#009 | Non-Fiction Books To Actions

Hey friends,

Do you read non-fiction books? Why do you read them? My guess is that you want to improve certain aspects of your life and you are hoping that you can find some lessons and tricks in books to help you do that.

Say you want to improve your interpersonal skills. You would probably start by googling which non-fiction books to read that can help you with that. You might discover the popular books like How to Win Friends and Influence People or How to Talk to Anyone. You decided to order a copy of the two books or download them on your Kindle. And that begins your reading journey…

As you are reading the books, you are constantly getting excited by the lessons and tricks that you are learning. You feel invincible.

Days or weeks later, you finally finished the book. You are a new woman / man. You have this internal excitement flowing through you body that screams “I can’t wait to use these techniques and improve my life”.

But hold on a second, what did I learn again from How to Win Friends and Influence People? I remembered I need to remember to smile but that’s about it. I have made a bunch of highlights while reading. I would need to review them and make it clear what I need to do. I will do that soon… but unfortunately soon becomes never… and so actions was never taken.

Does this sound familiar to you?

There are two phases in generating results in life: the learning phase and the action phase. The learning phase is where you acquire new knowledge you need to move to the action phase. The action phase is where you test, break and form habits with the objective to generate your desired results. Most of the results are generated in the action phase, yet, we tend to spend most of our time in the learning phase.

When it comes to reading non-fiction books, most people a) don’t take notes and b) they don’t reread the same book or review their notes. What this means is that by the time they finish reading a book, they would have forgotten what they have learned from the earlier chapters of the book. If you don’t remember what you have read / learned in the learning phase, you won’t be able to move to the action phase and start generating results.

That’s why my friends and I created Zeroton, where we convert non-fiction books into actions, so that once you finished reading the books, you can come to our platform and find a list of actions derived from the lessons in non-fiction books. You can mix n’ match actions from different books to create your own personalised actions set. I am very excited to launch this next Sunday. Here’s a snapshot of actions that you can find on Zeroton for the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

This week I finished reading:

1. How to Talk to Anyone (1st Mar - 3rd Mar 2021)

2. E-Myth Revisited (4th Mar - 6th Mar 2021)

❓Question of the Week

Share with me your thoughts by replying to this email 👻 👻 👻

🐦 Tweet of the Week

💡 Quote of the Week

🔥 Recommendation(s) of the Week

Join Zeroton’s ACTION-FOCUSED Slack Channel — We are in the process of looking for STRONG ACTION TAKERS, who wants to self-improve themselves through non-fiction books, to join our slack community. We want to connect and learn more about your personal development journey. We are aiming to keep this group small (20 - 25 people) to ensure that the quality of interaction is high.

Through the slack community, you will have access to the following:

1. Early access to Zeroton’s 100+ Actions from 30 best-seller entrepreneurship and personal development books

2. Weekly group zoom calls with myself and other like-minded people to discuss actionable insights from different non-fiction books. We will keep each other accountable and share personal experience in testing different actions! Essentially, we will grow, learn, and succeed together

3. Early access to the Zeroton platform

To join, please reply to this email with “I am interested in joining Zeroton’s slack channel” and I will reach out to you with more details. Looking forward to connecting with you guys on the slack channel!

🔦 AI Research Paper(s) Spotlight of the Week

Simple and Effective Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition With Structured Nearest Neighbour Learning

The paper proposed STRUCTSHOT, which it's a few-shot NER algorithm based on structured nearest neighbours learning. We use a NER model trained on source domain as a token embedder to generate contextual representations for all tokens. During inference time, these static representations are simply used for nearest neighbours token classification. We also leverage tag transitions between source and target domains and use a Viterbi decoder to capture label dependencies.

🎥 This Week on YouTube

That’s it for this week! I hope you find something useful from this newsletter. More to come next Sunday! Have a good week ahead! 🎮

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