One of the highly effective habits of top
1% geniuses is to learn from text. Now, video-based formats are good; you can learn
a lot from them. But when you have access to the information that very few people
have, that you can only get from text, and this is something that I want to talk about
in this particular video: How to read and learn from technical books or text. I have been reading
books for the last 4 to 5 years, and believe me, this is one of the best habits that you can
develop because it changed my life completely, as you can see it over here. I have read so many
books; it changed the way I think about the world. Think about this: when you read technical books,
you get everything at one place. The author of that particular book spends around 2 to 3 years
researching, understanding, and writing that particular book and gives you everything in a
structured format. The same goes with the white papers or the research paper. These are some of
the gold mines that you should explore if you want to become a top engineer. So in this video,
I want to give you the quick guide on how you can get started reading technical books, learn from
them, and retain the knowledge for the future. Now, before we get started, I just want to
burst your one myth: that reading technical books is difficult. A lot of people come to
me and tell me that reading technical books is boring and difficult to understand. This is
the pre-built mindset you might have because you were exposed to the reference books in schools
or college, preparing for exams. But most of the technical books in today's world are very
easy to understand. They are just like novels; you can read them text by text, and you will
understand most of it. The difficult part here is not reading the technical book; it is
learning the new concepts. So even if you watch the video and if you are just getting started,
it might be a little bit difficult to understand at the start. So pay attention to this; like
when you get started learning any new topic, the first step here is to get introduced to the
new information. After that, you will analyze it; your brain either accepts or rejects it. It
starts processing it, and the more you repeat it, the more you learn and grow in your life.
So remove this myth that reading the technical books are difficult. Learning
a new topic is difficult at the start, but the more you repeat it and the more
you stick to it, it will get easier. So once you begin with this right mindset, then
we can talk about how to get started reading technical books. Now here's the thing: in general,
there are two types of technical books available in the market in today's world. The first type
is just theory-based that only have text, and the second type of book is more towards hands-on,
based on the projects. So we will talk about both of these types. First, we will understand how
to read the theoretical and conceptual book. These are the books that only have the
theoretical information about different topics and concepts. One of the best resources
if you want to understand the technology from the fundamental level. It is very difficult to
find all of these information in the videos, but these types of technical books will give you
access to all of these information. The advantage of learning difficult text is that it makes
learning everything else so much easier. So once you understand the tech from the fundamental
level, you will realize that most of the modern tools are just abstractions or layers on top of
the core fundamentals. And these fundamentals do not change for a longer period of time. So now you
know why you should read all of these difficult books. But how to read them? The simple answer
is: you just get started with the reading. Now before you click off from this video, listen to
me first: learning to read technical books is like going to the gym. You don't go to the gym on the
first day and start lifting 50 kg of dumbbells. You start small, and you start with a 2.5 kg or 5
kg dumbbell. This is what you should get started with. The same thing applies here. When you
decide to learn from some of your technical books, do not put pressure on yourself that you have to
finish everything today or you have to understand everything that you read. This is the biggest
misconception people have that, "Okay, if I start reading this technical book, I should understand
each and every word." This is not how things work. When you get started, I have read this particular
book three to four times, right? This is the data in terms of application. This is a completely
theory-based book. This does not have any code examples or anything. Now when I got started
reading this book for the first time, I did not understand a single word. This is one of the most
difficult texts that I was reading at that time. But I kept reading it forward, and it started
making sense in the third or fourth chapter. So these types of books are always boring to read
when you get started. You will get different dots, but if you stick to it for a few days or weeks, it
will start connecting everything together. So the important point here is that you should start
small. Start with one page a day. This book is around 400 pages long, and if you want to read one
single book throughout this entire year, then if you read like two to three pages a day, you can
complete this entire book by the end of the year. Now this brings me to my second point: you don't
have to read 50 books. You don't have to read this book from the first page to the last page. You
don't have to understand every single paragraph that is written. It's all good. All of these are
the wrong mindset that you have about learning: that you have to finish reading 50 books, that
you have to read each and every single word and understand from this particular book. Even
if you understand 30 to 40% from this book, that's totally fine. No one really understands
everything. You understand some part, and you can skip some part. You don't have to
read this book from the first page to the last page. If you skip something, that is totally fine.
If you understand something, that is totally fine. Okay? So don't have all of these wrong mindsets
that okay, you have to understand every single thing. Just get started. The goal here is not
to finish reading all of these books. The goal here is to get in the habit of reading these
difficult texts. So at the end of this video, we will talk about how to build a proper
routine for reading all of these books, but let's talk about the second type of book that
is more hands-on with the practical examples. Now, these books are one of the best books if
you want to learn any new topic. Why? Because with the theory, you also get the practical
examples. The structure is usually the same: you get some theoretical knowledge, but with
that knowledge, you also get the practical code example that you can directly apply and see the
output. For example, at the start of my career, I read this book, "Hands-On Machine Learning with
scikit-learn, TensorFlow, and Keras." It was a gold mine if you want to get into the data
science and machine learning field because this book had everything that you need to know
from theoretical understanding to the practical, how to use the latest tools. As you can see,
after theory, you get the code samples. These are also available on the GitHub repository.
You can just read this book and execute the code while you're reading it. These types
of books are much easier to read because you get to execute the code and understand
the theoretical concept then and there. Now, one advice I would like to give is that when
you learn from all of these books, you should not do the copy-paste (Ctrl C, Ctrl V). If you want
to follow along, you should type the code by yourself. This will give you the hands-on practice
of writing code and boost your confidence. Now, these are mainly two types of books that
you will find in the market. The first are theoretical-based. If you can get the hard copy,
that is good. If you can't, then just read from the PDFs or eBooks. For the second type, I highly
recommend getting the PDF only because you get to follow along while writing the code. I usually
recommend people to start from the PDF, and if you like the book, especially the theoretical
one, then you can order the physical copy. Now we talked about a lot of good stuff. So if you
found it helpful, then don't forget to hit that like button. That keeps me motivated to create
more of this content and also hit the subscribe button if you're new here. Now let's talk about
how to build a routine to read all of these books and some of the strategies that I have used. Now
the first step: start with a simple goal. Again, you don't have to read 50 books. You don't have to
read each and every paragraph from this book. All you have to do is just get started. So just keep
your goal very simple: in this particular year, I will read three technical books. So every 4
months, I will read one book. I will recommend some of the books at the end of this video, so
don't worry about it. After you define your goal, then make a commitment that no matter how
hard it gets, no matter how boring it gets, you will stick to the entire process because
it will make sense in the future. Once you make this commitment, then start small. One page
a day for 1 week, 5 pages for the second week, 10 pages a day for the third week, and 20 pages a
day for the fourth week. At the end of the month, you will complete reading 250 pages. That's
half of this particular book. So the way you can do that is just keep 30 minutes out
of your day. It can be after waking up, going before bed, or if you're
traveling daily for the office, then you can also read it from the PDF. All you
need is 30 minutes for the reading. That's it. Now, at the end, if you want to retain this
knowledge, you can start taking notes. The simple way is just directly highlight the text.
Or if you want to take the notes separately, all you can do is just open the Word document
and start pasting your content. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. All you're doing is that
whatever the information that you find useful, you can just copy and paste it in the Word
document or you can use any note-taking application like the Apple Notes, Notion.
I usually prefer using the Obsidian for my Apache Spark course and building this note
structure for my students where they can get access to everything at one place. On
Obsidian, you can create the backlinks to easily track the new information. If you
want me to create the detailed video on the Obsidian and how I take notes, then let me
know in the comments. I will make that for you. If you're still watching this video, then you can
comment it out, "I watched this video till the end." That way, I will know that you completed the
entire video and you are very serious about this. Now here's the thing: read these technical books
as a curiosity to learn something new. You might or you might not use this information in
the future, but the act of understanding something that a lot of people skip, that gives
you the confidence. Doing hard things is always rewarding. So don't read these books just
because you want to get a job or something. Learn to enjoy the process of reading all of these
difficult texts. It'll help me a lot in my career, and I'm 100% sure if you stick to this,
it will definitely help you to grow in your career. At the end, I just want to
leave you with this quote from Steve Jobs: you can't connect the dots looking forward; you
can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect
in your future. This was all from this video. I hope you understood and learned something new. If
you did, then don't forget to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel. Thank you for
watching. I'll see you in the next video.
