How To Read Deeper - The Importance of a Commonplace Book

now here's a personal pet peeve of mine i don't like people who rave on on and on and on about you know i've read a hundred books this year if you place a heavier emphasis on a quantity over quality now please turn off this video personally i think the quality of reading is much more important at a quantity of reading you know if you've watched any of my videos you know that's like a common theme of what exactly we're doing here i want you to walk away from a book feeling like your life just opened up i want your perception to change after reading a really great piece of literature i want your world to alter i want you to have like a brand new understanding of the life that you occupy but that's not that easy to do you see the quantity of reading or you know how many books you've read that's very easy to define you just have to read you just have to read more and read even more and then you have this you know pseudo achievement happening you can read a hundred books in a year and that's going to sound very impressive at dinner parties but you know what if you want to read 100 books per year you run the risk of not understanding a single one of them and in that sense you're developing a second degree of ignorance that second degree of ignorance is a doctoral ignorance that comes after knowledge so you can have the knowledge you've read 100 books but you understand none of it or in the words of alexander pope you are a book for blockhead ignorantly read so given that we want to read for death we want to read for understanding when we want to read deeper into books there has to be something a mechanism as something that keeps you on track because the human brain as amazing as the human brain is it's not a computer it can't store information in its same way that the computer stores information so therefore we tend to forget things when we don't want to forget them we tend to remember silly things that don't really matter so how do we work with this machine this thing right here to help us read deeper into literature and that is what we're going to talk about today and i am going to show you something really cool that i you know that i haven't talked about in a while i talked about this concept before about like two years ago and that was one of the first videos that really blew up and that concept was or is the concept of having a common placebook to deepen your understanding of books starting a common place book is one of the best things that i've done for myself over the past few years and through reading a lot of books and through taking down critical notes and through you know through journaling and critically reflecting on these books i think that's like one of the best ways that you can ingest literature in like a really deep fashion there's no point memorizing passages from a book but if you have private reflections with regards to some of the passages that you've collected excellent most people make the mistake of hey i can just remember that in my head but you know the five days later you asked the same person again hey what did you think of um ts eliot's wasteland he's going to draw a blank here's the fact your brain is not going to remember everything that you've concocted your brain isn't going to latch onto those critical reflections that you've had your brain is pretty terrible at holding onto this like very elaborate information because those pieces of information are so interconnected with many other concepts it's very hard sometimes to retrieve the information if you're not that well versed in it and if you don't even have a device or storage for you to store those critical insights that popped out when you're reading a really really good piece of literature and that's setting you up for you know not understanding there's a hundred books that you've read so this is why you definitely need a common place book this is why you definitely need a personal encyclopedia this is your own personal library of your notes a depository of all of the crap that you've read this is a depository of all your personal reflections on a book and also the interconnections between the books that you've read all those very valuable interconnections they need to be documented your brain is a very stupid machine doesn't remember that much and also your brain is just like constantly occupied by daily matters you definitely need a system for you to take all of that crap in for you to put in all of this information and for you to store this information and organize this information in in a very effective fashion in very efficient fashion so before the common place book i took a lot of notes in the margins of the book but a little later on i realized i really need like a central system to compile all of these notes together that's when i first started using onenote but today i'm going to tell you something else something better than onenote onenote is great but it's kind of scattered it's kind of all over the place uh the organization on onenote isn't exactly that great the linking between documents it's it's just not that efficient but nevertheless i stuck with onenote for a very very long time it's kind of painful at times to organize my ideas but right now just about two weeks ago i bumped into notion and this video is not sponsored by notions just a really cool tool that i found that you can definitely definitely make good use out of i have notion on my computer but basically notion is this like all-in-one productivity system it's great you can search up other videos on how to use it i'm not going to tell you how to use it i'm just going to show you how i like to utilize notion for my book notes so i have a list of all the books that i want to read and they're all labeled as reading read or pending and as i scroll down the list i know exactly which book that i should read next i know exactly which book i'm reading currently and i know exactly how many books i've read in the past it's a very effective system you can customize the tags you can do everything that you want and even better you can expand the page on each one of the notes and to take notes in that section so you don't have to exactly jump around from one note to evernote and to jump on a website or something like that besides books i also have this ideas done so whenever i come across a really interesting article in a magazine or from a website my idea stump is full of these articles full of these references that i can later draw on to make videos or to write articles on to write blog posts on so as a whole it's a very effective system then again i'm not going to teach you how to use it if you want to learn how to use notion you just just search on the internet there are tons of videos that can you know that can tell you how to actually use this app as you know a very effective note-taking system but for me personally it's a perfect common place book and on the other hand it also works on your phone so when i have a random thought here and there i just like documented on my phone it's just completely completely fantastic so check out the application notion it's completely free you can use it however you want organize it come up with your own medium read the books that you want and read those books deeper record your personal thoughts on a system like notion you might not like notion you can use something else but here's the central idea when you want to read deeper you have to have a system for you to organize the ideas otherwise all those things are going to go haywire after you know after a month or something you're going to forget everything that you've read don't trust your brain because your brain's flaky you want a system to document everything down and i think notion currently is my favorite system to do that thank you for watching this week's episode if you haven't signed up for the newsletter be sure to do so each week we have exclusive goodies coming at you from the newsletter and this week specifically i was honored to go on to the socratic method podcast and and we've discussed an ins and outs of one of my favorite books of all time marcel prousts swan's way so if you're interested in that podcast episode head over to the socratic method podcast youtube page to watch the episode on swan's way and sign up for the newsletter anyway rc walden here and i shall be signing off right about now

Channel: Robin Waldun

Views: 214,719

Keywords: commonplace book, rc waldun, the quirky inquiry, how to keep a commonplace book, how to start a commonplace book, notion, notion tutorial, how to read better, how to read more books, how to read a book, mortimer adler, reading, bookworm, booktube

Id: ElAE4X3xwJk

Length: 7min 18sec (438 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 18 2020