How to Analyze a Book - 101

in five steps you'll have all the skills you need to analyze a book from start to finish you'll be able to walk away from books wiser and more satisfied with yourself you'll leave behind all the typical frustrations of shallow passive reading with these five steps I built a productive reading life I can actually be proud of diving into a book is no longer intimidating because I have that clear defined system to approach it and all of that builds up into real knowledge the kind that you'll carry forever and the kind that changes how you see the world what I have to show for that is my Archive of notes these are a collection of hundred of notes tens of thousands of words all of these valuable ideas I picked up along the way and can carry with me step one is to create a mental map because a strong analysis begins before the first page before you've even started the book to give myself a better Foundation of what's to come I like to form this mental map and it'll give me Clarity in Direction later on and don't worry it only takes like 10 or 20 minutes it's really a tiny investment to build this mental map I answer two questions and the first is what is the main idea of the book because most authors at least not the weird ones they don't like to Freestyle they pick an idea a big idea and then they divide it into subtopics or sub ideas and those are the chapters but they all center around this big idea so if you the reader understands this big idea this idea that everything else is built around you'll just understand the book easier every chapter will make more sense and every point will make more sense because it's all building up to that big topic now most authors make their big idea obvious you know it's usually in the title or the subtitle and it's not hard to see but not always some are more cryptic some of are they hide it from you a bit and so it's up to you to find it and again it's so easy like it really takes just minutes that could involve you looking in the contents page it could involve you looking at the blob and even though it's rare it does happen that you might have to go into the book to kind of probe but what the author is trying to say now you'll probably never have to go that far but it's still great to understand the main idea and keep it in mind as you go the second question to build a mental map is why is the book divided the way it is so you've understood the big idea and now the natural next step is to see the subtopics why has the author decided to split the book in the way they have each chapter links back to the big idea somehow and it's your job to kind of understand that and that will give you your mental map to better navigate the book later on before you even approach a chapter you'll remember that this chapter is about this and it connects to the main topic because of XY Z it's that direction and Clarity and it's so precious for reading now I recently read a book called tribe by Sebastian yunger and it's a sort of memoir anthropology psychology Style book and it's a perfect example to show this off because the main idea of this book is how humans get a sense of fulfillment and meaning from belonging to a group then he talks a lot about how modern society has messed up that balance and has kind of distorted the way we connect to others okay so that's the big idea down but then if we look at the contents page there's actually four major topics and each one of those concerns a different aspect of society a different issue a different problem to be solved but ultimately everything relates back to the main idea the main idea of this book meaning connection and society and because you formed that mental map you now have a clear picture of what's to come and that will make your analysis so much stronger in the end it's like the scaffolding that you're going to build upon as you dive in for like a proper deep look the second and most important step in your analysis is to read with a pencil in hand for being just a simple stick of w it's so powerful for your learning it'll really take it to new heights if you're not already doing it I think I can credit like 90% of my progress to just writing in books and I'm so annoyed that I didn't start soono it's really that powerful when you read a book you're not being lectured to you're actually having a conversation with the author because that is what literature is at the end of the day it's authors talking to each other it's authors talking to themselves and it's authors talking with us and the world and we're part of that big conversation reading without a pencil is like sitting out of that conversation alone if you want to engage in the discussion and really learn from it then you have to talk back to the author and you do that with your pencil now there's three ways that a simple pencil can boost your understanding first of all it for you to think because when we read we tend to drift off sometimes and we tend to think we can absorb everything passively but that is not the case if we really want to have a deep analysis then we have to force our mind to think and we do that by introducing this active element into the book by writing we have to think and wrestle with the ideas second of all writing is amazing for organizing your thoughts I swear some authors just don't want you to understand sometimes you read their work and you think could you not have said this a bit easier or could you not have helped me out here when I I'm trying learn what you have to say and I'm sure you felt that too at some point you pick up a book and you're excited to get into it but the author just blabbers on they use complicated words their ideas are a mess and it's really hard for you to just understand what they're saying let alone do a deep dive into it it slows your reading down it irritates you and it just makes reading boring to be honest and that's where writing comes in to save you by writing the book you can organize your thinking you rephrase points you connect ideas and you really pick the book apart it's like divide and conquer you take these big messy blocks of ideas and by writing you arrange them and you make them easy to not only to follow but you make them easy to understand that's the theory behind it but if you want to apply that then there's more on that in the later step now the third benefit of reading is more of a quality of life thing because if you write in your book and as I said make it easier to navigate it saves your future self so much work and effort by writing in the book you make it your own and you personalize it and whenever you come back to your notes which you will have to do at some point you've created this direction for yourself and it's so much easier to just see what stood out to you instantly all it takes you is to flick back and you can see immediately the ideas that stood out to you any questions you might have had or any links you formed it's all there ready and waiting for you just because you took the time in to write a bit if you didn't write notes and you came back to the book later you'd be forced to kind of reread everything and re-understand everything and that's a pain in the ass it's it takes time it's slow it just adds friction to your analysis which no one wants if I wanted to I could pick out any book in this pile here that I've read and because I've made notes in it it's so much easier for me to just jump back into it and really see what I was thinking it makes your analysis smooth and seamless step three is to talk to the book and not because you're lonely but because you understand it better if you do we know the theory of taking notes and we know how it's an amazing tool in our Arsenal but then how do we actually apply that how would you actually go about writing in the book to make it stand out to you the most over the many years I've been actually writing in my books my style of I guess discussion has changed a lot the way I interact with the book has evolved so in that time I've tried a lot of different techniques and I want to share with you the best ones the ones that make your analysis as strong as possible my absolute favorite idea is to take an important point the book said and rephrase it in my own words and you might not like what I'm going to say next but if you're just underlining your points then it's next to useless and I'm going to explain that by giving you a superpower Perfect Memory you'll remember everything you underline word for word without failure that means the more you read the bigger your bank of ideas gets and whenever anyone asks you you can essentially reiterate the words perfectly and you can say exactly what the author said back to the person but is that true wisdom would you call yourself wise if you can do that no of course not just because you can perfectly memorize a book that doesn't mean you've understood it true understanding and true wisdom comes from knowing the why and how behind the information rather than just the information itself when you underline key points in the book even if you remember them perfectly that's not enough to really do an analysis and besides you probably won't ever revisit them anyway and they'll just kind of be lost it's like in school when you go through a textbook and highlight everything you're not really going to remember any of that unless you do something with it when you write something in your own words you're wrestling with the ideas you're really taking it and making it part of yourself it's how ideas truly come to life and actually change the way you see the world and on top of that you get the added benefit of memory when you're write in your own words you don't have to force yourself to remember things word for word the ideas just stick with you naturally because you've integrated them as part of your mind and all because you took them and made them your own of all the notetaking techniques that's by far the best one and you can probably get away with just using that but there's a few more techniques I want to share that have made my reading smoother and more productive I love to write questions I have in the margin so as I'm reading and if something kind of raises a question or put it down I find that it stimulates your thinking it encourages you to read on trying to seek an answer to that question like it's a little challenge or something maybe you'll find the answer maybe you won't it doesn't really matter but the point is to have that goal of answering the question and really growing in mind second I connect points to my existing knowledge for example let's say you're reading a book about the Byzantine Empire you know you'll hear stories of Emperors being overthrown civil unrests and all this kind of power struggle and you might be reading that and think hold on a second this is what mackelli was writing about in The Prince and even though it's not mentioned in the book you've made that connection write that down that's precious because that means you've taken what you already know and applied it in real life to understand another book that is Peak reading right there and you should be proud and the final writing technique I like to use is is simple and it's more of a a quality of life thing as you read and you see the important points and all the arguments you kind of number them so when you dive back into the book later on you have this kind of ordered list it's not hard for you to understand and see where the arguments are because it's all there for you maybe you do a numbered sequence of the arguments or maybe you put a star or something to show you where the argument begins anything that makes the book easier to navigate your future self will thank you step four is to Summarize each chapter in your own words in the past few steps you've used the humble pencil to really understand what the author is trying to tell you and this step is the final blow this is almost how you complete your analysis you collect everything you've learned all the major points and you sum it up in this neat package at the end at the empty pages on the back of a book or a separate notepad you take all the ideas you learned and create a personalized summary of the book and luckily for you most of the work is already done because you've used used your pencil to go through the book and find out the main points and already write notes on what you found so you use those to help you write the summary at the end and how you choose to do that is totally up to you you can use lists diagrams bullet points anything that let you make this final report of the book almost for example this is how I did it in tribe the same book as before I went to the back of the page and I don't know if you can see that there but I wrote each chapter heading and just kind of rough notes on the main ideas I learned this is a really ugly page so if you're going to do it do it neater than me but I only keep it this ugly because I prefer to do it in a digital format later on and there I put a much more detailed list of what I learned and really flesh out the notes you can make the notes as detailed as you want or as brief as you want it really is up to you whatever helps you learn the best the point is to have a single place where you put all these notes so you can take them away with you much easier now the fifth and final step is to save the best insights in your second brain this step is how you make your analysis build up to something in the future you may have encountered the second brain strategy before it's a concept popularized by the famous Creator and author Thiago Forte to keep it simple it's your personal Archive of ideas I've built my own and so far it's about 550 notes with tens of thousands of words and it's been such a precious tool in everything I do every single day there's three main benefits to it first it lets you keep everything you learned in one place you don't have to carry around 700 notebooks and you don't really have to worry about losing any of it because it's all in this one centralized place that you can around wherever you go and let me tell you that keeps learning so simple and so free of frustration the second benefit is that you can organize your knowledge so whenever you need something you know exactly where to find it and the third benefit probably my favorite is that because you put everything in one place you let the ideas mingle with each other you give your knowledge the opportunity to connect and to form these exciting new ideas so after creating your summary in the back of the book which was the previous step you now take that and move it to your archive and maybe it doesn't have to be everything but the most precious and valuable ideas you can take and move them to the archive and that means wherever you go whenever you need them they'll always be there and that's it those are the five steps of analysis and I've used them for many years with a lot of success and I hope you get the same out of it and it might be difficult at first but if you can take that method and apply it to books that are worth an analysis you'll get better at it and you'll find that you can suddenly take on any book you put your mind to reading becomes fun it becomes more productive and it becomes something that really gives you true wisdom and joy I hope even one thing helped you and if you have any questions or experiences with it something interesting to share then feel free to email me I respond to everything and and I'd love to hear some of your experiences and of course thank you so much for watching

Channel: Odysseas

Views: 14,688

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Id: 5FVp3LBidQg

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2024