Chapter 20Extract Gold from a Business Book

In this chapter, you’ll be learning how to study a business book and make its potentially valuable concepts your own by agreeing and arguing with them on your freewriting paper. If the book’s ideas are strong, you’ll have a greater sense of ownership of them, even knowing how to test them out in your own life. If the book’s ideas stink, then you’ll gain by refuting those ideas. You must actively engage with the material and make it move. That’s a key to this chapter, this book, and this approach.

Okay, you need a business book with a premise that intrigues you, one you’ll want to give a close reading. There’s no sense in torturing yourself with a work repellent to you. As you work your way through the ...

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