Game in the Brain

So lately I find myself lately learning more from the CRM process book than from science book. When the wife was asking about Grit, by Angela Duckworth, I realize that by my current Knowledge to Action process the book would only fill 4 sentence paragraph about focus and arranging one’s life to be able to better focus on particular goals. (I get why Nick gives certain books a 3, while I tend to score on the high side of 4.5 – if you impress me thats a 5; now for just having an Action Plan thats a 5*)

Which leads me to remember that the Project Operations Management  Book would be the longest to Summarize into a Action Plan Document. The Maintenance Deskbook would also be particularly long.  But it has little to do with Personal Productivity… not exactly. While I wrote this paragraph with the intent to say teh these Work Knowledge is only verbose because of the technical knowlege I need for work – I simplified them so that I can use them at a personal level so that I can better undestand and appreciate their core benefits.

Ok, so probably the Encyclopedia of Operation’s Management by Arthur V. Hill is not summarize to an Action Plan and thus is not a great source of self help, BUT thats not completely correct. It was a Reference Tool – allowing me to research various processes by having the right key terms to find them online.

Taking a Different Approach: I think i can summarize Self Help into 2 Sources or Categories. First are Action Plans – books that gives a set of heuristics by which I can train myself into doing under the recurring problem circumstance. Second is Supporting Material – where the Book (Source of Knowledge) just give the Supporting Ideas, References, Evidence, Knowledge that is the reasons behind the Action Plan.

these Days I’m reading “Technical Stuff” in terms of Books on Operations of various Businesses and Industries, and with my my Process Framework I learned from Gaming shunting them into: Action Plan or Supporting material.

Learning to Hack a System, the way any Gamer would hack a game system to do what they want to do, I learned to take a Business Process and distill it to what can be used in a Personal Level. Typically that means it is a Heuristic or Formula of up to 4 criterias that can be done off the top of my head with no “Big Math”.

Again, with learning something new I get flashbacks of growing up and all the mistakes I made and how much I would have had it better if I learned this. And the mental process of going through all those regrets and stupid decisions and wondering how it could have been different with these “tricks”.

I think Getting things Done by David Allan is a great set of beginning processes but one needs to think that these are all modular and hackable. Gerrard Puccio’s Creative Thinkers Toolkit is a great set of Ideation Tools. Deepwork by Cal Newport gives the model of how Concentration works, which is complimented by Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg and Grit by Angela Duckworth. But Taichi Ono’s the Toyota Way – basically the Lean Methodology and the Case Studies and Walk through of by Bill Carreirra.  

*that the book can be distilled into an Action Plan then its a good book.
Distraction: Books with poor Action Plans
There is this one book filled with Essays and it was supposed to be an Aid for a particular set of users. I gave it a 5/5 because it was kinda alone in its scope and tackling the field. But it was Essays that was 90% supporting narrative and 10% actionable. Now to be fair it was Ground Breaking and very much underated when I consider how much good it will do the target audience vs what else there is in the market right now. The thing that conflicts with me is that its actionable content misses the 90% of what can be identified . Considering there are underlying principles that give 80% weight in the experience while only being 20% of the knowledge of the discipline it kinda addressed the goal.
Then there is very underrated Book that can be taken to be used in any discipline of that market, but thats for another topic.

Some Key Criteria:
Knowledge should be Predictive, it gives foreknowledge of the best options or actions available. So Knowledge should be Actionable, it informs on the Best Action to take in the situation. Since circumstances can be complicated, so should Actions be as nuanced and adaptable – thus an Action Plan (action with a processes and conditions) is what comes out of a very good book.