As you know, my no.1 piece of advice is to learn, relentlessly. If you don’t learn something, you could possible get inspiration. But, I’ll be honest, I’m not the biggest reader, and tend to get distracted easily. Although I may pick up books, I find it difficult to continue reading consistently for any major periods.
Enter Mentorist, who in their now words:
Mentorist summarizes bestsellers in business, leadership, and personal development. But most importantly, it presents you with actionable steps to apply the knowledge where you need it most.
https://www.mentorist.app
I mainly used Mentorist to listen to book summaries that were roughly 15-20 mins long, but gave me the key aspects of the book and allow me to ignore the padding in there. Summaries are generally available in audio or written word, and allow you take highlights built into the app. (Talk about a prime example of the 80:20 principle, but we’ll get into that another this…)
You can also save these highlights into a habit tracking aspect of the app, but in my opinion this wasn’t the strongest part. A key part of learning for me is that I can take notes, so listening to the summary while making notes in Notability worked really well for me.
There is a great range of productivity titles in there, but also a number of other non fiction titles, so you can really read around your topic and don’t have to focus completely on your niche area. I think this is really useful that you can still keep focussed to non fiction books to learn from, but also let your inspiration and direction wander.
I’m currently trying to reinforce the habit of reading (or listening to a book) for 15 minutes each day. This app makes it really achievable, and I probably listen to 3 unique summaries a week. There is literally no other medium that would allow me to complete this process. Mentorist makes this target easily attainable, and more importantly enjoyable.
I’ve also found that a couple of the summaries have been so interesting that I’ve added the full publication to my wish list. At least one of those books would not have been on my list without listening to the summary first.
I was really fortunate to have a feedback session with Greg, the founder of Mentorist, and it certainly sounds like they have a lot of exciting plans for the future. I’ll definitely be hanging around to see how that one works out for them!
I would definitely recommend Mentorist to you if your time is tight, or you’re just looking for a slightly different way to ingest some other systems and tools that you can use. It has become a key part of my learning arsenal.
