The story
It was in about 2015 that I started thinking about how people could learn more effectively from non-fiction books. Books have always been an important part of my life but I was beginning to get frustrated with the amount I was learning from my reading.
Initially I believed that teaching readers to use more effective reading strategies might prove to be a good solution.
However I soon came to realise that reading strategies put the burden of work on the reader. Instead I began to wonder how things might be better if non-fiction authors wrote and structured their books in different ways.
Since then, I have been developing the ideas you can read about here.
Background
My work background over the years has been quite varied.
In 2020, I founded and then was the first editor of RoamBrain.com, which is an information hub for Roam Research. Roam is a note-taking and knowledge management app.
My roles and activities previous to that included:
- business consulting for small businesses and non-profit organisations for nearly 20 years
- being one of the four founders of the Merlin Ecology Fund (now the Jupiter Ecology Fund) in 1988. Merlin was the UK’s first environmental unit trust and, as the Jupiter Ecology Fund, is one of the world’s longest-established green investment funds
- management consultancy work for the Falkland Islands Government in 1984
- articles for various news and business publications, including a jointly written article for the Guardian on how novelists have incorporated an awareness of environmental problems into their work and an article for the New Statesman on the political implications of the concept of emotional intelligence.
I am a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge and live in Hertfordshire, England.