Why You Don't Know How to Read

The short answer is reading a book is not about reading the book cover to cover, it’s about reading what matters in the book, quitting early, avoiding what doesn’t matter, understanding the material, and applying the information.

Almost no-one does this.

Most people read the wrong books, waste time on irrelevant parts of book, and almost never actualize the information. This is a chronic problem in schools by the way.

Why? Daniel Kahneman points out in Thinking Fast and Slow that humans are homeostatic cognitive misers, in other words it’s just flat out easier to read the material, nod along, then close the book and say you read it. Pat on the back! You did it!

But the reality is you have wasted your time if you do not put into practice what you claim to have read. You need to prove to yourself you got value out of the book.

I’ve read hundreds of non-fiction books… I should be Elon Musk! The problem is that I did not engage and digest the material in those books, just a small portion of a small fraction of the books.

Sadly, the same is true of school, school is empirically a highly sub-optimal learning environment that trains people to check boxes instead of truly learn. I’d encourage you to take the Learning how to Learn course by Barbara Oakley.

Okay, here is a much better way to read books (and learn in general)…

Do a Sanity Check

You’ll want to ask two quesions to quickly sanity check a book:

• is it relevant?
• is it of high quality?

Relevancy means: this book is applicable to my life. Why are you reading the book? Is this to better understand psychology so you can have more powerful interactions, become focused, or more productive? Is this to learn about health so you can increase output and well being? Is it about building a company? What am are you doing in your life and how is this book relevant?

Quality means: the author has useful knowledge portrayed in an intelligent way. This can be tricky because many of the cues we use are fallacious like social proof and authority bias. Judging credibility should refer to the author’s ability to get repeat results. They aren’t one trick ponies. You might look them up on the internet, make sure they have the experience to back up their ability to teach you in a book. The other is, they may be an expert but terrible at expressing ideas, teaching methods, etc. This is something else to look out for.

So if the book is relevant, and the author is qualified, you want to look at the table of contents. Make sure the type of book is the right kind of book. Is it a textbook? A narrative? If it’s a story based book then breaking down and digesting the book will be done differently then if it is a text book with discrete sections and structure. Some books occupy a sort of in between space.

Keep this in mind because you will need to extract information from the book and chunk it. If there is clear elegant structure it will be simpler to organize your own thoughts along those lines. Though consider reorganizing ideas into your own structure for better retention and ownership of the material.

If the answer to both is yes then you are ready to read the book.

While reading, keep this in mind: quit early. If the book doesn’t offer value, quit it. Leave it. Even if you bought it. The whole point is to get value from the book. This is why you want to do multiple quick passes to make sure the content you invest in reading thoroughly is worth it.

To get the most out of the book and decide what to dive into deeply we will use the DISE method.

Dissect The Structure

Give it a first pass and get an idea of the structure. Read the last page of each chapter (try to get a summary of each chapter) this way you can tell which chapters are relevant.

One thing you notice the more books you read is you begin to see a lot of intersection between books. You want to avoid rehashing the same material unless the author offers some interesting counterview or insights. Sometimes it can be nice to get a fresh perspective on a topic but just make sure there is something of value offered.

Rereading is useless for learning. In fact, it is negative because familiarity can become confused with real knowledge.

Now that you’ve reviewed the table of contents and read the summaries/conclusions of the major sections then you can now proceed with deciding what matters.

Identify Relevant Content

So, you read the chapter summaries, now do the same for any chapter subsections, elimnate any sections that don’t provide value. Now you should have a final set of chapters and sections to read.

You should now have a good idea of the general flow of the book and main ideas. This should give you a feel for the structure of the material and you should be able to anchor the sections you read into this high level outline.

It is worthwhile to stop here and sketch out the book in an on paper outline. Write down what each chapter and subsection covers in a sentence or less. You can create a tree (basically a table of contents) in your own words and you can then write your notes into this tree.

Now you can skim each of these sections. Skim through and search for novel content, make a mark by anything you should come back to and read thouroughly, annotate vocab you don’t understand.

Once you’ve marked up the content now you can go back. First look up the vocab, create anki cards if needed. You need to understand the vocab to grok the content.

Synthesize and Distill the Content

Now read the pages/paragraphs you’ve marked. This might be most of the section. Slow down and read throughly. Take your time. You’ve done multiple passes to qualify the content, now is the time to embed it.

After you finish each section write a short summary of the key ideas. Do this recursively so that you then summarize your summaries in you chapters. Then when you’ve finished the book, summarize the whole book from your summaries.

Now. You’ve finished the book. You’ve summarized it. You’ve ankified terms or facts you want to memorize (or as candidates to memorize).

You have your notes which are basically a summary of the book.

You’re done right?

Wrong.

Encode the Material

So far you’ve passively absorbed material. Of the few people who read books, a tiny fraction actually put them into practice on the regular.

Don’t waste your time. You didn’t read the book just to read the book did you?

Now it is time to get active. You need to produce a work to ‘seal the deal’. What do I mean by ‘Work’? I mean a ‘Proof’.

You want to engage with the material. I do this in one of a few ways: 0) write in the book! engage in a dialog with the author directly in the book, ask questions, pose counter arguments 1) write a review narrating my thoughts on the books 2) write a rebuttal playing the devil’s advocate 3) build a project implementing the knowledge from the book (best if applicable) 4) plan an experiment where I put the knowledge into practice and how I will put the knowledge into practice in the future 5) create flashcards for spaced repetition review via anki