In today's video, I'm going to show you how I remember everything that I read and then
apply what I learn from books to my life. Hey folks welcome back to the channel if you're
new here my name's Alex and on this channel we focus on human performance to help you
live healthier, wealthier, happier and more productive lives.
If you're a life-long learner like me and obsessed with human performance chances are
you read a lot of books. I love reading and read well over 100 books a year. When I was
younger I would just passively read through a book, put it down and then forget what I
learned. And so in this video, I'm going to share with
you the life hacks that I use to remember everything that I read so you can apply the
principles from books into your own life more effectively.
Books Aren't Sacred When I was younger I used to be super precious
looking after physical books. If I took a book on holiday I'd make sure that the pages
didn't get creased and I'd feel bad if the cover was damaged or if I didn't read right
to the end. One of the best pieces of advice I was given early on is that books aren't
sacred. It's fine to annotate books and to curl or
tear the pages to help bookmark sections and highlight key information. Most of my books
now have faded covers, highlights, annotations and their corners curled over so that I can
quickly find and recall key information. Treat Books Like Reference Tools
Traditional thinking is that you might read a book only once, put it down and then never
go back to it. Alternatively some people might read a helpful book a second time from beginning
to end. While a second full read-through is better than reading only once it's not time
efficient and so my second reading hack is to think of books more like reference materials.
Once you have finished a book, store it on a book shelf or in an easy to access location
with books on similar topics so that you know where find it should you need the information
quickly. I have lots of bookshelves like this one and organise by what I have and haven't
read and by topic area and will routinely pick up a book and jump to a page or chapter
if I need to reference the information. Go Physical and Digital
The next hack is to consider getting both a physical and a digital copy of a key book.
Hell get the audio version too on Audible. The principle here is to have continuous easy
access to books and to have a variety of mediums which you can dive into at anytime. If you're
driving put on the audio book, if you're on public transport pull out the Kindle app or
your Kindle. My personal preference is physical books as I'm pretty old school and get more
enjoyment from reading and annotating physical books but I find being able to jump into their
digital copies to find key information and help consolidate what I've read. This won't
be for everyone but for those who have the cash to invest in themselves it's a great
way to make things easy to access. Bookmark and Highlight Books
Reading hack three is fairly obvious and is to bookmark the relevant page of a book and
to highlight or underline key passages. You can use post-it notes stuck to the relevant
page of a physical book or actual bookmarks. The problem here is that you might not always
have these to hand and we want to make things as easy as possible. My preference is to curl
the top left or right corner of a page I want to bookmark. This is quick and easy and means
I can jump back at any point in the future. I'll usually have a pen or highlighter nearby
and so will use these to highlight or underline key sentences or points in a physical book.
On Kindle it's even easier with the bookmark button allowing you store bookmarks to your
notebook and the highlight ability allowing you to colour passages and copy and share
text to your notebook. Audible also allows you to store a clip of the audiobook.
When highlighting and bookmarking I'm marking things that I find interesting that I might
come back to later or might use later. The problem with highlighting is, we actually
don't remember the stuff that we highlight very well and there is a mountain of evidence
that shows that highlighting does nothing to actually improve our memory, for more on
this and learning methods check out my learning series videos starting with the video on active
recall. And we also run into the issue that we've
got all these highlights, but they're hidden away inside our book or inside our Kindle
and we don't really have a reason to go through them.
Take and Store Notes The next hack moves from passive highlighting
to more active note-taking to help you recall concepts. With physical books you can write
notes into the book at the start of the book with page references and annotate the actual
relevant pages if you wish. You can also translate key concepts onto flashcards and store and
organise these. While this is good I prefer using digital
tools such as Evernote, Notion or Roam as a central space in the cloud from where all
my information is stored and accessed. It doesn't matter what note taking tool you use,
I tend to use Evernote to screenshot a page or passage since Evernote's OCR technology
can pull out text from a screenshot. I will then add this to a relevant note or notebook
and name and tag it so that it is searchable. For me this is extremely fast and allows me
to then add in my own personal thoughts and summaries to the same note or notebook.
Create and Share Your Own Notes To Teach Others If I could go back and give my 16 year old
self one piece of advice it would be to write down my own summary of each book I read immediately
after reading it. This hack moves us into actively thinking about the concepts in a
book and framing them around why they are relevant to us. This helps to translate things
into your own life as you consider how you might apply what you learned and put it into
action. Your summaries don't need to be long and it's
helpful to have a template to make things as easy as possible. I have a summary template
I use which quickly helps me to reflect. As you can see from this book summary on Rich
Dad, Poor Dad I organise the summary at the top of the note for the book, tag the book
by it's topic or subject and then add in screenshots at the end.
I've added a google docs version of this in the description below so you can add it to
your own note taking app if you wish. Book Summary Template
A great thing about making your own summaries and adding your own perspe ctives is that
you can also share these via a blog or on social media. This helps to put your thoughts
out into the world to offer value to others and makes you use the summary as a teaching
tool which helps to consolidate your own understanding of the topic and remember the information
more deeply. Use Blinkist and Readwise For Summaries and
Reminders Hack number seven is to combine your own notes
and central note storage system with summaries and reminders from other digital tools. Blinkist
provides text and audio summaries of popular books and allows for highlighting of key concepts.
Most importantly Blinks can be saved and shared to your main note taking system which then
complement your own notes. I use Blinkist as it can quickly send notes and Blinks to
Evernote with appropriate tags which we'll learn more about in the next hack.
Readwise is another great tool which I use routinely. Readwise connects to your Kindle
account and pulls in all of the highlights you've ever highlighted from all the books
that you've read. In fact even if you don't have highlights saved yet you can add books
to Readwise and it will recommend sections you might find helpful. The app then provides
you with a daily review of highlights from books which you can rate as relevant or not.
Overtime the app makes more personalised suggestions based on your reviews and it works a little
like spaced repetition by regularly reminding you of key concepts and highlights. Readwise
also includes a mastery mode where you can turn highlights into flashcards or fill in
the blank questions if you wish to memorise them in detail.
Use a Personal Knowledge Management System My final reading hack brings all of the previous
hacks together and is to store everything you read in a personal knowledge management
system using a workflow that works for you. As mentioned I have a process and workflow
I use everytime I read something: Firstly I will read a book using both physical
and digital methods, Then I will bookmark and highlight things
I find useful as I read through, I'll screenshot pages and send these and any
Kindle highlights to Evernote I'll name the note after the book and tag
it by topic and by context I'll pull in external notes from Blinkist
and Readwise and use Readwise to remind myself about key paragraphs
I'll then write a quick summary and reflect on the book once finishing it using my summary
template and think about what I'll implement in my life
I'll order my physical book together on my bookshelves and group my digital notes by
tags in Evernote Finally I'll use these notes and summaries
to write a blog post or compose an article so that I am teaching others and sharing my
deeper thoughts on the book This personal knowledge management system
is based on the workflow of the prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, called the Zettelkasten
or slip-box system. It is used by people like Author Ryan Holiday to organise reading and
research before writing a book. The systems consists of summary notes that
are linked to each other around relevant topics and contexts. In Evernote notes are linked
by notebook and tags. As you can use multiple tags in most note taking software I tend to
use umbrella terms such as "Productivity" to tag a book as well as a contextual tag
to help me apply what I learn to my life around a problem or something I want to improve.
This is particularly helpful when I will also find other information such as a podcast,
research paper or new article which I can tag and store in my knowledge management system.
Regardless of what system you use make sure you love the process and love reading and
life-long learning. I've included a link to my book summary template
in the description below and if you're interested in understanding more about passive and active
learning do check out my learning series playlist starting with active recall.
Thanks again for watching and I'll catch you again in the next video.