(2019-09-17) Chin The Land And Expand Strategy For Reading

Cedric Chin: The Land and Expand Strategy for Reading. ...reading in service of career goals

When you want to learn something new from reading, read the stories around that thing before you read the thing itself.

Want to learn the Kelly Criterion? Read Fortune’s Formula first — William Poundstone’s fantastic book about the history of the gambling strategy, and its applications in Vegas, horse betting, and equity investing.

land on the stories around X, and then expand into X itself.

The first reason it works is because most people are too tired by their day jobs to read after work

But stories, on the other hand. Good stories work even when you’re tired.

replaced my novel reading quota with narrative non-fiction

non-fiction narratives are important because human brains use narrative to learn effectively.

I’ll give you an example to make this concrete. In software, we have something called ‘agile software development’.

And so here you can sort of squint and see a ‘land and expand’ reading strategy for agile.

Start out with Henry Ford’s My Life and Work.

Move on to Taiichi Ohno’s Toyota Production System.

when you finally got around to reading the Poppendiecks’s book, you would bring along with you a collection of stories to their ideas. You would be able to place those ideas in the proper historical context, and you would be more critical of the tradeoffs in their system. Why? Because you know the constraints imposed on the original creators. You would be more critical when the ideas are applied way outside their original field of development.

Finally, read Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck’s book

This seems like a lot of work!” I can hear you cry. And indeed it is. It’s far more effective to read Poppendiecks’s book and then learn the constraints through actual trial and error application of those ideas.

But if you’re reading about a field that isn’t directly actionable, you’ll have to resort to reading in order to build context.

So this gives us an opportunity. It means that you can set up your reading system in a staggered manner:

Read three books at a time. An easy book (usually narrative), a medium-hard book, and a ‘difficult’ book (usually a non-fiction idea book

Read the easy book after work, before bed.

read the idea book itself on the weekend. This may take a number of weekends

I think my contribution here, if any, is to point out that you can stagger this while working a day job and living a full life