I’ve been an avid reader ever since I learnt to read and every holiday I lug along several books to consume during my relaxing break.
This year I invested in a Kindle Touch. I took the plunge and downloaded several books and stored them on my new lightweight eBook reader.
Within minutes of reading the Kindle on the beach I realised what a massive boon to reading this was. Lighter than a paperback, read from any angle, choice of books at an instant, I even downloaded a book on the beach. Cheaper books, no need for reading glasses as you enlarge the text, an instant dictionary to look up new words, web links built in.
What a gadget. I could even read 50 Shades of Grey with no one knowing what I was reading 🙂
But I tell you, there are some serious lessons for us in sales and coaching sitting on my lap. Let me enlighten you.
Reading on the Kindle soon became infectious. I began to speed read. I don’t know why. I read more as a result. Downloaded more books and sped read them. I began to look for shorter, more punchier books, put off by the 300 page tomes.
I realised that once something gets digitised we lose patience we want it shorter. The same happened to photography and photos.
I read an article about a family who bought a digital camera in 2002 to create family memories and ten years later they were lamenting the lost drawer of photos, the basket of snapped memories created by TruPrint. All their memories were on computer hard-drives so one weekend they decided to print off good snaps from the collection of over 7,000 images on the computer.
The result? They printed just 40. Because digital photography was so easy, they found hundreds of duplicated shots, a gamut of bad photos and dross.
They wanted less. And that’s the lesson – less is more.
The modern digitally savvy consumer wants short, concise information in the future. So we need to ensure everything we send out to customers and colleagues is shorter, sweeter and sharper – to the point more than ever before.
Can’t change the passage of time.
Would I return to paper books? Never, no way. It’s the only way I can read 50 Shades of Grey on the beach without anyone knowing.
