You are throwing books in the garbage

“I’ve read 62 books this year, only 38 more to go.”

“I listen to podcasts at 3x speed.”

Flexes like this make me cringe.

On one hand, the pursuit of knowledge is a good thing.

But many people extrapolate that more knowledge, faster, must be a great thing.

It’s not.

The issue is that our brains are not designed to drink from a fire hose of information without spilling a drop.

Pay attention:

Imagine a windowless room inside of your head. There is a single door into the room.

In the middle of the room is a small desk.

On one end of the desk is a basket labeled “inputs.”

On the other end is a basket labeled “save to memory.”

And next to the desk sits a trash can.

Sitting at the desk is a little old man.

As new information is carried into the room through the door, the man’s job is to sort through the information and quickly decide if it should be saved or tossed in the trash.

The man can only process between 4 and 7 pieces of information at a time.

As long as the flow of information does not exceed his processing speed, he can make good decisions about what to toss and what to keep.

But if the flow turns into a flood, he cannot keep up.

More and more information that should have been stored simply slides off the end of his desk into the trash.

Listening to audio books rapid fire at 3x speed is a flood.

Most of that information is flying by the little man, landing straight in the garbage.

And he probably didn’t even notice it.

He certainly doesn’t realize he is missing over 80% of the info he’s supposed to be processing…

But at the end of the year, he will proudly proclaim he processed 100 new books.

As a towering pile of missed and discarded information looms over him in the background.

It gets worse.

You see, we paid a price for everything in the garbage pile.

We may have paid a financial price, but we definitely paid with time, attention, and focus.

Lost opportunity.

Fortunately, there really are ways to help the little man to do what he does.

To maximize his efficiency, making sure a larger amount of important and useful info makes it into the “save to memory” basket.

And next week, I will be joined by a learning expert who will teach us effective strategies to maximize learning based on the latest brain science.

This is the kind of investment that makes all other investments in learning more valuable.

If you can squeeze even another 10% out of your learning efforts…

…Adding at least 10% to the ROI of every book, video, training, and course you’ve ever consumed (or will consume), how would that change your speed and effectiveness of implementation?

I’m excited to share this with you because it may be one of the most leveraged, highest ROI things you could possibly do.

Tomorrow, I’ll introduce the guest expert.

But for now, please let me know if you’d like further details about this training next week: