I vividly recall the disappointment of being handed a beautifully wrapped Christmas present, knowing immediately from the weight and firmness that it was a gift-wrapped chore.

The book I got as a “present” was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The present only presented its value when it saved me the trouble of coming up with a book, when a school assignment forced me to read a longer novel and write about it. For sure it was a wonderful story, but it still felt like a chore reading it. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy reading as a child, to learn about topics that were relevant and interesting to me, but as soon as something felt like a chore, my motivation would dissipate.

At Copenhagen Optimization we have a small library of physical books that we’ve picked out, because they have inspired some of us in how we think and work together today. Very few others have picked them up, so I think the books serve more as a collection of nice cultural artifacts, rather than a source for organizational learning. One reason might be that only very few have the time, focus and energy it takes to dedicate oneself to reading a physical book on top of work and life. I really wish it wasn’t so, and I don’t see how to change the world to that degree, so let’s find ways around it.

I’ve written this post to reflect on how audiobooks kindled my passion for reading real books again without requiring any additional time in my schedule.

Audiobooks for Personal Mastery by DALL-E

At university I conceded that I got the most out of being present at lectures. Why would I spend time reading the books, when the lecturer would always present a summary with the essentials? That was my excuse at least, for giving up on some of the homework reading. Maybe due to this practice, I’ve since preferred auditory learning - to hear how stuff works and then apply it. Of course this also made my learning very dependant on the quality of the lecturers and their capacity to teach and engage students, not to mention picking what the essentials were. Ironically, it seemed like many university lecturers had never learned how to actually teach, but that’s a different story!

Meanwhile 3G mobile data, iPhones and podcasts had become abundant. I found that podcasts were a great source of learning and inspiration on the go. However, the easily digestable format mostly only scratched the surface of the topic, and I would have to dive into details on my own to learn more. Libraries had become impractical, so research came from articles and blog posts, which are often similar to podcasts in accessibility and information density, but they could be skimmed much faster for relevant insights.

Another source I stumbled upon was a collection of recorded courses - I remember one about the history from philosophy to psychology. The content was more extensive than podcasts at the time, but the accessibility was lower and the range of material was limited. It seems this format never became popular.

When my responsibilities in Copenhagen Optimization began expanding beyond my comfort zone, with questions about leadership and how our ways of working affected the wellbeing and motivation of myself and my colleagues, I started feeling I was unprepared and in over my head. No colleague, podcast or blog post seemed to answer any of my questions, many of which were also about myself or about which questions I should ask to begin with. I needed to develop some kind of intuition about what leadership meant to me and how I wanted to interpret these new responsibilities.

In September 2017 I listened to my first non-fiction audiobook. With academic content, it was much like the recorded university course, but because of the way professional audiobooks are produced, it was much more succinct. Each word was deliberate. Like a well-produced, insight-dense, in-depth and satiating-in-a-different-way “podcast”.

In The Art of Impossible, Steven Kotler breaks down the return on investment on reading. As in, how much time spent consuming a source of knowledge do you trade for the time invested by the author to produce it (researching, writing, editing, etc.):

Resource Time to consume Time to produce ROI per minute
Blogs 3 minutes 3 days 1.440 minutes
Articles 20 minutes 4 months 8.640 minutes
Books 5 hours 15 years 26.280 minutes

Sure, it may be crudely generalized, but it resonated completely with my gut feeling of getting more out of my time with audiobooks than podcasts and blog posts. By the end of 2017 I had consumed five more books about human nature and leadership. Six books is like a university semester curriculum worth of knowledge within three months, all while riding my bike! My intuition slowly started to take shape and develop a direction - I was completely hooked.

Imagine that everything you knew about a topic could be placed within a circle. The periphery of the circle would be the boundary of what you knew; your known unknowns. When one knows close to nothing about a topic, the periphery is ever so tiny and it leads one to think that there’s not much more to learn. This is also called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Even though reading expanded my comfort zone, it also expanded the peripheries of these metaphorical circles within me, and even many more books down the line, I still feel like I have so much to learn, and some times no idea what I’m supposed to do. This just drives me to pick up the next book!

At Copenhagen Optimization have a budget for education and personal development, and I’ve had a company sponsored Audible-subscription for a few years now. The subscription gives credits I can trade for audiobooks, but I can also use them to gift audiobooks to colleagues, and I eagerly do so when someone shows any hint of interest. More and more colleagues have been curious about audiobooks that could add perspectives to their work and life, so this year I ran out of credits way early before my new credits arrived. I think that is really awesome!

One of the disciplines of learning organizations is personal mastery, but the problem may be that nobody has time to read. There’s no time for know-time! I think we can change that with more open access to audiobooks, together with a place to start, that matches the interests of the individual, so that it doesn’t feel like a chore. Reviews from other users and a star-rating system helps to determine whether a book might be a good fit for you, before dedicating yourself to it.

As an experiment to see if non-fiction audiobooks could become a part of the educational toolkit at Copenhagen Optimization, Anders (my boss and one of two company founders) and I structured an initial version: A few designated Power Listeners will have annual subscriptions that give the most possible credits. These credits can be passed around as gifts for people to try out audiobooks. Participants will still need an individual Audible-account, if they don’t already have one. If you find it meaningful after a trial book, and believe that you can sustain a monthly subscription, we will set up a paid subscription on your account. We also created a Slack-channel to request books from Power Listeners and to share experiences.

I would go so far as to argue that, as long as it’s non-fiction, the topic doesn’t matter as much. A company is the sum of it’s employees, so anything that improves an employee, improves the company. The most important factor is personal mastery. We read books to add a different perspectives to our own, not to replace our own.

If you wanted help with a concrete place to start, we had put together a list for inspiration that included the books from our physical library at the time (listed at the end). Everyone was also invited to come talk to me and to figure it out together.

Tips for starters

For many people, it’s such an easy transition to make, because the habit of listening to podcasts or something else on the go is already there. I’ve tried to gather some patterns I’ve found myself repeating over the years:

  • Multitasking is a myth; listening to audiobooks requires focus. Focus requires practice, and audiobooks are also a good way to practice focus. Start with a book that’s accessible, at the right level detail, and thus easier to digest. Get used to skipping 15-30 seconds backwards to catch up again when you get distracted.
  • ChatGPT knows a lot of books and can be helpful to find books with different levels of detail.
  • Listen while you do maintenance tasks on complete autopilot. These situations could be while cooking, cleaning, longer runs at slower pace, hikes, commute, traveling, sun tanning on vacation - the opportunities are plenty!
  • You still can’t multitask, so when autopilot turns off because something steals your focus, just pause the book. Skip 15 seconds backwards to catch up again.
  • When I stumble on an particularly insightful phrase, I pause the book to try to let it settle and think about how it relates to my worldview and everyday. Sometimes I have to completely halt my bike to take notes and be sure I remember those golden nuggets that seem to speak to exactly that specific issue I had been thinking about.
  • If you find an audiobook that is exciting, you can let it be an excuse to go for a walk outside instead of watching netflix - easy and healthy win/win. Some audiobooks are interesting to listen to with your partner and I know that at least iOS can share audio to multiple sets of Airpods.
  • If you get easily impatient, you can turn up the reading speed from the app. It depends a lot on the narrator. Some times it feels like they get paid for the duration of their recordings.

List for inspiration

  • Stephen R. Covey — “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change”
  • Daniel Pink — “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us”
  • L. David Marquet — “Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders”
  • Chris Zook — “The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth”
  • Sean Covey — “The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals”
  • Andrew S. Grove — “High Output Management”
  • Eric Ries — “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses”
  • Marshall Rosenberg — “Nonviolent Communication: Create Your Life, Your Relationships, and Your World in Harmony with Your Values”
  • Gary Hamel — “Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them”
  • John Doerr — “Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea That Drives 10x Growth”
  • Jonathan Smart — “Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility”
  • Gene Kim — “The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations”

This post is the first in hopefully more that started as a communications task. As you might have guessed, this particular task was an internal e-mail at Copenhagen Optimization.