How To Retain Anything You Read | #25

How The Pros Read Books

No. 25 — read time 5 minutes

Welcome to The Soloist, a weekly newsletter where I share timeless ideas and insights about life, business, and art.

Today at a glance

• How To Retain Anything You Read

• Tweet: Building Library of Knowledge

• Snippet: Derek Sivers’ Creative Retirement

• Tweet: Mindful Productivity

The best writers seem to have an endless bank of ideas to draw from. This is because the best writers have a repeatable system for finding interesting ideas.

I must have read hundreds of books so far in my life but most are a distant memory. There are probably only a handful I actually remember. A massive lost opportunity.

Not only have I read books without retaining much, it means that because I never had a system for reading, anything I did end up reading (and finishing) was a result of willpower, a notoriously fickle beast.

Reading is one of the highest leverage activities known to man.

Instead of living life relying on our own life experiences to guide our intuition and decision making, you can live vicariously through the words of someone. Someone who took the time to pour their heart into writing a book.

Reading also allows you to connect ideas. Connecting ideas is how you become prolific.

Ryan Holiday is the author of 14 books including Ego Is The Enemy and The Obstacle Is The Way.

His not-so-secret trick is the way he reads and connects ideas in his research.

I first came across his system for capturing ideas when I read a Twitter thread by his research assistant, Billy Oppenheimer. Reading more about Billy I came across his post on note-taking, which is inspired by his boss’ system, which in turn was inspired by Ryan’s former boss and mentor Robert Greene.

And these systems all date back to a 1960’s German bureaucrat turned Sociology professor named Niklas Luhmann.

Luhmann devised a system to connect ideas from books he read which led to him publishing 58 books over a 30 year career. The system he invented is called the slip-box system, or zettelkasten in German.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll break down the system into manageable chunks and conclude with an overarching framework for you to use.

Today, I want to go over Step 1 of this system.

Active Reading

The moment an author writes a piece of text, their work is dead. Where it was once alive in their heads, it never comes out exactly how the author intended.

Whatever made it to the page was the best the author could come up with.

Most people pick up a book and read in a passive, almost mechanical way. Eyes glossing over the text. Stubborn passages get skipped over as they race to the finish.

Little, if any, information is retained.

Instead, try active reading. Bring texts to life through empathy and action, as author Robert Greene explains.

You do this by reading with a pen in hand and writing in the margins. This is not a new technique. It dates back centuries and is called marginalia.

But we’re not talking about doodles.

There is a repeatable process for using marginalia to retain any information you read.

And it has nothing to do with trying hard.

What To Write In The Margins

The process goes like this:

Summarize the first paragraph

Read the first paragraph of a text and summarize it in one sentence. You need to think about what the core idea of the paragraph means.

Then, repeat on next paragraph. One sentence to summarize paragraph 2.

Progressive Summarization

On the third paragraph you write two sentences.

The first sentence is a summary of the previous 2 paragraphs. Then another sentence summarizing the 3rd paragraph.

By the 4th you are summarizing 1, 2, and 3 into a single sentence and then writing another sentence for the 4th.

And so on..

This is not trivial. Summarizing multiple paragraphs with different points into a single sentence means you will leave things out.

But what you’re doing in the process is understanding which is more important than reading or memorizing. You’re forcing yourself to think deeply in an active way about the text.

As you do this, ask questions in the marings.

Disagree with something? Write it down.

Want to dig deeper on a stated claim? Write it down.

This is how you create what I call Infinite Rabbit Holes.

If you want to go deeper on this I recommend the following:

Next week, we’ll go over what to do with these scribbled notes to make sure they don’t stay inside your books forever lost.

Writing while reading to build a library of knowledge

Monica runs a wonderful podcast and here she interviews content creator Ev Chapman on her approach to endless content. Sound familiar?

Rethinking Retirement

Derek Sivers is an author, TED speaker, blogger, and founded CDBaby which he sold in 2008. Here is him explaining how he thought of retirement:

Mindful Productivity as a third way

Anne-Laure Le Cunff is one of my favorite writers. I completely agree with her that there needs to be a third way in thinking about success that isn’t zero or 100.

Till next week,

-Tom

P.S. Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. If you save a lot of bookmarks on Twitter (like me), try dewey. —
   the easiest way to organize Twitter bookmarks (I'm one of the makers).

2. If you're looking for coaching on audience growth book a slot here (prices went up due to demand).

3. I’m putting together a course on how to network online to grow faster. If you’re interested sign up here.

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