How I Learn From Reading I Complete System Using Notion and Readwise

we've all had that feeling when you read a really insightful book and you think wow there's some really great lessons in here and i should incorporate them into my life you read extreme ownership by joko willing and tell yourself you're going to take more responsibility for your actions you read grit by angela duckworth and promise that you're going to persevere through the hard times time goes by though and the book and the lessons gather dust you haven't really changed or incorporated the lessons in any meaningful way you get back into your old habits and the lessons of the book just become an interesting theory rather than core principles by which you live your life as a voracious reader the idea of taking lessons from books and actually incorporating them into my day-to-day life is something that i've been struggling with for years i mean i spend hundreds of hours every year reading so i really want to make sure that those hours are spent well and ultimately i'm using the lessons and incorporating them into a meaningful way so recently i've developed this system that really helps me to do that and i'm going to share that with you for those that are new to the channel my name is tom i'm a startup founder based in london and on this channel we discover living with simplicity and productivity in a very distracting world if that sounds like something you're interested in bang subscribe i release new videos on these sorts of topics every week today we're going to be looking at a three-step system of course these things are always three steps that's really going to help you get the most out of reading so the first step we're going to be looking at is curating so this is taking information from books things that really resonate with you and capturing them in a meaningful way the second step is going to be creating so this is taking this curated information and really getting to grips with the concepts behind what you've read by creating your own unique take on it finally we'll be looking at the cementing phase and this is just where you want to cement your understanding about what you've learned over a long period of time i tend to use notion to go through all of these different phases and i'll be talking you through my templates that i use to do that but you could use any note-taking or digital tool that you like the first thing that you're going to want to set up is just a very simple way for you to actually track the books that you're reading i really love notions kanban board feature for this and i just have my books in either a to read in progress or read status and then i simply just have a backlog of books that i want to read and i drag them through so i always know what i want to read next and i've got somewhere to store information about books that i've already read when it comes to the actual reading of the book my weapon of choice for the first pass is always going to be a kindle i just find that a kindle it's so easy to highlight relevant passages it's so easy to take notes but it's also not necessarily as distracting as an ipad i find that if i go into an ipad to read often i'll get drawn into youtube or instagram or some other app that i don't necessarily want to be interacting with then usually what i'll do is if i really enjoy the book i'll buy a hard copy of it just so i've got something there for reference that i can easily access the final part of the setup process that you're probably going to want to do is install the read wise app this app has a couple of benefits the first one is it makes it incredibly easy to access all of your notes from a kindle and you can even actually by paying for the premium features have it automatically sync into your notion database which is just a really great feature to have and the other benefit of it is something we'll come to later which is that it sends you a regular email with different parts of books that you've highlighted so you can just constantly remind yourself about things that you've read okay so let's talk about the first part of this process which is the curation stage all you're really going to want to do here is just read the book and anything that stands out to you anything that really resonates just highlight it and it's as simple as that you just want to get into a habit of rather than passively reading books just actively thinking okay what stands out to me here what do i really sort of find powerful about about the arguments in this book also it's really helpful to make notes so on the kindle you can just as you highlight something tap on it and then write in a note if you're doing it on paper equally you could write in the margins and these can just be your general thoughts on the idea that you've sort of highlighted don't overthink this stage you know this is just a stage for you to put all your ideas down get everything together and it really just this sort of free-flowing exercise of getting inspired by things that you're reading one other feature that i really like on the kindle is having the ability to tag stuff so if you integrate with read-wise what is actually going to happen is if you put a full stop before making a note on the kindle it's then going to add a tag and this can be really great if you're wanting to identify common themes while you're reading a book for example i just recently read jack london's call of the wild and the theme of adaptability just kept coming up and up and i just thought this was a really powerful concept in the book so every time that sort of theme came up and i was highlighting something that was relevant to that i just put a full stop write out adaptability and then when i access my notes later i can clearly see every note that has that relevant tag i should also just mention as a side note here that i really think that fiction books are underrated when it comes to taking sort of powerful lessons from them i actually did a whole video on why i think people should read less self-help books and more fiction so i'll leave a card to that here so now you should be in a position after reading a book where you've got a ton of highlights you might have some nerves and some tags and unfortunately the next step is where you're really going to have to put in the work and that's the creation stage so let's take a look at that the problem with just consuming content even if you're doing it actively and perhaps making notes and highlights it's really not a good way to both a remember the content that you're learning but also more importantly to form your own ideas on some of the arguments that you might be interested in and this is why i think it's really important for you to create your own original piece of work after you've read a book generally at the moment for me this is creating a youtube video if i've read a particularly interesting book or if there's a certain mental model that's come out of books that i'm reading i'm going to put those into one of my videos but this is a lot of work you know involves creating a script it involves filming and if you're not really passionate about making videos i'd recommend just starting off with either a simple summary or a blog post and indeed that's what i used to do before creating these kinds of videos it's a great way to just get your original ideas down to form your own opinion and ultimately ensure that you're not just aping the ideas that you've heard in a book but really getting to grips the fundamental concepts really expressing your own views and you're just going to find that if you do this your understanding on key topics and fundamental principles is going to be so much deeper than if you just read books after one after another without really creating your own original work behind them and if even a blog post is looking like too much work for you you have twitter now you know you could just create a quick tweet storm on some of the key ideas that you've picked out of the book really just find whatever works for you as long as it becomes a consistent part of your process when you're reading you're going to find it to be really valuable i will also mention here that i think it's important or i think it's beneficial if you actually put these views online because somebody else out there could find some value in them it could also develop your online presence if you're going to create this work anyway why not share it this may seem like a hell of a lot of effort but i can assure you it's going to be worth it it's not going to take as long as it took you to read the book not after a while anyway and i can assure you it's going to more than double the value that you would have got from the book so definitely a good investment of your time in my opinion so in my eyes learning equals behavior change people say all the time oh i learned this really important lesson about persevering through difficult tasks but if that person isn't then persevering through the difficult tasks they haven't learned the lesson and this is where the cementing phase of the framework comes in this is taking the concepts that you've understood but actually embedding them into your day-to-day life so you're living out those lessons and seeing that change in your behavior now an important thing to understand with this phase is that your brain is like a slow-cooked beef joint and this is a bit of a weird analogy but bear with me here so if you're going to want to cook a beef joint what you want to want to do is put it in the oven at a slow temperature for an extended period of time you're going to want to break down all the fats and slowly sort of work in all the different flavors and the spices what you don't want to do is just turn that oven up to 1000 degrees put the beef in for 10 minutes and then take it out it's going to be burnt on the outside it's going to be raw in the middle and ultimately you're going to have a horrible piece of meat and your brain is like this as well it doesn't respond well to just overloading it with information for a short period of time if you really want to start living out the lessons that you've learned you need to over a very long period of time gradually build it into your daily routine and how you think about things the first way that i try to really live out a lesson or principle that i've learned from a book is by trying to incorporate it into my daily life and the way i do this is by combining it with my daily journal so i'll leave a link to how i journal daily here but just to give you the short of it at the beginning of the day i have one life lesson mental model something that i want to work on and i'll probably change that every three to six months that's how long it takes to embed one of these lessons then what i'll do is have that in the forefront of my mind in the day for example at the moment i'm working on first principles thinking then at the end of the day i'm then going to fill out how did i use that mental model and if i do that every day over a long period of time then that mental model theory principle whatever it's going to be is going to be something that i now don't think about it's unconscious and it's just a way that i live out my life so i think it's just a really great way that you can start to slowly change your behavior around a certain topic so of course one of the disadvantages about the journaling method is that you can only really focus on one very small very distilled idea every three to six months and this is where i think the read-wise app comes in to really help sort of slowly as well incorporate some of the other lessons and highlights that you might have learned from the books you've read so how the read wise app works is you sync it up with your kindle and every day on the paid plan and every week on the free plan it's gonna send you an email with different highlights that you might have made when you're reading a book and this is really useful because it goes back to this idea of your brain being like a sort of slow-cooked joint of beef in that over a long period of time you're gradually getting these insights coming in you're gradually building on them and learning from them so what i tend to do is just every morning you know when i'm having a poo or whatever it might be i'll just pull out my phone scroll through my read wise email and just be like oh yeah i remember making that highlight that was a really cool lesson and then hopefully in the day it's just going to be playing on my mind and i'm going to be thinking about that and who knows it might help me initiate some kind of positive behavior change if you don't want to use the read wise app or if your notes are in a different storage system you can apply these principles in exactly the same way just randomly every morning perhaps go through some of your highlights it's going to have the exact same effect i just find the rewise app to be a really convenient way to get access to this information in a random way over a long period of time so there you have it the three-step framework to really help you get the most out of every book you read from the creation stage which just involves getting your ideas in one place by making highlights and taking notes to creating your own original piece of content which is really going to help you form your own views on these ideas and principles to finally cementing your understanding by either reflecting on the different ideas every day or actually journaling about how you might have incorporated these lessons into your daily life so thanks a lot for sticking around if you like that video press like subscribe share it with a friend all that kind of stuff and i'll also leave a playlist here to my notion guides that you might want to check out if notions are all that interests you and i'll also leave the video here to my argument against self-help books and the kind of books that i think people should be reading instead thanks a lot and enjoy the rest of your day

Channel: Tom Littler

Views: 2,591

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: tix5Ze5D-Gw

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/tclittler]

Hey guys hope all is good!

This week I’ve put together a guide on how I use notion to build my ‘second brain’ by taking syncing notion with my kindle using readwise, then categorising my highlights and turning them into original content.

I hope you find this guide helpful, let me know your thoughts as always!

Thanks, Tom