One of the things I love most about our Actionable book summaries is that they reveal a lot about the individual who wrote it.
If you’ve been reading our summaries for any length of time you know that rather than summarize the entire book, our dedicated roster of writers extract one idea from the book (the The Big Idea) and two ways to implement it (the Insights). These takeaways are what resonates with the writer… what spoke to them… and no two summaries of the same book are alike.
Actually, duplicate summaries are something we usually discourage, but every now and again we make an exception, especially when the book is that good. When we do double up on a summary, I often go back and revisit the previous one. It’s interesting to compare and contrast what the two writers decide to focus on, how they made the material their own, and even the different ways they apply these lessons to their own personal and professional lives. A recent example of “double dipping” is our two summaries Charles Duhigg’s bestselling productivity book, Smarter Faster Better, which was summarized by both Ronni Hendel-Giller and Dianne Coppola. While both are ostensibly about choice, they’re very different summaries. Both are excellent, and very much worth the read.
