Book: Love Is The Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends

24 Feb 2016

I found out about this through the recommendation by Dan Martell. As I’m subscribed to his newsletter and often find value in his posts, I decided to follow his advice on books. I wasn’t disappointed!

Love Is The Killer App by Tim Sanders discusses why it is important to read books, how to do it and then how to put the acquired knowledge to use in everyday life.

Author defines these three as “intangibles” - something that each of us owns and can share it with others without losing it. In fact, more successfully we share more we receive in the return.

I love this point of view and found it helpful in understanding how to develop meaningful interactions through providing value, both in personal and professional relationships.

Knowledge is in books

Books give you knowledge. The news gives you awareness. The latter is a measurement of today. Knowledge is a measure of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Awareness is finite. Knowledge is forever.

This quote (and the whole chapter) argues fact-based knowledge vs. understanding-based knowledge. While news provide most recent facts, they are not meant to be a source of ideas and inspiration. This is where books step in - although the facts may be outdated (this book was published in 2003), the concepts and lessons in it hold for much longer.

Also, people by nature enjoy to share what they know with others and get a sense of accomplishment and earn credibility for it. But, in fact-sharing business the competition is much larger because facts are so easy to find and it’s only a matter of luck from whom you will find out the result of last night’s game.

It is more valuable to listen first, and then share ideas that people can apply in their specific situations, to provide them with a new perspective that they haven’t thought of before. To help them help themselves.

Develop a reading system

I found it interesting how author puts a lot of focus on developing a reading system that helps him to be more aware of what he is learning, and think this is a good idea. He developed his own system that he calls “Book Cliffing” - what he does is he tags the parts he finds useful and also writes a mark in the front blank page about it.

The end result is a short summary of the whole book which is useful if you want to quickly remind yourself of a certain takeaway.

Since I’m mostly reading books in electronic format this technique is not directly applicable in my case, but I love the idea of writing down key takeaways with purpose of fortifying acquired knowledge and storing it for later use. This is actually the reason I write these posts, but I’m also looking forward to further developing my reading system.

Network and Compassion

There are two more chapters about Network and Compassion, but I mostly focused on the first one as it was the most innovative for me. While the other two also offer great ideas and insights into old-fashioned corporative way of thinking, I feel they are being much more promoted nowadays, especially in the startup community so I was more familiar with them from the start.

How to apply all this to blog posts?

As another great source of knowledge and actionable ideas I find blog posts, particularly in the area of self-development and entrepreneurship. Their peculiarity is in that each blog post from a certain series (e.g. Groove’s Startup Journey or Nathan Barry’s ConvertKit story) can act as a stand-alone piece of content and it’s hard to summarize what is already pretty much summarized by itself.

The whole concept is also very interactive and “lean” since readers immediately provide their feedback and point what they would like to learn more about.

There is a ton of awesome blog posts on various topics and I would love to have a way to systemize that knowledge and keep a track of what I read and what I’ve learned from it.