Daily Archives: February 18, 2009

Announcing the New Personal MBA Calendar!

Posted on February 18, 2009 | Leave a comment

Hello Personal MBA Students,

Please Read This Important Announcement:
Thanks to the brilliant work done by Josh Kaufman on the Personal MBA, you now have the opportunity to participate in one of the most innovative learning groups that exists in the country.

We are taking a major step towards achieving this vision today by announcing the next 5 books, and a tentative learning plan for the remainder of the year. You can now clearly see what you will be able to accomplish by committing yourself to the group. I am extremely excited about this; there is no other place in town where you will be able to find as much bang for your buck in terms of both money and time.

Upcoming Section: (book descriptions)
The next six sessions, with the exception of Think and Grow Rich will all come from the Productivity and Effectiveness section of the Personal MBA List.  In this section you will learn:

–To become a more effective thinker and deliver better results.
–To sharpen how you approach problems and handle projects.
–A complete system for organizing your day to day activities in order to minimize stress   and maximize results.
–To use the creative and imaginative powers of your mind.
–Practical information about project management.

Where Do I Get The Books? (website)

You can easily order all of the productivity books that we are studying from Josh’s Batch Book Buying tool. Just go to the website above and select the books that are contained in the schedule below. Please note that we are not studying ALL of the books in the section, so just select the ones that are in the schedule.

Schedule: (calendar link)

March 1st – Think and Grow Rich

March 15th – The Effective Executive

March 29th – Getting Things Done

April 5th – The Creative Habit

April 19th – The Path Of Least Resistance

May 3rd – Making Things Happen

May 4th – July 5th – Summer Break

July 12th – Resume Discussion

July 11th – Sept 20th – Marketing Sales and Negotiation (6 books)

Oct 4th – November 8th – Psychology and Communication (3 books)

November 15th – Dec 20th – Design and Production (3 books)

Thanks to everyone who has participated thus far. We have an opportunity to make this one of the coolest learning experiments in the country. The group still needs more participating members, and now is a great time to join.

Click here to go to our Meetup Page and signup!

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10 Days to Faster Reading

Posted on February 18, 2009 | 1 Comment

10daystofasterreading

10 Days To Faster Reading

Attendance: Chris, Harry, Justin, Nathan.

Overview

This book is designed to help your everyday untrained average reader learn skills that will improve his or her reading ability. It guides you sequentially through different techniques that enhance your reading skills and it has exercises and tests to try a long the way.

Commentary

Everyone seemed to enjoy this book quite a bit. I know that I did. Now I have skills that are going to help me keep up with all of the reading I plan to do without killing myself to do it. As far as discussion goes, it was very straightforward. The whole point of the discussion was not really to help anyone gain any new insight on the material, but just to activate another part of the memory to help remember the contents.

Because the goal of the discussion to commit the material to memory, I simply asked a series of questions that took us through the book. This resulted in lots of flipping through the book and reviewing the different concepts outlined within. I actually used the opportunity to finally take notes on the big post it flip chart paper.

Many people are at first skeptical of this book. But after reading it, I can truthfully say it has been very useful to me. I can now easily keep up with the reading that this group will require.

For me, the most useful techniques were:

1) Previewing — This technique is fantastic. It is basically a method of trying to find the authors outline so you can quickly go through a book or chapter and get the main points. I have really started doing this a lot.

2) Using a notecard as a pacer – This helps assure that you are not wasting eye movements looking back up at what you previously read, or trying to find your place. It also makes you keep up a constant pace.

3) Looking for Keywords – This method basically boils down to “read the big words.” Most smaller words add very little content to a sentence, and the meaning of the sentence can be derived from the bigger words. By training yourself to look for the bigger words you can cut down on about half of the words you are reading.

There are many more techniques in this book, and exercises to go along with them. The exercises were all easy and very helpful to practice the material. My reading skills have definitely improved as a direct result of this book. Unless you are already a really good reader, it is worth your time.

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Posted in Discussions, Uncategorized

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