In continuation of the articles about books and reading, I would like to share a way to measure the usefulness of books. I will try to tell you how you can determine for yourself how good this or that book you read was.
Of course, everyone has their own criteria for determining the "coolness" of books. Someone likes the syllable, some are crazy about pictures and illustrations (such people like to have more of them), others evaluate the book with the so-called "aftertaste". However, all this is quite subjective and is not suitable for evaluating useful books (to which I refer psychological, philosophical publications and books on self-development).
Such books are convenient to evaluate the number of useful ideas and their relative density per page.
It is very easy to count the number of useful ideas. When, while reading a book, you suddenly blurr into an invisible (or visible) smile, you realize that you are impressed by a phrase or an idea expressed by the author, you can safely put the book "+1". You can put a plusadin directly on the margins of the book (some bend the corner of the page at the same time). You can summarize not only ideas, but in general all places, events, examples and everything that aroused your interest. If you wanted to remember or quote something from the book, this is an obvious "+1".
After you read the whole book, count the pros. Their sum will be the number of useful ideas (let's call this parameter KPI).
The relative density of ideas is the ratio of the number of useful ideas (KPIs) to the number of pages in the book. This parameter shows the concentration of ideas. In other words, if there are only 30 useful ideas in one 300—page book (one idea for each 10 pages), and in the second - 70 ideas for 100 pages (almost one idea per page), then it is clear which book is cooler and more useful.
Try to determine the usefulness of a book in this way, and you will quickly realize that all books are different, and you can feel this difference. By the way, the same parameters can be applied, for example, to speeches at conferences (number of ideas per minute), blogs (number of cool ideas per 100 posts) and so on.
