Of course we all know how to read. just visit our goodreads page and you'l see how many books we have read. Next challenge, we will complete 50 book by the end of the year. Go.
"no one ever shows us how to learn" said Adam Robinson in his Farnam Street podcast. Acquiring information and views of book authors is not learning. Speed reading is not learning. 100 book a week is not learning. The faster you skim books, the less you can comprehend and learn from them.
Speed reading will not make you smarter. I can argue that it is even counterproductive despite what your productivity guru might claim about their revolutionary speed reading approach.
Think of all the books you read and highlighted earlier in the past 3 years? What did you learn from those highlights and notes? if you are anything like me, unfortunately its only highlights and notes I never really got back to them after completing the book!
Not to be understood mistakenly, It is absolutely great to read for entertainment and leisure. In fact just by doing that you are probably among those few intellects who exist in this world who reads for fun.
There is different types of reading, I don't feel like its the place to talk about them here, but I'll leave you with this great book on the topic by Mortimer Adler, where literally it teaches us how to read.
This is also a great series of articles on reading on Farnam Street blog.
Once I have tweaked my reading workflow slightly here and there, I had phenomenal satisfactory results. At least from my personal perspective.
Have you ever been stuck on a certain book? you just can't seem to get yourself to move further and you just can't leave it, because that feels like quitting, and you identify yourself to be a great reader, and great readers never quit their books till the end!
Even worse, you can't start a new exciting book, because of all the guilt you feel for the book you abandoned behind?
I'm sure some of you might identify with this situation. But for this I want you to listen to this podcast by Naval Ravikant about how he approaches his reading habits.
You don't necessarily have to follow his approach, but just take a step back, and think for a minute.
Why are you reading in the first place?
Is it leisure and relaxed reading? if so, you need to keep enjoying it. If you are not thrilled and excited to read it, then why are you wasting your valuable time?
Is it that you are reading to learn. then you need to take a step further and move to step two:
Read with purpose.
Process what you are reading for your future self to benefit from.
I'll just share my reading workflow, and I have to admit it is becoming a very much enjoyable process because of the new technology and apps that simplified our life. Of course you've got to explore yours, it could be depending on pen and paper. You can do your own Zettelkasten type of system, as long as it serves your purpose.
Let me simplify this workflow, who knows you might adopt it 🤷♀️.
This applies to all books I read on kindle or iBooks. Same applies to any article I find interesting I just save it to instapaper to be read later when i'm free. I set them to be synced automatically to my readwise account. I set readwise to automatically sync to my notion as a default, but sometimes I use Roam or evernote as well.
Why I prefer Notion, is purely visual and aesthetic, you processing and distilling your notes to
get the most out of them is the goal here. Using the Tiago Forte progressive Summarization
in writing to get the maximum benefit and recall of what you read, have been a major transitional point in my way of reading. Once you identify your purpose of reading and lessen the fraction of capturing your thoughts while reading to be able to remain in your flow, you will note that your way of highlighting is more purposeful and intended to create evergreen notes. You will note that spontaneously moved from the receptive reader where you absorb the author's ideas and thoughts, to be a critical reader eager to learn and connecting ideas to your previous readings.
You can note here that I'm reading many of these books all at once, there is no deadline to finish. It's not a sprint. My most preferable device to read is the iPad, so where ever I am, I'd read something that interests me and suits my energy and mood level and this will be automatically synced through all my devices instantaneously.
I set dedicated times to process and distill these notes and highlights, add my thoughts
on it, connect different ideas together. So it will become something close to this.
You can always link back to the exact location of your highlight on the book. I always keep those and indent my own thoughts under each highlight.
Another interesting approach by Naval Ravikant, is to view your book library as a blog archive. Which means you approach your readings in a non- sequential order, just how you would read a blog archive, you don't have to complete the 200 post. You get back to it when ever you need and read what you need, the right book in the right time.
There are different type of workflows you might want to adopt for different purposes. You might to deeply analyze, and have in depth notes for certain books, where your best bet would be to use a more advanced note taking app which allows you to connect your thoughts and ideas, Such as Roam research, Obsidian, Amplenotes which are all great for learning wether as a student or as someone who continuously seek to grow.
For academic article, it gets a little more trickier because you need to handle pdf's and reference them for different projects. You need to be meticulous about your articles metadata to be able to cite your work when needed.
I might share this workflow later, there are so many fun apps and reference managers that definitely can ease the pain of this, such as Zotero, Papers, Paperpile, Mendly.
for now, happy reading 📚
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