Book Review - The Extended Mind

Welcome back to another episode of Top 5. My name is Chance Brown. I will be your host today. Thank you for being here. If this is your first time joining us, we're grateful that you are giving us a listen and want you to know that this show was designed to give you five actionable takeaways that you can apply to your business to help it grow and prosper. And so hopefully you get that. Today, I'm going to be launching, I guess, a new part of this podcast, which is coming from my blog. If you listened to my last episode, I restarted my blog, and I'm bringing some content from that blog over to this podcast. And part of that is a book review. I'm a big reader. I love to read. And I want to share some of the books that I think are great for your business in the hope that you will also pick them up and learn and take away something from them that helps you. So first book review out of the can. Here we go. It is a book that I recently read called The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul. The book, the subtitle of the book is The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. So I have to tell you, I don't remember how this book got on my bookshelf. But I, when I first picked it up, and I kind of read the description, it kind of sounded voodoo-ish to me. It was like new agey. It was not a book that I was particularly looking forward to reading. I'll put it to you that. And that all changed about five minutes into reading it. And I think I read this entire book in like three days. I thought it was fantastic. I thought that it could have been a really, really dry and boring book that still would have been important. But the author does a very good job of illustrating her points with interesting studies. And so for me, being able to see the practical application of how the theoretical part of the book was put into the real world was a really big deal with me. So the basic lesson from this book, really, really simplified is this. Get out of your head.

I grew up in an environment, I don't know how you grew up, where you studied hard, you learned the things you needed to learn, maybe you did some memorization, whatever that looks like, so that you could excel in school and get a good job and get into a good college, get a good job, all of those things, right? And what this book really does is it kind of takes that and deconstructs portions of that. It doesn't mean that you're not still going to have to do the work to learn things. This gives you a formula for doing it in a more efficient way and not just relying on brain power to do it. And that's where, to be honest, the voodoo part kind of came in when I first started looking at reading this. But the truth of the matter is your body and your health affect your ability to learn. The environment you're trying to learn in affects your ability to learn. The groups that you work with, the people you look to as role models, the people who have done what you're trying to do previously that you can borrow, if you want to be nice, if you want to just say straight up steal, straight up steal from. And perfect. There's a lot of things that go into helping you learn that are outside of your head. And I found this book to be particularly important for a few groups of people. In the real estate universe, if you're a broker, if you're an educator, if you're a leader who's going to speak to other people about how to do their business, I think it's a brilliant book and you have to read it. I think it's one of those kind of must-have reads. You may not take every piece of the puzzle out of it and use it for what you do, but I think it's a brilliant read for people who are in any way, shape, or form an educator. If you're a parent, I think this is going to help you.

You know, I don't know about you. I learned very quickly during the pandemic that what I am not designed to do is teach my kids. I can teach adults, but my kids are not people that I am meant to teach. But I think reading this, I can take a different approach to how I help them learn and retain the information that they need to know. So I think there's some really great stuff. I think there's some debunking of old, outdated models of the way that we learn that, frankly, we're really in need of a refresh. And not only does this book tell you what they are and explain the science behind it, but because of the applicable studies used to illustrate the point, I think that this book really does a great job of showing you how to do it. And so I definitely recommend that you take a look at it. It's not a hard book to read. It's a relatively simple book. If you want to see this review or you want a link to purchase it, it is on my blog at chancebrown.com, along with a bunch of other great content that you can subscribe to and all the back episodes of this show. So there you have it. That's our first book review for The Extended Mind, The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul. Hope that you enjoyed it. We'll be bringing more of these as fast as I can read books that I think are useful for you. I hope you have a great day. I hope this was useful.