The secret to Pip Decks: a high rate of “insights per minute”

Apr 20, 2022

Posted by: Steve Rawling

I read these books so you don't have to.

The Master and His Emissary, that was a beast. Took me six months to read.

Don't Be Such a Scientist, On the Origin of Stories, Into the Woods and more. There's two or three year's reading on that shelf alone.

These books are tough, tightly packed with information.

But there's stuff in there you don't need.

Amongst the introductions, anecdotes and elaborations - you may come away with some key insights that made the book worth reading. You could say the ipm (insights per minute) of a book is somewhere between 0.1 - 0.0001.

With a blog post like this, the ipm might be closer to 0.2

But with Pip Decks, and how we’ve distilled everything down to the essentials. The ipm is 1.

When you pick up a deck, you are almost immediately brimming with ideas and enthusiasm for how you can put this new knowledge into practice.

It took me a year to read Maps of Meaning, Seven Basic Plots and Factfulness. It took me weeks to turn their insights into Voyage & Return, Order & Chaos and Data Detectives. It will take you minutes to read each card and start applying the insights.

This is what good ipm looks like! And it's the core principle behind the design of Pip Decks. Just like a book, it has a "user experience" and that isn't just the form it takes. It's the content too.

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I used Storyteller Tactic Three is the Magic Number to write this post. It helped me turn the concept of ipm into a three stage process: I read, I write, you learn. This is a Little Pigs Three (set up, set up, then reverse).