Unlock the full potential of your reading experience. Discover strategies to extract tenfold value from each book you delve into, transforming your approach to literature and knowledge acquisition. Prepare to revolutionize your reading habits.
A five-step method to save time, remember more, and master what you learn
Most nonfiction authors pad their books with superfluous content
- Even the best books contain unnecessary anecdotes, examples, and explanations
- Instead of reading a book ten times to drive home the lessons, read it once – going through the harvesting process – then read your summarized version ten times
Doing this for the first time
Create a folder called Book Notes
- Within that folder, create subfolders for the various categories of books you read.
- That’s all you need to get started. Don’t worry about neglecting categories. You can always tweak it later.
Master
Read your book summary once a day for two weeks
Read and mark
Whenever you come across a passage of interest, a critical insight, or a profound statement, put an asterisk next to it
- If you’re reading a physical book and hate marking up the pages, use a pencil instead
- Fold the bottom of the page down as an alternative method
Categorize
Create a best of the best document to capture the top highlights of each category – an anthology of your most prized lessons.
- Do your best to keep this document short and to the point. You can leave out author, book, and page references if you need to.
Harvest
Create a new document with the title of the book and its author
- Thumb through your book, starting on the first page
- When you come to a marked or highlighted passage, reread it and delete the old record and replace it with the new one
Edit
You’ve transcribed the best of your book into a document. Edit it.
- No more than 3 to 5 pages long
- Feel free to reword your entries in a way that makes sense to you
- The goal of reading a nonfiction book is to glean lessons, and writing them down will help comprehension
