Way back 90’s I used to have personal web site on AOL and writing at that time what we’re really essentially blog posts years before I had ever even heard of blogs I wrote this:
In the introduction to his book Leadership Is an Art
, Max DePree says:
“In some sense, every reader “finishes” every book according to his or her experiences and needs and beliefs and potential. That is the way you can really own a book. Buying books is easy; owning them is not. There is space for you to finish and own this book. The ideas here have been in my mind for quite a few years, changing, growing, maturing. …As a child, I often watched adults study books and learned one of my first lessons about reading. They wrote in their books. Intent and involved readers often write in the margins and between lines…Good readers take possession of what they are learning by underlining and commenting and questioning. In this manner they “finish” what they read.”
Well that’s me. My books are more often than not full of underlines, circled text, highlighting, and post-it notes. Their pages are sometimes wavy and wrinkled from being soaked from the sweat dripping off my brow on as I read them on a stair master or stationary bike.
Recently an online friend said to me he’d like to not just get a copy of Defensive Estimating: Protecting Your Profit
but that he likes to get my personal notated copy of the book. I thought it was funny reading that in that he pretty much figured out on his own what I did to the books I read so I took a photo of it at the time to document it.
It turns out I’ve got a whole bunch of books that look like that or even worse. Tom Peters’ Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties
