Reading

Key Insight

● Reading

● Reading is probably one of the best effective rests we can have. We gain knowledge, practice focus, we don’t look at screens, and (ideally) we read outdoors in nature! Everyone reads now, and reading has become 'popular' but it’s very easy to read and learn nothing and derive no value. Of course there is reading for pleasure, but that’s not the topic of this course, and here we’ll talk about reading non-fiction books with the aim of gathering knowledge.

● Writing books has become a lucrative business, and there is a surge of writers, books and content. There is so much content that it’s very hard to decide what is quality. Every day 50 new self-help, productivity books appear, and if you read each one from start to finish you’d need 60 hours in a day just for reading.

● The author of popular/commercial books generally has a few good ideas, and then from 40 pages of text gets instructed to produce 400 to sell the book. Why? Because they’ll earn more money if they make a book that can be sold in the millions of copies (and for a book to exist it must have ~400 pages) than a course that would sell less, so they pad the book with filler text. That filler text can be useful, but mostly it’s not, and ideally you would actually read only the original 40 pages. There are tools that attempt to solve this (blinkist, headway), but they have their drawbacks (only certain books, only one level of summarization).

○ If you see that I’ve released a book of over 200 pages, you can be sure I’ve padded it with filler text. Very few writers truly need 800 pages to present their idea fully!

● What’s the ideal solution? Well, the project I’m currently developing, called bookmaster.ai. This project arose from my frustration while writing this book. I wanted good summaries, but they were not available. It will enable you to summarize any book in a few minutes, and then you can browse it through chapters in depth or breadth as you wish. It will offer multiple levels of summarization depending on how deeply you want to dive, and at the deepest level the summary will be about ~60 pages, with hardly any significant loss of ideas/knowledge for most books.

● It’s far better to read a good summary 5-6 times than the entire book once. Most people read one book once and completely forget it, and what they read enters one ear and exits the other. It’s basically a waste of time. A much better tip for reading to absorb knowledge would be to take good summaries of about the 200 best books and read those in a circle.

● Given the flood of commercial writers, some writers who can truly create good density are getting lost in the sea of content. The goal of the bookmaster.ai project is to help you gauge density of content, but you can also take other people’s recommendations. There is a very short list of books I would recommend reading cover to cover. Navalmanack is one of them, but it is densely written, and that’s one of the rare cases where summarization would lead to a loss of knowledge. If you’re not sure, a good strategy would be to first read a good summary, and then try reading the full book and see after the first few chapters whether you’ve learned something new. Usually the answer is no...

● If we decide to read the entire book then we can apply some of the following tips.

○ Reading + listening (at speed 1.2x-2x) of the entire book helps with retaining knowledge.

○ Listening during training or driving is more efficient, but we must take breaks when we hear something good to note it down (in driving you can note it down with voice-to-text).

○ If we read (and do not listen) the book, ideally it should be in paper form so we can easily make notes and underline. Underlined passages and notes are something we should revisit several times.

● Reading is an ideal evening activity because it calms the brain before sleep, and with low light and tea can be a great evening routine that allows for good sleep.