Magazines are our friends.
I would like to talk about magazine subscriptions, but not only about what magazines you like and why people should subscribe to many magazines. I think we must receive probably over 30 magazines a month, but it's how to read magazines that matters.
Reading magazines is different than reading a book. In fact, reading a technical book on marketing is completely different than reading a novel. You would scan a marketing book or a technical book to get a bird's eye overview of the book. You wouldn't necessarily do that with a novel, because you don't want to know parts of what happens in the story before other parts. But with magazines, you do neither.
Look at the front of the magazine, then go to the table contents and find out what's in the magazine that may be of interest. Quickly scan through the magazine, through those pages that are going to be of interest, bypassing all of the advertising and things that will be just a waste of time, and go directly to the interesting information and start reading.
You can scan it. You can speed-read it if you're into that, or you can read it a little slower for comprehension. But read it as quickly as you’re comfortable. When something stands out, like an important idea or an ‘ah-ha’ moment, or something that seems like, “Wow, I can use that,” then highlight or rip that page out. And if you highlight and you earmark that page, then go back to it and handle it at a designated time. If you pull it out, which I sometimes do, then throw the rest of the magazine away when you're finished, and then put that page in the stack that you're going to go back to, to extract the information. Here’s where you may make notes on one of those index cards we talked about earlier.
And then you just quickly move through your magazines and not necessarily allow let them to stack up and stack up and stack up. I do that whether it's a home theatre magazine and I'm trying to find some cool equipment that I can probably persuade my wife Alicia to allow us to buy, or it has to do with trading magazines, or it has to do with Forbes magazine, Fortune Magazine, Robb Report magazine that I receive. Regardless of the magazines that come in, and we do get a ton of different magazines, I'll stack them up, and then I'll have my moment where I'm basically sitting over the trash can in my chair, and this is time to spot, scan, read and dump. That's it.
And that's a way to get a whole bunch of information out of very valuable magazines without feeling as if, "Oh gosh, I don't have time to read a magazine. I’ve got other books to read," or "I’ve I got this to do."
Many people who get magazines collect them. Others throw them away saying, "Why did I subscribe to this?" Some want to read a magazine and get frustrated because they didn't read current issue, and now the next issue is in. It doesn't have to be that way. There's a huge amount of great information in those magazines that's just screaming out for you to read it, so just take the time as I’ve suggested.
In an issue of Business 2.0 was an article about a woman who took the regular cowboy boot and, knowing sneakers were very big for running and exercise, added an insert to cowboy boots, making them cushiony and comfortable like sneakers. Now that kind of thinking was worth the price of admission!