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Do you read? Yes? Then this post is for you.

If not, consider why to read.

As you may know, there are different purposes for reading: for pleasure or information. When you pick up a book for information, your intention dictates how to approach the book: do you do investigative reading and exploratory reading?

Exploring the unknown

If we do not know what to search for, exploratory reading is the way. Assume you are new to a field. Overviews on the topic are rare to find. To reduce the so-called unknown unknowns to the known unknowns, we have to create a knowledge map.

If you want to be fast, you can skim the book. Sometimes scanning is not enough, and it is better to read quickly over parts of a book. After we finish the explorative task, we do not know the answers. Still, we have an idea of the responses we will find most likely find.

Investigating the known

Once we know what to search for, the task becomes more apparent, while not necessarily easier. We read investigative. Assume you have a particular question or are only interested in a specific topic. This question can come from your knowledge map or anywhere else.

Nowadays, access to information is easy. Our brain is easily overwhelmed by too much information. It is necessary to filter the important from the less important. We need to separate the wheat from the chaff. While a book may be helpful, maybe not all the book’s insights are valuable.

Knowing how to google is most often a quicker solution to many problems. Google acts as a natural filter for information. (And with this, I do not mean the advertisement-based filter bubble).

What if google does not know the answer? Assume the question is quite creative and the topic quite particular. You are on your own, and you have to deal with the raw material yourself.

Approaching a book with a question

The most important part is to have a question.

In many sciences, work usually starts with a hypothesis. The aim is to prove or falsify this hypothesis.

We do not need to go so far as to create a hypothesis, but we can think of questions we believe the book can answer for us.

Example: Influence by Robert Cialdini

An example is in order here.

I recently read Influence by R. Cialdini. Summaries of the book are available in many places.

As detailed in How to read a book, an informative book should lead to possible actions. For the book influence, there are two main activities possible: we can defend ourselves against psychological triggers, or we learn how to exploit these triggers.

The primary question is:

How to defend against triggers?

The best self-defense is the offense. However, Cialdini blames the exploitation of these principles for hindering their beneficial use as social shortcuts.

This accusation raises the question:

Why apply the principles of psychological influence in your communication?

and related to this one:

How to use them?

Now we have generated some initial questions.

The answers: go back to the book or the summary of the book with the questions. Try to find more specific questions.

Sometimes one person said it all. You read a phrase and it is all there. This is my selection of quotes on storytelling.

• “The world’s second oldest profession”
  – Gershon & Page: What storytelling can do for information visualisation
• “People have begun to forget how powerful human stories are, exchanging their sense of empathy for a fetishistic fascination with data… the human stuff is the main stuff, and the data should enrich it”
  – Jonathan Harris
• “Data journalism is not graphics an visualizations. it’s about telling the story in the best way possible. someties that will be a visualization… but sometimes it’s a news story. sometimes ust publishing the number is enough”
  – Simon Rogers
• “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel”
  – Maya Angelou
• “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories that you tell.”
  – Seth Godin
• “Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.”
  – Dale Carnegie
• “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”
  – Brandon Anderson
• “Everything is more compelling when you talk like a human being, when you talk like yourself.”
  – Ira Glass
• “Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others.”
  – Otto von Bismarck
• “Some of his stories became my stories, and just by telling them again and again, he gets to stay alive forever. That’s the magic of storytelling. It’s a time machine that can heal the world.”
  – Kevin van Valkenburg
• “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.”
  – Mark Twain
• “We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
  – Mark Twain

In which order to start reading your booklist?

Three years ago I run into the question “What are the best sources to read on programming?”

No matter your field of expertise, you certainly have asked yourself the question: How do I best inform myself on topic X.
You can search for your answer on web pages and blogs. For many daily life questions like “What is the best way to cook an egg”, this is the way to go. But what about “I want to become the best manager in the world?”. Where do you find the answer to this question? Sometimes it is good to read a good old honest book.

Quickly, you will find books. Many books. In fact, after one hour you will have more books than you can read in one year.
Looking over your list of books, the question certainly arises “In which order to start reading?”.

Sunken cost

The issue you face is the following:
There is always a lack of time for the most interesting things in our life. Especially reading. In addition, starting a book, which turns out to be boring and useless is frustrating. You spent your time and energy on this book even though it gave nothing or little back to you.

This means the book selection process is almost as important as reading the book. At least if you want to go beyond skimming many books and not only read books on your chosen topic the entire day. Some people recommend Blinkist to get a first impression of the book. I advocate another process: Manage your booklist.

Managing your reading list

In the beginning, there is always the question of the start point.

The best method to answer “Where to start?” is a meta-search.

What is a meta-search, you may ask?

You ask a lot of people in which order you should read their booklist.

Ask your colleagues, ask your boss, friend, neighbor, gardener, you name it.

Every suggestion of a book gets a +1. You then rank all those answers and voila – you have done a meta-search and compiled your booklist.

To google or not to google

If you are new in a community or there seems to be no community, it may be hard to find the people, who know all the answers. Luckily you and I know a guy who has most of the answers. Google. “Best books on …” is usually a good phrase to start. The search results feature web pages with lists of books.

Once you have several such lists the process becomes simple.
Ask each list like you would ask a person.
List all the books and mark +1 for every time a book appears on a list.

The problem with google is its simple-mindedness of google.
Depending on the topic, there is no direct answer from google. The art is how to find interesting books via google.

Considering my original problem, programming books, there has been an evolution since I first searched. This question is so popular nowadays, that “what is the best book for programming” actually returns pretty good results. Piere de Wulf has automated the process:

https://www.daolf.com/posts/best-programming-books/

As of the time of writing this is the third-best result of the google search.

Digging through your reading list

Great now you have a nicely ordered list. You start and we see us in three years when you are finished? Not so fast. You should not blindly follow the lists.

Depending on your needs reading the list from top to bottom is not what you want. Usually, you have your very own taste on what you think is important. This means you still need to read the descriptions of the book and why each listed author thinks it is a good book.

Building your reading list is a process. While reading something you will stumble across new sources. As soon as the sources appear twice you can start ranking. Sometimes you get a book recommendation from a trusted source. It would be stupid to put this book at the very bottom of your reading list.

Happy Reading!

– Goethe

How we got here

So you want to do storytelling? Telling tall tales? But how to start? You are probably much in the same situation as I was in late 2019:

I had a story to tell, of this I was sure but I did not know how to tell it. Nor did I know where to start to learn how to tell it.

Originally, I decided to start a blog to gather resources about storytelling. Very soon I got overwhelmed by the sheer material out there. Just checking the calendar: it is already July 2021. Certainly, it took some time to get here. I used this time to dig into the topic and to clarify my blog’s purpose:

My main idea for the blog was storytelling. I want to write about the topic of effective communication and getting the point across. How to not get lost in the myriad of options that we have today.

I know not every much more precise, but I hope it will help me.

So let’s descend into the mine of storytelling.

What is storytelling?

The most obvious way to obtain this answer could be to look up Wikipedia.

“Storytelling describes the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics, or embellishment.”

A glance over this article reveals: storytelling is quite a vast field.

The two most prominent and established thematic fields are storytelling in fiction and storytelling in marketing.

Storytelling in fiction is the very process of writing a story.
Storytelling in marketing is the process to wrap the product in a story to provide a better possibility for the customer to identify with his potential next buy.

Business storytelling

I will try to write about a far less popular part of storytelling:

Storytelling in business decisions.

“Business decisions” generally means a very large field.

Aspects of business storytelling:

• How to pitch your business idea?
• How to build a team?
• How to sell your products?

Business storytelling as an engineer

Due to my background as a scientist and engineer, I will restrict myself to the question:
How to influence business decisions as an engineer?

Examples:

• You have an idea, which you think to be great. How do you convince other people that it is a great idea?
• You want to change the course of things in your department. What do you need to do?
• You did something brilliantly in a small team. How do you scale your idea to a larger team, in short how to make your ideas grow?

Impact without power

These situations are certainly applicable to many professions. A recurring theme is acting impactful without formal power. There is a high probability that this getting more important as the knowledge economy spreads and we all want to sell on the “marketplace of ideas”.

The rise of influencers on platforms such as Youtube and Instagram is one such aspect.

At the same time, many big companies aim to democratize decision-making and reduce silo structures by fostering internal communication platforms. In a knowledge network power arises from being a node with many connections. The connections can be two ways, like in a classic network or one-way like for the modern followers.

What to expect

The aim is to have an overview of some good resources on storytelling. In addition, I want to explain key elements like the influence of the audience, story structure, and of course story delivery.

Stay tuned for the next article!