Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them via blog posts and audio podcasts

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• Last week I focused on honing my process of distilling a book down to a digest and testing a progressive summarization method. It’s painful to do this with books that don’t have an EPUB (i.e., e-book) file—it must be done by hand. I’m trying to find the right balance between capturing too little and too much in a digest. And trying to figure out a good length for a digest relative to a book’s length. And trying to figure out where it makes the most sense to add context and links to external sources in the digest without disrupting the flow of the story. Lots of work to do here. The quality of the digest affects the quality of what I can share with others.    
• Reading, creating a digest, and publishing blog posts for one book a week is doable. Adding on top of that recording, editing, and publishing a pod series the same week has been a struggle.

What I learned:

• I’ll start measuring the number of book digests I create and their length (relative to the book’s length). If I don’t measure this, the quality of these digests likely won’t improve.
• If an entrepreneur endorses a biography, that’s a good sign that the biography is high quality and worth reading.
• I must screen books continually. I must identify high-quality books I want to read while I’m still reading another one. Waiting until I finish a book to start screening for the next one has led to spending too much time on books that aren’t excellent.
• Biographies that include specific information about how entrepreneurs solved problems and specific financial information are more likely to include actionable insights that other entrepreneurs will find useful.
• Not creating or listening to my podcast episodes for a few weeks had an unexpected benefit. When I listened again after a break, I was able to pick out areas of improvement I’d missed before.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!