Learn it write - read!
Retention of Reading - a career must!
I HAVE from early childhood amazed one and all, and that includes doting family and loathing friends, by my unparalleled inability to do well at exams and come anywhere near the marks required to qualify for anything I have even been bet upon to fail an eye test, and I must admit I did not disappoint my adoring fans. There came a time finally when I woke up one day to realise that absorbing information orally was not always the best way to remember things since the person that told you could and often did deny all knowledge of having vouchsafed any information even remotely similar to what you said he told you! When something like `Get it in Writing' became the byword, I shuddered because of my disability.
Career progression, I realised only then, is based on the precept that only what is written is fact. What is said is rarely so unless it is also written down somewhere. This forcibly brings to mind the time when I took my expired passport for the purposes of identification.
The concerned official refused to accept it because it had expired. Which meant that through some inscrutable means I had ceased to be whom I was because I had no document to prove my state of membership to the human race! With my inability to absorb the written word I decided to visit my personal sage on Career Mountain, and ask him about the rather gloomy disabilities that abounded in my insubstantial frame.
I am a very fast reader but only of material that I want to read rather than the junk that I have to read. I am often spammed by diabolic colleagues who thrust reams of unimaginable drivel at me that they expect me to memorise till it runs in rivulets out of my ears.
The sage said just as I prided myself in active listening (one can do this if one is unmarried - once the bell has tolled though, listening becomes continual and totally inactive), active reading can do wonders for one's ability to master documents virtually like a flatbed scanner with optical character recognition. The revision element will also, he said, anchor the memory of what you read in your mind for easy and quick recall when needed.
There are five steps to get started on the route to Total Recall, and one starts by:
Scan: Scan the document visually: This means starting at the beginning. Most of us go to page one of a document or a book, skipping the table of contents and any foreword or preamble.
We generally start at the introduction but then simply skip everything else and jump to the conclusion, in both deed and fact. It is important to check out everything including every chapter-introductions and end-chapter conclusions. Then at the end, check the index too. Once that is done, return to the table of contents and see which of the sections are germane to the issue you have to decide upon
Ask Why: There may be things in the document/book that are not immediately clear. Note the points on a separate paper and tag the place in the document for reference. If one or more appear more than three times in a long document, these are the concern-causing areas that you should ask persistent questions about.
If nothing can provide a satisfying answer from the contents, it becomes a match-winner for you because it is bound to be the questions that those that wrote it hoped you had never ask
Depth Charge: Having scanned the contents and the summaries, you need to get your eyeballs on a roll. Read the sections you have marked in particular detail and winnow the chaff from the grain. Take care to discard the chaff and retain the grain! Take notes and zero in on the concern areas - if they are relevant.
I can never forget a boss I once had who would quibble at punctuation and capitalisation while completely missing the gaps in logic and fact. This is akin to not seeing a forest because there are trees in the way.
In the end, the poor man was given material that he used to wallow in correcting while putting his signature on the most disastrous decisions ever made in the history of that company. People began to bank on his nit-picky ways and slipped in stuff they wanted to push buried in all that. The man was so focussed on the punctuation that he would let the matter slip by
Remember:Having read the relevant bits and taken them through the wringer, try and make a mental précis of it and then render it to paper (or screen) and see how the postulations `hang' together
Revise:Having remembered and noted down the relevancies, do a recheck by including or deleting certain information that you can discuss with your core cronies. I always found that I scored decent marks when some hapless classmate came up and asked me to teach it to her.
Drilling it through her dense though divine head actually helped me in anchoring the stuff in my own mind. Even though your core teams may not have dense (or divine) crania, the process will work like magic This technique really helps in information extraction from the reams of paper we are assaulted with every day. The ability to `sequentialise' information from what you have is really like tying thrusters to your career prospects that allows you to rise faster than leavened dough in a hot oven. The technique that I called the SADRR method works brilliantly and certainly will help you to be a wiser and not SADDR person!
ABHIMANYU ACHARYA
abhimanyu@india.com
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