Don’t Read This Article
Entrepreneurs… we’re avid readers. We pour over business periodicals. We study Harvard Business and MIT Sloan Management Reviews. We read books. And books. And more books still.
And many times our propensity to read is beneficial, like when we learn something useful about industry-wide trends, or when we discover new ways to start, grow, and run our companies.
Other times, though, it’s expensive. Because reading isn’t our work… building companies is. And sometimes we read when we could be winning a new customer, or closing a sale, or making a mistake.
I think the final point captures the essence of why we entrepreneurs read as much as we do; We don’t want to waste money. We don’t want to make the wrong move. We don’t want to be caught not knowing an industry detail that we could have learned if we had just read.
In other words, we don’t like to make mistakes.
Mind Petals contributor William Quisenberry addresses this topic in an article titled It Isn’t Where You Start that Matters. He writes, “…in our culture we come from the ‘microwave generation,’ we want everything correct and done in just a few seconds.”
“Another issue plaguing young ‘prenuers,” Quisenberry continues, “is also the fact that they place too much emphasis on their current situation or what they perceive as a negative or unstable foundation.”
Applied to this topic, Quisenberry encourages us to put down our books, and to abandon our entrepreneurs-as-sponges orientation. Because reading is simply a means to an end, and it might not be (re: probably isn’t) the best channel to bring us there.
Why not?
Because entrepreneurial reading is characterized by diminishing returns. That is, each additional resource we read adds more value, but adds incrementally less value than what we read before it.
And that makes intuitive sense: there’s only so much we need to know – that we can know – about trends in our environments. About the sales process. And how to build our companies.
Everything else we can learn by doing. Still, the point is not to stop reading. Not at all. Instead, the emphasis is to read selectively, and to ensure that it never inhibits our “get-to-it-iveness.”
Because too much reading is counterproductive. Not enough reading is certain death.
And it’s our job as entrepreneurs to manage those tensions.
Brian Lash is founder of The Tipping Blog and writes about the entrepreneurial experience at BrianLash.com.
2 Comments
Mihai
March 7th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
I read, because I don’t want to be left behind.I like to always be on top.
Chris
March 17th, 2007 at 12:12 am
Agreed. 100% of the books I used to read were about business. I read about entrepreneurship, strategy, biographies, marketing, you name it. Then I realized something - the books began to repeat each other. I also noticed that while I was gaining a lot of knowledge on business history I was lacking in areas such as US and world history. There is also a large number of classic novels that I have yet to read. I still do not read the popular fiction novels of today, but I started reading more about history, health, cultures, and the environment.
I still read business books but I’m not buying as many these days because I have about 20 unread books in my queue and I need to spend more time with my family. I think that reading a broader array of subjects will help my business career in the end - not to mention my performance when I watch Jeopardy - when I have time to, that is.
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