, former Dallas Cowboys cornerback Deion Sanders didn't just market himself as Prime Time, he worked like crazy.  He watched more videos than anyone else who played his position; he studied wide receivers and quarterbacks on teams he had just played or was about to play, or teams he was watching in other conferences, should they play in the future.  Imagine this guy spending hours on end with a stopwatch timing quarterbacks and receivers, until his knowledge of was so great that when the ball was supposed to hit the receiver, instead there was Deion, intercepting it running it back for a touchdown.

Read books so that you can own your own job just like Deion Sanders own his.  If I were the financier who aspires to be a banker, I would want to be fully geeked on the impact of globalism so I could sit comfortably in any meeting, knowing that  I could add value to any conversation.  Or, if I were that human relations person who aspires to be the best in his/her business, I would want to know everything there is to know about human and organizational behavior as it pertains to my job so that I could lead the pack rather than follow.  If I acquire the right knowledge, I am actively self-promoting in the best sense of the word; I have been moved up from private to four-star general in others' eyes.

 But to aggregate, you must engage in the first step - find the right material.  This is not a difficult process.  Stroll through a book store and look for title and sections that seem interesting to you.  Begin to develop key words you look for for your topic/field of desired study.  Go to an online book selling website.  There you can type in your keywords and research every available volume on that subject.  Take advantage of those sites that recommend books.  Study which ones people with similar interests purchased and follow the links to them.  When you buy from the leaders, like Barnesandnobles.com or Amazon.com, their technology recommends related books each time you revisit their site.  How easy is that.

to be continued....

2.   Encoding
3.   Processing
4.   Application