Never Read



20 Juice and Smoothie Recipes for Energy and Vitality. 10 Things That Even You Can Do to Change the World. 10 Benefits of Reading: Why You Should Read Every Day. 30 Awesome DIY Projects that You’ve Never Heard of. 20 Online Resources for Free E-Books. The Voynich Manuscript. Believed to have been written sometime in the early fifteenth century, The. Trump's ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, speculated that Trump has never read a single book in his adult life, not even a book about him or 'by' him, of which there are 17.

  1. Never Read 100 Books To Get A Personal Pan
  2. Never Ready Always Prepared
  3. Trump Never Read A Book
  4. Never Read The News
ADVERTISEMENT
Our free email newsletters

If you're reading this sentence, you've read more than the president has today.

Last month, The Washington Post reported that President Trump ignored 'more than a dozen' intelligence briefings in January and February warning him of the coronavirus. They were in the President's Daily Brief, which the president doesn't read.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote a memo in January warning of 'a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil.' Trump said he didn't see it because 'Peter sends a lot of memos,' none of which he reads.

After failing to read about the coronavirus, Trump failed to respond to it. It's not a stretch to say that if the president read, thousands of lives might have been saved.

Trump's ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, speculated that Trump has never read a single book in his adult life, not even a book about him or 'by' him, of which there are 17. Trump pretends to have written more books than he pretends to have read.

In an interview on Crossfire in 1987, Trump mentioned Tom Wolfe as one of his favorite authors. Seconds after saying he had not read The Bonfire of the Vanities, Trump said, 'I really like Tom Wolfe's last book,' which was The Bonfire of the Vanities.

In 2015, Joe Scarborough asked Trump if he could read. After some awkward silence, according to Scarborough, 'Trump quietly responded that he could while holding up a Bible.'

When Megyn Kelly asked him about the last book he read, Trump replied, 'I read passages. I read areas. I'll read chapters. I don't have the time.' Trump didn't have time to read the last book he read.

Reading — even about oneself — requires focus, and Trump has none. 'It's impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes,' Schwartz said.

Read

Trump's non-reading evinces not stupidity so much as incuriosity. Narcissists are easily bored, and Trump is no exception. In his 1990 book, Surviving at the Top, which he didn't write, Trump says that travel, exercise, and successful people bore him. 'I get bored too easily,' he says. 'My attention span is short.'

Trump's former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn allegedly wrote in an email, 'Trump won't read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.'

The only information that interests Trump is information that affirms his self-image. He's rich, handsome, and popular — that's what he wants to hear, which is why he regularly says it himself.

Trump, we are told, processes information orally. If you process information orally, you likely process little information. And if you process little information, you exude even less. Every time Trump comments on a subject, he reveals how little he knows about it. He wondered aloud why the Civil War was fought. He said he's been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated. He didn't know what happened at Pearl Harbor. He's too dumb to know he's ignorant, and he's too narcissistic to care.

As John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, observed, oral communication is personal, focuses on emotions, and 'reinforces what you know,' whereas the written word 'collects information we don't memorize.' The latter is conducive to prolonged thinking.

Trump, putative author of three books with 'think' in the title, doesn't like to think. He doesn't even think about himself — his favorite subject — much less about public health. He lives and acts in the moment, chasing instant gratification, which reading does not provide. That's why he prefers television and Twitter to reading and thinking: they are immediate, visceral, and cognitively undemanding.

Reading doesn't necessarily make you a good president — James Buchanan, America's second-worst president, was well-read — but not reading is sure to make you a bad one. In his book Call Sign Chaos, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis writes, 'If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you.' Trump's personal experiences include being on TV a lot and watching a lot of TV.

One of the purposes of reading is to learn, but it's pointless to learn if you already know everything. Trump is convinced of his own omniscience. Last month, he claimed to 'know a lot about helicopters' and to 'know South Korea better than anybody,' right before he got the population of Seoul wrong. 'I know windmills very much,' he said in December. 'I've studied it better than anybody.' The president has claimed to possess superior knowledge about drones, ISIS, courts, lawsuits, America's system of government, trade, renewable energy, banks, taxes, tax laws, debt, campaign finance, money, infrastructure, construction, technology, the economy, Democrats, polls, steelworkers, the word 'apprentice,' environmental impact statements, 'the power of Facebook,' 'offense and defense,' Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), COVID-19, and 'things.'

None of this is true. Trump is a know-it-all who knows almost nothing and refuses to read anything except his own name. His bibliophobia would be funny if it weren't so deadly.

Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's 'Today's best articles' newsletter here.

ADVERTISEMENT

By Martin Yate

Ninety-five percent of resumes today never get read.

The reason is surprising -- it's because they are honest recitations of everything the resume writer has done and thinks important.

Let's look at why this doesn't work.

The Resume Database - a.k.a. the 'Black Hole'

Resumes today rarely go straight to a recruiter's desk; typically they go into a resume database.

Understand that no one ever reads resumes for the fun of it

Before anyone actually reads your resume, it must first be pulled from that database by a recruiter who is focused on filling a specific job opening and who is naturally doing so with the priorities and language of that job description firmly in mind.

So, you can see that, if your resume is a gumbo of everything you've ever done and of everything that you happen to think is important (without reference to what your customers are actually buying), it is never going to work.

Understand Your 'Customer'

The first lessons a professional learns in any job are that, 'the customer comes first,' and 'understand your customer's needs and sell to them.'

We all know this, yet when it comes to creating the most financially valuable document we'll ever own, this most basic of professional lessons flies right out the window.

In the same way that corporations tailor products to appeal to their customers' needs, you need to create a resume tailored to your customers' needs.

A resume works best when it tells a compelling story that matches your skills and experiences to the responsibilities and deliverables of a specific target job.

This means your resume must focus on how employers -- your customers -- think about, prioritize, and describe the job's deliverables.

A resume focused on a specific target job, and built from the ground up with the customer's needs for that job in mind, will perform better in resume database searches. It will resonate far more effectively with recruiters, whose eyes are already glazed from the tedium of reading resumes.

It's All About Credentials, Not Potential

When you are changing jobs, you will invariably be hired for a job that you can already do, a job for which you have the credentials.

Writing a resume that targets a job you'd like to do, but for which you don't have the experience/credentials, will put you up against other candidates who all have the experience and the credentials for that job, and this reduces your chances to the negligible.

Jobs you pursue because of your potential are usually landed within the context of a job you already have and a company where you are a known quantity.

How to Decide on a Target Job Title

With just a few years' experience in the professional world, most people reach a point where they have experience that qualifies them for more than one job.

Right now, there are probably two or more jobs you can do, but with the way recruitment works today, you have no choice but to go with a resume that focuses on a single target job.

So your first task is to look at all the jobs you can do (they are all probably closely related in many ways) and choose which one will give you the best chance of reaching your goal.

Never Read 100 Books To Get A Personal Pan

You can make this decision on many unique criteria, but assuming your main goal is to get back to work, or leave your current job, your best bet is to go with the job you can nail. This is the job that you can make the most convincing case for on paper, the strongest argument for in person, and the job where, when you hit the ground running, you won't trip over your shoelaces.

Never Ready Always Prepared

Once you've decided on your target job, build your primary resume around this target job, the one that offers the greatest odds of success.

Resumes for Those Other Jobs You Can Do

Those other jobs you can do? The layout and much of the data from your prime resume will remain the same: all you'll need to do to create these additional resumes is understand how employers define them and then, replacing the Target Job Title, edit each new resume version to reflect your credentials for this specific option.

Trump Never Read A Book

More About Getting Your Resume Read

NO spam! Privacy Policy
About the author...

Never Read The News

Successful careers don't happen by accident. Professional resume writing expert Martin Yate CPC is a New York Times best-seller and the author of 17 Knock Em Dead career management books. As Dun & Bradstreet says, 'He's about the best in the business.' For FREE resume-building advice and to view Martin's resume samples, visit the Knock Em Dead website. Join Martin on Twitter at @KnockEmDead.
More about this author...