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For the past 15 years that I've been writing this blog, my consistent purpose has been to provide you with information that is Educational, Entertaining, and Enlightening.

Education

Why educational? When I open a book, a blog, or a web page, I'm there to learn something. I'm hoping I'll find information that will make my life better. After all, I've always got things to learn and to improve. But if the information doesn't engage my imagination, it's often hard for me to stay focused and follow the narrative. There have been books that I consume simply because I found the information presented so very valuable that I was willing to labor through them even though it was a real slog (Joseph Campbell's The Hero with A Thousand Faces comes immediately to mind). As I see it, in order to captivate readers, education must be served with a healthy heaping of entertainment.

Entertainment

Just like the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, entertainment is the way the educational element can be presented and remembered. Good entertainment is what helps readers decide if they should keep reading or put the materials aside for another day. And let's face it, the day that we wade back into something that we didn't enjoy in the first place almost never comes, does it?

Enlightenment

Believe it or not, as much we want to learn from an enjoyable read, what matters most is what we think, feel, and remember after we've put the book down and gone on with our lives. Because it's when we get back to our daily to dos that we confirm whether or not we got our money or time's worth from reading the material.

Enlightenment is what creates this value. It's not just what we learned and how much we enjoyed learning it, but how we were encouraged to look at our lives and our businesses with new eyes. It's the new insights we gather, and the new tools we acquire, that help us improve our lives and make all our efforts worthwhile.

By now it should be clear that it's not simply enough for an author to know about what they're writing. And it's not enough for them to be enjoyable to read or listen to. Instead, what is needed — dare I say what is required — is an author who is fascinating to learn from, fun to read, and one who provides us with long-lasting useful lessons.

In other words, the content creator has to give us proven tips and techniques we can use to make our lives or our businesses better along with the enlightenment to know how to use those tools. Because when that happens, you know you've gotten a great return on investment for the time, money, and effort you've spent with their thoughts and materials.