Read More, Faster
Archives: Daily Issues
Issue #2659
- WEALTHY: A stock picker’s dream (Steve McDonald)
- HEALTHY: The hazards of being pudgy (Jon Benson)
- WISE: Edward P. Morgan on books
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- What to read and how to read it quickly (Michael Masterson)
- An easy opportunity to prosper (George Dahir)
- It’s Good to Know… about the emergency e-mail stop
- Add “voluble” to your vocabulary
== Highly Recommended==
This “Bailout” Could Be Perfect For YOU
If the Fat-Cat banks can get FREE MONEY why can’t you?
Here’s how a ‘robot’ could grab $1000 a day from the banking crisis for YOU!
7,000 Points to Go, and That’s the Good News
For months, my colleagues and I at ETR’s sister newsletter, Investor’s Daily Edge, have been pounding the table about how this market is a stock picker’s dream. We have said things like, “Millionaires are made at this point in the market cycle,” “Stocks are really cheap,” and “Build a bulletproof portfolio now.” But most people can only hear the doom and gloom news, and it always ends up costing them money.
The market is almost 7,000 points below its previous high, even after a huge move in the last month. This is a buy signal… not a reason to stay out. But most will stay on the sidelines and wait for stocks to become overpriced before they buy again.
In my last ETR article, I said that you can lower your risk in this market by giving it time. Now, here’s another suggestion…
Average in, rather than dumping in all your money at once. Buy about one-quarter to one-third of what your usual position size is, and buy on the dips – and there will be dips in the next three to five years.
If you want to add a nice kicker to this plan, buy companies with good dividends. That could add 5 to 7 percent to your annual return. That’s how cheap stocks are right now. Companies that usually have dividends of 1 to 3 percent are paying 5 to 7 percent.
This is a 100-year buying opportunity. The only requirement is that you must be willing to stay the course and treat selling dips as buying opportunities. You have your pick of the best companies in the world right now at bargain basement prices.
[Ed. Note: Get the scoop on more emerging investment opportunities from Steve McDonald in Investor's Daily Edge, ETR's sister publication. Sign up for free right here
This June, Steve and 8 other top investment experts will show an elite group of investors how to make a fortune in today's market. They'll be revealing their #1 investment strategies and top recommendations for making 2009 the best year EVER for your portfolio. Get the details here.]
“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.”
Edward P. Morgan
Defeating Info Overload: Read to Succeed
The average American adult reads about 150 words a minute. At that rate, a 500-page book would take 24 hours to finish. If you had two hours a day to devote to it, you could read a book every two weeks.
Twenty-six books a year. That’s just a fraction of the great business books that are published – books that can help you work smarter. And when you consider everything else you read – magazines, newspapers, business reports, e-mails, etc. – it’s obvious that you can’t gather enough of the information you need by going about it in a conventional way.
To read for success you need two things: (1) a way to select good stuff to read, and (2) a way to read that good stuff faster.
How to Select the Good Stuff to Read
Deciding what to read is by far the most important part of this. Your brain is fundamentally a sophisticated computer. If you put good stuff into it, you will get good stuff out of it. If you fill it with junk, your thinking will be junky.
When you read for success, you read with a purpose. You are looking for ideas that can inspire you, strategies that can inform you and facts and figures that can help you do a better job. But since you will never have time to read 95 percent of what is published in your field, you need to be sure that the 5 percent you can read is the best.
Unfortunately, most of what is out there is useless or banal or both. And as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.”
In other essays, I’ve pointed out that just about every experience in life – including reading – can be categorized as enriching, neutral, or negative. I have labeled these categories golden, vaporous, and acidic.
Some of what you choose to read will be acidic – downright bad for you. Most of it will be vaporous – neither hurting nor helping you. And only a small portion of it will be golden – changing you for the better.
Promise yourself that you will read only gold from now on. Make a deliberate decision to do that by creating a reading list
Your reading list should include books (both business books and works of fiction), magazines, and newspapers – in print and/or online. And it should have two parts: a must-read-this-year section and a wish list of everything you’d like to read but don’t have time for.
The must-read section has to be limited to what you can actually read. The wish list can be almost any length, and is useful as a resource to draw upon at the end of the year when you create the next year’s must-read list.
I keep my wish list on my computer. It includes such books as Harry Potter and War and Peace, such magazines as The Nation and Esquire, and such newspapers as The London Times and Le Monde. My must-read-this-year list is much longer. It includes three newspapers, four magazines, 24 e-zines, 52 business books, and 12 works of fiction.
I don’t read every issue of every magazine and e-zine on my “must” list. Nor do I read all three of those newspapers every day. I have developed a method of rotating through them each week so that I am constantly stimulated with good ideas. And when I read business books, I use a speed-reading technique that I’ll explain in a minute.
The point is that having a reading list allows me to make a conscious decision once a year about what I’m going to read. It’s not up to impulse. It’s not up to someone else. It is based on my own judgment about what will be good for me. I’m looking for the gold. I don’t have time to spend on anything else.
How to Read the Good Stuff Faster
When I was a teenager, I was taught how to speed-read. I tripled my reading speed, but soon lost much of that skill because I didn’t practice it.
As an adult, I’ve read a number of books and articles on speed-reading and have developed my own system. Using this method, I have read a 359-page book on marketing in 55 minutes, four weekly magazines in 31 minutes, and the Sunday New York Times in 16 minutes (a rate that even my high-school speed-reading teacher couldn’t match). More important, I still remember (and use) a million-dollar idea I learned from that book, a time-management technique I got from one of those magazines, and a handful of interesting facts from that issue of The Times.
Reading stuff fast, after all, is not what’s important. Retaining it… and using it… that’s how you change your life. “The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it,” as James Bryce once said.
Here is my system for reading business books and magazines:
• First, skim the table of contents. This will give you a quick idea of what the book or magazine has to offer.
• Next, highlight one or several items you want to read. Don’t be greedy. You don’t have time to read everything, and it would be foolish to try. Select the content that you think might have the greatest long-term impact on your career.
• Now review those highlighted items and see if there is a common thread. What you are looking for is a Useful Big Idea (UBI) – a principle or perspective that is new to you and that can make you smarter, happier, or more successful.
Your job is to find that UBI, to understand it and figure out how it fits in your life. With that limited objective in mind, you will be able to sprint through the material – ignoring everything that is tangential and/or irrelevant to your purpose.
• When you find what you are looking for – the UBI – highlight the sections of the book or article that help you understand it. Continue speed-reading until you have what you need. Then stop.
• Make it a point to bring up the UBI in a conversation or e-mail communication. Do that within 24 hours so it sinks in and begins to stimulate you. Do it again within the next 24 hours. And then do it one more time.
Studies show that we forget 80 percent of what we learn within 24 hours and most of the remaining 20 percent in the week that follows. By focusing your attention on one UBI and referencing it three times in 72 hours, you will find that it will stay with you and eventually find its way into your decision-making process.
Of course, some business books have more than one UBI. A good example would be the book MaryEllen Tribby and I co-wrote, Changing the Channel: 12 Easy Ways to Make Millions for Your Business. It is a goldmine of ideas. Each of its 12 chapters teaches you how to master one important marketing channel.
To speed-read a book like Changing the Channel, you would review the table of contents, looking for two or three chapters that you believed could have an immediate impact on you career. (Immediate is the key word here. You don’t want to spend your valuable time learning skills you can’t implement right away.) Of those two or three you would select one and look for its UBI.
You might, for example, decide that you wanted to learn about telemarketing, e-mail marketing, and print advertising… in that order. So you would start by reading the chapter on telemarketing, looking for its UBI and highlighting the paragraphs that best explained it to you. Then you would use what you learned in conversations over a three-day period. By that time, what you had learned would have sunk in. Then you would go on to the chapter on e-mail marketing and the next UBI.
This method works. I’ve been using it for just over a year, and I’m much better at applying the stuff I read than I was before. Phrases come to mind. Terminology. Titles and authors.
It makes my thinking more “linked.” I am starting to see how certain popular business and financial ideas correspond to ideas about art and literature. It also makes me speak more confidently. And I believe it makes my arguments more credible.
I’m convinced that this is the smart way to gather information:
1. Read less, learn more. Don’t feel you have to take in the entire content. Search for useful big ideas. Focus on one UBI at a time. Get it. Repeat it. Put it to work.
2. Learn to scan. When reading books, give prefaces and/or first chapters your greatest attention because they are likely to contain most of the useful big ideas. Then read the first paragraph of the rest of the chapters and the first sentence of each paragraph below the first one. This technique will help you locate the big ideas fast.
3. Make it fun. The purpose of learning is not necessarily to have a good time, but if you care about what you are doing, and do it seriously, it will be fun.
Read less. Read better. Read faster. Have fun and learn.
[Ed. Note: Get more of Michael Masterson's surefire strategies for getting ahead in business in True Path to Profits: A Master Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Success. Find out more (including how you can get a bonus subscription to his VIP newsletter, Ready Fire Aim) here.
Discover how you could be making $50,000 to $5 million starting this year right here .]
Reader Feedback: “It was a nudge into looking at life in a fresh way.”
“I recently read Michael Masterson’s article on golfing with his son. The message became very important because it was a nudge into looking at life in a fresh way. It is really amazing how routine we are. I keep a notebook now. Every day, I pluck out some incident to write about. It’s great. Thanks for the nudge Michael.”
Judith Pazmino
Covington, KY
You Could Be Just Hours Away From Instant Internet Income
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You will learn the exact plan that banked $187,296 in 24 hours for one man. And you can copy it step for step. And the best part is, once you put in just a few hours, you need not do any additional work. You could very quickly have an “automatic” monthly income stream flowing into your bank account.
This new program is appropriately called Instant Internet Income and I guarantee it does exactly what I promise. Take a look and discover how Jim Sheridan made this money so quickly.
How to Build a Recession-Proof Stream of Income
By George Dahir
Even in tough times, opportunities present themselves… if you look in the right places.
One of the best ways to build a recession-proof income? Become an affiliate marketer.
Affiliate marketing is the process of using your website to drive traffic to a merchant’s website… and receiving a commission for sales that are generated. It has quietly become a $6 billion industry and, according to Jupiter Research, is expected to grow another 13 percent year-over-year through 2012. Jupiter Research also states that online marketers’ spending estimates for 2008 were $2.1 billion on affiliate marketing fees, with U.S. online affiliate marketing spending expected to reach $3.3 billion in 2012.
One reason affiliate marketing has experienced such massive growth is that it is a win-win opportunity – for the merchant and the affiliate. The merchant pays affiliates for their advertising efforts only when sales are actually made. Affiliates become an extension of the merchant’s sales force and receive nice commission payouts by driving sales traffic to the merchant’s website.
Many affiliate marketers do this as their only source of income and make a very nice living.
So what’s stopping you? If you aren’t making the money you need to live the life you wish to live – or if you just want an additional source of income – affiliate marketing may be for you. Early to Rise’s Affiliate Program has had a large turnout since its launch back in February (with 900 affiliates thus far) and the sales continue to roll in.
[Ed. Note: George Dahir is ETR's Affiliate Marketing Manager.
If you are ready to make money as an affiliate, join Early to Rise's Affiliate Program today by clicking here. You'll get $20 just for signing up!]
Does Being “Slightly” Overweight Matter?
By Jon Benson
“It’s just a few extra pounds.”
Or is it?
In the 2008 Physician’s Health Study, researchers tracked 21,094 male doctors for two decades. They found that even those who were only modestly overweight had a higher risk for heart disease, and the risk grew along with the amount of extra weight.
The average age of the men at the outset of the study was 53. During the study, 1,109 of them developed heart failure. Overall, the risk of heart failure increased by an average of 180 percent in those who met the definition of obesity as measured by body mass index (with a BMI of 30 or higher), and by an average of 49 percent in those who met the definition of overweight (with a BMI of 25 to 30).
And what about “all those hours” needed for exercise?
Yet another myth busted by the study: “As far as vigorous physical activity is concerned, even if somebody said they exercised one to three times per month – which is a very low level of exercise – they had an 18 percent reduction in the risk of heart failure after accounting for all other established risk factors,” said head researcher Dr. Satish Kenchaiah.
It’s time to get serious about losing that little bit of flab. Long-term studies like this one show how beneficial it can be.
[Ed. Note: Fitness expert Jon Benson's 7 Minute Muscle program is by far the shortest workout you can do to reap the greatest rewards. Try it for yourself risk-free for 60 days right here.
For effective strategies for burning fat, getting fit, and feeling better than ever, sign up for ETR's FREE natural health newsletter right here]
It’s Good to Know: The Emergency E-Mail Stop
Ever hit the Send button and instantly regret saying what you said… notice you forgot to attach a document… realize you hit Reply All instead of Reply?
Now you can take it back. If you have Gmail, that is. And if you react quickly.
Simply go to Settings in Gmail and turn on the Undo Send feature under the Labs tab. From then on you’ll get an Undo link in sent mail confirmation messages. If you click Undo within five seconds – we said you had to be quick – the e-mail won’t be sent. Disaster averted.
(Source: Gmail)
== Highly Recommended ==
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If you’re looking for a new break and the opportunity of a lifetime, jump on this now.
Word to the Wise: Voluble
“Voluble” (VOL-yuh-bul) – from the Latin for “to turn easily”) – means talkative/fluent/glib, having a ready and continuous flow of words.
Example (as used by Scott Eyman in a Palm Beach Post review of The Paris Review Interviews Volume III, edited by Philip Gourevitch): “Most writers are voluble because they spend so much time alone.”
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2009
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