Beware of the book summary.
There’s an art to doing a book summary, which I can assure you very few people do well at. Many book summaries have 2 fatal flaws:
1) They tell you the conclusion,
2) They boil it down.
Sounds great right? It’s terrible. Because conclusions don’t matter nearly as much as the premises to have reached the conclusion. Outside of math, when you have good premises, you can make many (not just one) good conclusions.
Premise: He’s been in jail 9 times for theft.
Conclusion: He would be a poor candidate to work the register.
Conclusion: He’s probably not the best person to date your daughter.
Etc
Versus if you had the right conclusion of “He’s not a good guy for my daughter to date,” but your conclusion was based on the premise that, “He doesn’t make $100k a year.” Now you’re making the right conclusion currently, but your premises / beliefs are so wrong, you’ll likely make many other stupid conclusions in the future.
If your conclusion is good but the premises aren’t, you’ll only be able to make that 1 good conclusion.
The problem with book summaries is everything can be summarized up to sound stupid or worthless, and also the conclusion is given, which blows over the most important part many times – the premise.
Consider how worthless the following accurate, great summary type statements are:
“I read that book on persuasion, it basically says to try to make your idea seem like their own.”
“I listened to Gary Vee’s recent podcast, he basically says to work hard.”
“I read about the guy that called Gary Vee’s message ‘Struggle Porn’, he basically says ‘struggling is overrated.'”
If you keep it up with this sloppy and “efficient” way of summarizing everything, it becomes highly detrimental. Because everything seems trivial, obvious, or even just dumb, when you summarize it too much.
This is because understanding the premises are more important than the conclusions many times. People feel like you disagree with them if you don’t agree with the premise, even if you agree with the resultant conclusion. Conclusions are too easy to boil down to meaningless ideas and also blows over a lot of the premises to focus on the conclusion too much.
Beware of the book summary – they give you the conclusion, which keeps you from what matters – how the book concludes something, and the low level details of the conclusion.
