How to Learn Through Reading
“Reading a book isn’t a race—the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.” - Naval Ravikant
Reading is one of the most powerful habits to cultivate. Being a reader exposes you to a wide range of ideas and perspectives you may not normally encounter.
Reading is a foundational part of lifelong learning. With just a few books, you can open yourself up to a world of knowledge that can change your life and those around you.
One way of reading a book is straight through, cover to cover. This is how most people read. This approach to reading, however, is only a minimal level of engagement with a book. If you’ve ever started at your bookshelf wondering if you actually remember all the ideas you’ve read in those books, this article will help.
Remembering what we read and implementing it into our life depends on the quality and frequency of our engagements with the ideas in the book. This is a multi-step process. This article will show you how to improve and increase your engagement with a book. By the end, you’ll know how to extract the most resonant ideas, organize your learning, and remember even more of what you read.
1. Choose the “Right” Books
Getting the most out of your reading starts with reading the right books.
For this article, let’s assume you’re reading a book relevant to your values, key results, and projects. It’s a book you presumably chose to read because of its knowledge, information, and instructional matter. These books have the information you want to learn, remember, and, most importantly, apply.
Being selective, skeptical, and methodical about choosing what you read isn’t always necessary, but when reading for learning, it’s essential. The time you’ll spend reading through a book can be huge, so it’s worth choosing books carefully.
One great way to ensure you’re always focusing on the right books is to use a Read.Watch.Learn. Database that sorts books you discover according to their relevancy to your projects and key results.
The main takeaway here is that you should be deliberate about which books you choose to read. Research the book, the author, essential reviews, summaries, and more to determine how helpful and relevant a book will be.
Once you’ve found the right book, it’s time to engage on various levels. Here’s how:
2. Create Notes and Highlights
Use a Pencil
As you read the book, starting at the beginning, always have a pencil to write notes in the book as you read.
Writing notes directly into the book increases your engagement with what you’re reading and helps you better organize and understand the information the author is discussing.
Here are a handful of strategies you can use:
Circle new key terms. Books will often introduce you to key concepts, mental models, or words you were previously unfamiliar with. Whenever you encounter one of these terms, circle it. If the book doesn’t already have an index at the end, create your own by going to the inside of the book's back cover, writing the page number, and writing the term. This way, you can quickly flip back to any essential key terms you learned in the book.
Write short summaries (3-5 words) beside essential paragraphs. Some paragraphs help the author transition from one idea to the next, while others may be packed with important ideas and insights. Whenever you finish reading a particularly insightful paragraph, write a 3-5 word summary in the margin right beside the paragraph. This makes it easier to identify the essential paragraphs and their content later.
Underline resonant passages. Anytime you come across a particularly insightful or instructive sentence, underline it. This also makes it easier to skim the essential information in paragraphs after finishing the book.
Add an asterisk or bracket to the thesis or imperative sentences. You can add a bracket or asterisks beside the thesis or imperative sentences to add additional context.
Highlights
If you’re using a digital reader that allows for color highlights, you can use different colors for different purposes. For example:
Use green to highlight key terms and definitions
Use yellow to highlight any important sentences
Use blue to highlight particularly insightful or resonant sentences
Use pink to highlight mental models, frameworks, formulas, etc.
Use purple to highlight quotes
3. Flag Wildly Important Ideas and Make Your Own Table of Contents
Within every book are a handful of foundational ideas and concepts central to that book. These are the wildly important ideas. These insights are dispersed throughout the book, and the better the book, the more there will be. As the reader, it’s your job to find them.
When you find one of these insights, fold the bottom corner of the page, and in 3-5 words, write down the idea at the bottom of the page. Then, go to the very first page of the book and behind the front cover, write the page number and the title of the insight you identified.
Continue this process as you read, engaging with notes or highlights and flagging the essential ideas in this way. By the end of your first read, you’ll have successfully sifted out the book's most important information while creating your own unique table of contents cataloging these ideas.
4. Convert Your Findings Into Learning Notes
After finishing your first read of the book, it’s time to review it by creating learning notes. These notes will be your own personal summary and extraction of the most resonant information in the book for you to return to and review later. Think of this process as filtering out the book’s most important insights and encapsulating them into a single page of notes.
Instead of organizing your notes by chapter, you’ll instead organize your notes in order of the wildly important ideas you flagged and added to the inner front cover. Use H1 headings to capture these ideas and H2 and H3 headings for any additional supporting information or notes you also want to add.
Start by writing down the first wildly important idea as a heading, then below, adding any additional passages you underlined, bracketed, or created notes on. When deciding whether you should add something to your learning notes, the primary filter to use is: Will I be able to use this later? If so, add it to your learning notes.
Continue to add each wildly important idea as an H1 heading and, below it, related underlines and passages from the book organized with H2 and H3 headings. While this process can take some time, it’s important to spend the time to type out the ideas from the book word-for-word. This creates an additional layer of engagement with the ideas, forcing you to slow down and review the passages one word at a time.
After you’ve added all of the essential ideas you flagged from the book, along with additional notes, underlines, and highlights, you’ll have a single document that encapsulates your understanding of the book.
See the article How to Take Effective Learning Notes for more on creating your own learning notes database.
5. Summarize Using the Feynman Technique
The Feynman Technique, popularized by the physicist Richard Feynman, is a method of explaining complicated subjects in simple terms. According to Feynman, if you can’t “explain it to a 12-year-old,” you don’t understand it.
For this step, open a new blank document and challenge yourself you summarize each of the wildly important ideas you captured in your learning notes. Do this in your own words, from memory, as if explaining to a 12-year-old. If you get stuck and realize you don’t know how to explain a concept or idea, return to your learning notes to fill the gap in your knowledge, and continue creating your summary.
Once your summary is complete, you now have a condensed summary and a deeper understanding of the core ideas in the book.
6. Memorize
Now that you’ve extracted all your notes and ideas from the book, the final step is to consider which parts of the book are worth committing to long-term memory.
Depending on the type of book you read, if the book is more technical, there may be mental models, diagrams, systems, mind maps, etc., worth memorizing for future use. This is where you will need to use forced retrieval.
As discussed in How to Memorize Anything, the simplest way to use forced retrieval is through the notecard method via the free program Anki. Anki will help you create different types of “notecards” that prompt you to retrieve specific information from memory. Using Anki, you can memorize any technical information that will aid you in your future projects and workflow.
For more on strategies for effective memorization, see How to Memorize Anything.
LearnChangeDo Tools to Power Your Reading
For additional tools to help power your reading and learning, check out: