Longtime readers may recall that I’ve started using December as a month exclusively for rereading. I thought it would be interesting to look back at the notes I put together from my original read, compare those to what I scribbled down during my most recent rereading month, and see if I could identify any lessons from how my notes have evolved over the past five years. I’ll work through these ‘lookbacks’ over the next couple of weeks prior to posting the standard reading reviews for these books.
Let’s start, appropriately, with Lean In, the first book from which I took notes.
Lean In (original notes from December 2013)
The one that started it all, at least in the context of my note-taking for books and, in an indirect sense, this TOA project. The resulting file from 2013 stands out for my focus on themes, generalizations, and conclusions. These notes aren’t useless to me today but there is very little I can apply to my work from just my comments and observations. One note, for example, points out that in general men are more likely to chase growth opportunities and be impatient about career development. The note is perfectly fine and captures one of Lean In’s central messages. However, I find that this kind of note – which forms the bulk of my 2013 file – offers very little practical value because it fails to address why this conclusion is so often observed in the workplace. These notes are mostly about outcomes and although such notes are interesting, they offer no starting point for how I might use the information to influence a colleague or mentee.
My notes from the December reread demonstrate my evolution toward causes rather than effects. The result is a far more applicable set of insights in comparison to my first-ever notes file. One example from 2018 suggests that shy, quiet, or reserved people will speak up more if the culture encourages a communal mindset. It goes on to suggest that one way to establish such a culture is to have colleagues advocate on the behalf of others rather than merely focus on trumpeting personal accomplishments. If I see a note like this on Tuesday, I can apply it on Wednesday. This immediacy is consistent across many of the bullets in the 2018 notes file and stands in stark contrast to the generalized tone of the 2013 notes – it would be like one weatherman saying ‘summer is hot’ while another told you that it would be eighty degrees tomorrow.
I was encouraged by this evolution in my approach. As Sandberg points out in Lean In, progression means learning and contributing quickly. The biggest shift in my notes over the past five years is how my learning from a book is summarized in a way that facilitates immediate contribution. My recent approach of reducing the volume of my overall reading to take notes (and write short essays for TOA) should remain valuable as long as my resulting writing can contribute quickly to the relevant challenges of both work and life.
Footnotes / endnotes / but why this book?
0. The Business Bro Book Club, A History
I remember deciding to read management books around this time because I wasn’t improving. Although my initial year and a half with managerial duties was driven by hard work, good intentions, and limited success, my growth and development in the role did not meet the same pace set by the growth in my data analytics and programming skills.
I don’t remember why I chose to read this specific book, though. My guess is that since Lean In was a big deal at the time, I was convinced by its visibility on bookshelves and prominent position atop bestseller lists that reading the book would help me improve my work. Why I made this my first ‘note book’ is also unclear. My guess is that there was no special feature of Lean In that made it first – I knew that retention was not my strongest suit and therefore adjusted my reading method to include notes for later reference.
