[Table Alternative: Table explains the differences between Notevantage and Blinkist. Notevantage hyperfocuses on the best tidbits in books whereas Blinkist offers summaries of books. The pro of advantage is more effective learning vs. getting to the point of a book fast with Blinkist. The con with Notevantage is it’s random vs. book summaries being ineffective. The edge for Notevantage is it forks over gold nuggets quickly whereas Blinkist has voluminous amounts of material. The pricing is $75 vs. $49.99 to $79.99.]
As I’ve blogged previously, book summaries don’t work.
In short, when is the last time a book summary changed your life?
Never.
Blinkist is a life saver if you completely blanked on your homework assignment (reading that book) for the last two weeks and now it’s 30 minutes before class.
But beyond that, book summaries give you a false impression of knowledge.
The people that condensed the book down to 15 minutes know exactly what the material’s about while you have the “yeah-yeah, I know this” version of the book.
With that in mind, we got into the business of hyperfocusing on random book tidbits that deserved the spotlight.
Our thought: Why not?
Why Not?
Why not go deep inside the tidbits, the gold nuggets of information we really want to mine from books?
Summarizing a book strips it of its color and waters down the voice. Furthermore, summaries are, by definition, a generalization of information.
It’s a bureaucratic notion in terms of information investing because for self improvement buffs who thirst for knowledge, reading a book summary is an inefficient and ineffective means of acquiring knowledge.
Instead of going that down that path, why not extract and explore critical micro sections of the book?
It’s a way to take part in the intellectual discussions we seemingly never have time for in real life.
It’s also a means to better understand the author’s best contributions: their anecdotes, data, key theories, etc.
With Notevantage, we take a key selection from a non-fiction book each week and dwell on it with intensity.
Each Note is randomly chosen which may frustrate some.
But the counter is that we actually pick up information randomly more often than we think – and not only do we pick it up but it sticks.
Story Time
I used to have this idea in my head that education needed to be organized; that we needed to learn in chronological order from some predetermined outline.
And then, one night while reading a blog it hit me: IT DOESN’T MATTER!
After all, I was picking up information randomly from this blog; I would grab my phone in bed late at night and open up the website and click on whatever headlines looked good to me.
So why can’t I (we) learn-learn in the same fashion?
There’s no need for a table of contents, course syllabus, formal introduction, etc.
Instead, education can come in the form of random tidbits that we read informally.
And with Notevantage, we offer to send those tidbits to you.
More Than an Alternative
Originally you were probably looking for another website or app like Blinkist such as GetAbstract or InstaRead.
But as you can see you’ve stumbled upon something much different; something very new that will change the way we approach education and help everyone absorb material better and educate themselves.
Informal education works and Notevantage is going to prove it with our own random twist.
