On Taking Notes, Part 1: Preparing to Take Notes

This first installment of an eight-part series on note-taking results from the frequent requests I get to help people write effective reviews of meetings, conferences, programs, and books. The first step to writing focused reviews is note-taking, which is the planning stage of the writing process. Your first draft will go a lot smoother with a strong plan, so let's get started.

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I'm a big fan of reading for pure pleasure. Few activities are better than hanging out on a beach, in a park, or in your living room while cozying up to a fiction or nonfiction book just for the sake of relaxation. But reading with a purpose can happen at the same time. Pleasure and purpose can live in harmony.

What is reading, or listening, with a purpose? Actually, many things. For me it could mean making myself a more knowledgeable education consultant, or to better understanding a social issue in becoming a more informed citizen. For you it might mean getting through an academic course, learning a new skill, or passing a high-stakes test. For someone else it might lead to preparing for a terrific vacation experience, choosing the best academic path for a child, or achieving professional mastery in a craft.

Whatever the aim of our reading or listening with a purpose, we can take three useful steps to ensure we make the most of the reading experience.

First, answer: "Why and for whom am I taking notes?" If you're taking them just for yourself, then answer why you need them. To be updated on a project? To learn a new process? To determine the feasibility of an organizational move? To understand how the author created a cultural shift in her company? If you're taking notes for someone like your manager or your team, answer why they need the notes. If you're not sure, ask well before attending the event or reading the book. Without answering this question (I know, it's really two questions), your note-taking experience will be useless.
 
Second, answer: "What does the audience need to know?" List the necessary items, read them, and reread them to embed them in your consciousness. They will become your mission for attending the meeting or reading the material.

Third, answer: "What methods and sources would best get me the answers I want?" For attending an event, this might mean knowing which parts of the meeting and which speakers are most valuable. These assets shift from meeting to meeting and from book to book. For instance, I once attended a language conference to get a grasp of a speaker's communication theory; when I heard her the following year at the same conference, I was more interested in observing her communication style for my own development as a speaker. As for books, I remember reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Ultimate Experience to learn about his theory, while I read his Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discover and Invention to hear what his renowned subjects had to say about their creative experiences. For reading a book, decide whether you'll read the whole thing, key parts, appendices, and additional resources. Time is of the essence here. You have to be all business.

Now you're planning to listen or to read. You're ready for the next step, listening with a purpose, the topic of the next post.

BOOK BRIEF: Deep Diving into Principles

Principles by Ray Dalio (Simon & Schuster, 2017) 593 pages

Why would anyone who is not an entrepreneur or business analyst want to read Ray Dalio's book, which is one-third an  autobiography of a billionaire and two-thirds a how-to of the mind? The answer is in its applicability to most issues confronting us, from dealing with one's own emotions to contending with difficult coworkers or clients, from responding to tough questions about business forecasts to addressing universal concerns that challenge our everyday life. 

Even Dalio himself suggests in the opener to jump right into parts two (life principles) and three (work principles), skipping part one if you'd prefer to bypass how he came to embody the principles. The principles themselves are refreshingly philosophical and organic, not what one would expect from a bottom-line driven businessman. The truth is Dalio is more than that. He realizes that life is a process of planning, failure, learning, recovery, and continuous change. Anyone wanting to get a unique, well-packaged thesis on how to approach daily challenges of any type would do well to read Principles.   

BOOK BRIEF: The Meaning of Big

What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence by Stephen A. Schwarzman (Simon and Schuster, 2019), 394 pages

If you dream, dream big, because dreaming big and dreaming small take just about the same amount of time. If you try hard, try hard for something big, because trying for something big or for something small take roughly the same amount of effort. And don't let failure stop you. These are the main messages of Stephen A. Schwarzman's compelling and useful autobiographical look at best business practices and, more significantly, how to live a focused, fulfilling life, Wall Street style.

Schwarzman has lived by those words of advice, as a teenager, when he tried to persuade his father to go national with the family's linen business in Philadelphia (he failed), and when he wouldn't accept Harvard's rejection of him and pumped a pocketful of coins in a pay phone to get the university to reverse its decision (he failed). As a Lehman Brothers associate, he blundered more than once on big presentations. When beginning Blackstone. the giant equity asset management firm, his days of hustling for a first investor went to weeks and months. Yet his tenacity enabled him to achieve enough successes in between all these setbacks as a high school track athlete, a student activity coordinator at his alma mater Yale, and as an investment banker. These successes reinforced his confidence in an evolving decision-making system and in his commitment to principles that have always guided him through big moves, even in tough economic times, when his competitors failed.

Schwarzman's attention to the details of elite image-making is as striking as his legendary largess: $100 million to the New York Public Library, whose main branch on Fifth Avenue bears his name, $150 million to Oxford University, $150 million to Yale for a renovated student center, $25 million to Abington High School, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated, $40 million for a scholarship fund for children to attend New York Catholic schools, and $100 million to establish Schwarzman scholars in Tsinghua University, Beijing, not to mention the countless millions he raised as Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He details how involved he was in executing these bequests, putting in no less effort than when opening new Blackstone offices globally, establishing new investment funds, and serving as an unofficial economic consultant to world leaders, including the present and past few presidents. 

Schwarzman writes with candor, humor, and insight, gifts in their own right for readers interested in biography, business, and self-development. His 25 Rules for Work and Life at the end of What It Takes have grounded him throughout his life and make sense for the burgeoning entrepreneur to adopt.

Do You Know How to Argue? Part 3: Remaining Purposeful

Part 1 of this series on arguing well notes that an argument needs to be clearly stated. If one American votes Democratic and her neighbor votes Republican, they are not engaging in an argument. They are voting. But if she claims that her candidate would make a better leader, she would need to qualify that statement for an argument. She might say the Democratic candidate follows through on pledges more regularly than the Republican, or has more expansive government experience, or speaks more eloquently, or  supports gun reform more ardently through his voting record. 

Part 2 looks at the rules of arguing, such as how long should the argument run, what will be the range of talking points, how will the argument be resolved, who will resolve it, and whether a judge is necessary.

After defining the terms of the argument and setting the rules, let the argument begin—but keep the lines of argumentation in check. For a purposeful argument, we'll need to be faithful to two principles: stick to the point of the argument and refrain from logical fallacies. We'll cover each of these separately.

Stick to the point. Let's say we agree to argue about whether the Democratic candidate has more expansive government experience than the Republican candidate. The Democratic supporter might say her candidate has been a town mayor for eight years. Fair enough. Now the Republican supporter replies his candidate has six years experience, two in the town council, two in the state assembly, and two as US attorney general. The Democratic supporter must concede that while her candidate has more years of experience, her opponent's is more expansive, on the town, state, and federal levels. This fact alone may not be sufficient for the Republican supporter to win the argument, but he is winning 1-0. Perhaps the Democratic supporter can talk about her candidate's service on state and federal commissions, or her four-year stint as a naval officer. But she would not want to talk about her years as a corporate attorney unless she had government clients.  

Avoid logical fallacies. Using them will surely erode, if not completely destroy, your credibility. In 2006, I wrote a 20-part series on logical fallacies, such as:

• straw man, misrepresenting an opponent's position to destroy its credibility. Example: Since you like the Democratic candidate, you hate Republicans. 
• ad hominem, attacking the person, not the position. Example: You like the Democratic candidate, but you have been wrong on so many other issues, so you're wrong now.
• unequal comparison, equating unequal ideas. Example: Voting for the Democratic candidate is like voting for a monarchy.
• guilt by association, inappropriately associating an idea or a person with another discredited idea or person to refute an argument. Example: Ten years ago you voted for a candidate who ended up in prison, so why should your voting preference have any credibility?

There are scores of logical fallacies worth studying, so know them all before entering a well-reasoned argument. The point is to narrow your field of vision to remain purposeful.

Do You Know How to Argue? Part 2: Setting Rules

In part 1 of this series on arguing effectively, I explain that we have to define terms carefully before embarking on an argument. For instance, I would want to qualify the proposition Paris makes a better vacation than Venice by at the least stating the precise location (the city in France, not in Texas or New York, versus the city in Italy, not in California or Florida), the vacationers (college students? young families? middle-aged singles, senior couples?), and the purpose of vacation (architecture? art? dining? history? music? sports? theater? walking?).

Rules of conduct also apply to argument. Should we establish the points we want to argue (e.g., buildings, waterways,  walks)? Should we insist on refuting each point the opponent raises? Then how do we refute? If I raise a point about the beauty of the great squares of Paris, such as the Place de la Concorde or the Place Charles de Gaulle, should you be required to refute my point by devaluing those locations? by explaining why Piazza San Marco and Campo San Polo are superior? by jumping off point to claim the Ponte di Rialto and Ponte dell' Accademia are more beautiful bridges than the Parisian squares? Should we determine time allotments for each point we want to argue, as well as the total time for the entire argument? Should we assign a judge to keep us on track? If the argument should lead to a winner, how would we determine victory? What about an audience to determine the winner? 

In my years of sitting in corporate conference rooms, university lecture halls, and Thanksgiving dinners, I have noticed that many of these arguments turn into exchanges of indignation, invective, or insult because people don't establish rules. We might be arguing about entirely different things when we don't define terms, but we are certainly arguing pointlessly when we don't set the terms of engagement. 

Do You Know How to Argue? Part 1: Defining Terms

Most irresolvable arguments result not from intractable parties unwilling to compromise but from their inability or unwillingness  to clearly define their terms, or their unawareness of sound  argumentative principles. Arguments are useless without establishing definitions. I'm not talking about social arguments, such as whether a career in the public sector is better than one in the private sector. Talk that one up all night with your buddies over your hummus dips and G&Ts, for all I care. 

But a really useful argument requires us to set clearly established routes through which our rhetorical lines can go—if only all the TV pundits and politicians took heed! To illustrate, let's look at that weakly phrased proposition in the first paragraph.

As a first step in the public-private sector argument, let's see who's arguing. Assume one is a 32-year-old single woman without children happily employed for 3 years as a medical doctor in a group family practice and living in a Manhattan co-op apartment. The other is a 45-year-old male public high school gym teacher, also happy at his work for the past 13 years, and a homeowner in suburban Pennsylvania married to a 43-year-old public elementary school teacher with two children, a 9-year-old girl and 5-year-old boy. Of course, we can collect much more personal data if needed, but this is a starting point. Maybe one more item about the doctor and the gym teacher: Even though she prefers the private sector and he the public sector, they are open-minded about their position, a trait uncharacteristic of the times we live in, don't you think? Based on this information, the argument might be reworded to "A career in the private sector is better than one in the public sector for a doctor" or  "A career in the public sector is better than one in the private sector for a young family with a hefty mortgage and college bills on the horizon."

Next we need to consider whether by a career in the public sector we're talking about a career in government jobs or also those non-government organizations whose main source of income is government funding. Also, are we talking about federal, state, or municipal government careers? (There are differences.) What about the departments in those organizations? For private sector, we should also decide whether we mean only salaried jobs or self-employed careers too. Having reflected on those matters, we now change our proposition to Having a career as a purchasing manager in a federal government agency is better than one as a purchasing manager in a Fortune Global 500 corporation.

Now step 3. Should we continue to narrow our terms by mentioning the precise federal government agency and Fortune 500 company? What about the locations in the United States? Let's say the doctor and gym teacher settle on Having a career as a purchasing manager in the FBI in Washington, DC is better than one as a purchasing manager in Exxon Mobil in Irving, Texas.

With step 4 comes the choice of the comparison word better. What in the name of sanity does better mean? Better in what way? Support systems? Salary? Job security? Camaraderie? Paid time off? Growth opportunities? Professional development opportunities? Relocation options? Health benefits? Retirement benefits? Self-fulfillment? After-work area activities? We can go endlessly with this better word, so you can see the argument is bound to go in circles purposelessly without either person arguing persuasively or swaying the other.

Once we learn to define the terms of an argument, we'll often see that we have little to argue about because we agree with our presumed adversaries in most cases.

What's So Bad about Being Prepared?

My daughters and their husbands, who more than once have had to deal with my travel habits, just had to send me this article about a father planning to bring his family to the airport 14 hours before their scheduled flight. The just-in-case mentality of that dad reminded my family of me, and I must admit, they've got a point. I'm one of those what-if guys: What if we get a flat tire on the way to the airport? What if the road is closed because the President is in town? What if an accident backs up the traffic for miles and hours?

But I'll tell you why I have no apologies for such seemingly idiosyncratic behavior. It has served me well as a reader, writer, and student of life. For decades, that mindset has made me bring a favorite book to the bank, doctor's office, post office, and supermarket for something to read in peace while waiting my turn as everyone else fumes over how long the line is. That sentiment has gotten me up an hour early for years so that I can better concentrate on my writing assignment as the world sleeps. That attitude has made me show up at the airport early to squeeze in an extra hour of research time in the comfort of my seat while others aimlessly drift through the terminal shops. I have not struggled through flights from New York to Beijing, Mumbai, and Sydney because I am always prepared to learn something new from whatever I am reading at the moment. The habit of being prepared has moved this man of ordinary intelligence but boundless curiosity (which is what most of us are, but we may not realize it) from one successful 19-year career as an organizational director to another successful 23-year one as an independent communication consultant and, if I'm lucky to have the health, yet another as a full-time writer in the near future.

Of course, if you're a mom, dad, grandparent, aunt, uncle, big sister, or brother responsible for young children, you wouldn't want to get to the airport early just to watch your restless kids wreck terminal kiosks and trounce on people waiting for their flight. But just thinking of waiting as a privilege and not an inconvenience has transformed my life—and it could yours if it hasn't already.