It's Not About the Takeaways
“What are the key takeaways?”
This is the question my friend asks when I send him a link to a book, article, or podcast. He guards his time closely and uses this question as a screening mechanism.
I’ve found it both frustrating and helpful.
Frustrating when I didn’t have a quick answer. I thought I was frustrated with my friend, but I was actually frustrated with myself for not knowing the answer.
“How could I listen to a whole podcast and not be able to spit out one useful tip? Was I even paying attention?”
Then the question became helpful because I knew if I was recommending something, I better have a coherent reason to support my recommendation – usually in the form of several actionable pieces of advice.
Anticipating the question helped me to better absorb the content.
Several years ago, this question was not as difficult. I found actionable takeaways in almost everything I read and listened to. But recently, I find myself struggling more with the question.
“Am I losing my comprehension skills? Am I not paying attention? Maybe this content isn’t actually valuable.” Those were some of the thoughts running through my mind.
I knew that wasn’t the case, but I couldn’t articulate why. That was, until I came across this piece by Morgan Housel, and it all clicked into place.
The article is about how to read financial news, and his last point is Actionable Takeaways Should Be Rare.
Why is that the case? According to Housel, “the person writing the article has no idea who you are, what your goals are, what your situation is, or how it will affect you.”
Isn’t that the truth.
The purpose of reading books and articles and listening to podcasts is to give yourself a framework, to hear several different educated perspectives. The point is to build a large collection of data points on which you can base your own, highly personalized, decisions.
When takeaways are important
Remember I said that several years ago I didn’t have any trouble answering the “takeaway question”?
That’s because I was a beginner at everything.
When you’re a beginner, it’s better to seek structure. This is the time when takeaways are valuable.
If you’re fresh out of college and new to personal finance, you want a simple framework to follow, not a high-level discussion of investment strategy.
In that case, you should read something like I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi.
Maybe try this article on automating your savings, or this one describing two personal finance pillars everyone should master.
If you’re new to learning a language, you want an article with a few actionable things you can do today – actions that provide quick results, like the tips in this article.
At the early stages of learning Spanish, you don’t want to read a book on Spanish culture – it won’t be useful. But as you reach mastery, that same book will be more helpful than the article I mentioned above.
When takeaways lose their value
As you progress from beginner to intermediate level – in anything – prescriptive content diminishes in value.
As your skill level grows, seek resources like interviews of experts with conflicting viewpoints. You want to hear different opinions on different scenarios.
You’ve mastered personal finance, so you want to understand the difference between portfolio theory and behavioral finance.
As your mastery level increases, you should drift away from the bulleted “how to” lists and gravitate toward the more nuanced – all in an effort to broaden your perspective and give yourself a larger knowledge base upon which to make decisions.
In the realm of finance, you might reach for something like Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, or The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
In the area of general self-improvement, you'll graduate from something like Atomic Habits by James Clear and start reading biographies. These are just a few of my favorites:
Books like Atomic Habits teach you how to execute, but biographies give you perspective on where you might want to focus that execution.
Here's your takeaway
Making the transition for me has looked like this:
Step 1: Everything I read has actionable takeaways. I implement a bunch of them and see good results.
Step 2: I still read and listen to things that have takeaways, but I don’t use all of them. Also, some of this stuff doesn’t have takeaways…what’s going on here?
Step 3: Most of the content I consume doesn’t have actionable takeaways, but that’s fine. I’m learning from it. I’m enjoying it. I know it will shape my decisions. The impact doesn’t have to be tangible.
So now my answer to the takeaway question is no. I don’t have any actionable takeaways from this one. It’s what I like to call a perspective piece.
But I promise it’s worth your time. I value my reputation too much to recommend something that isn’t.
