How to Remember What You Read | How I Digest Books (Plus: A Few Recent Favorite Books) | Tim Ferriss

hi this is Tim Ferriss and welcome back to masterpiece theater kidding we are gonna talk about books and specifically I'm going to cover a few books that I found very enjoyable in the last few years and also I'm going to talk about note-taking how I digest books how I synthesize different pieces of books so that it's not just in one eye and out the other so to speak because consuming a ton of information especially if it's just in case information instead of just in time information is largely a waste of time its recreation but it's not retention okay so I'm gonna talk about how I go through books and I'm gonna use a few fun examples first one I'll talk about is travels with Charlie in search of America John Steinbeck this is an incredible book beautifully written simply written and hilarious I really did not expect this to be as funny as it was it was recommended to me by my mom my mom and my brother are both book snobs so if they recommend anything it's clear to high hurdle and you can see here on the inside I make indices I make an index in each book and I do it in typically one of two ways or I'll combine them here you will notice that I have written down page numbers with brief descriptions of what I found interesting so I have in quotation marks the ancient shutter I liked that phrasing so in many books I'll put pH next to it and then I'll write that down which indicates the second way I can do an index so this is page numbers description the other way I might do this in a book that's beautifully written is I will put say pH up somewhere that means phrasing and then underneath that I'll write down all of the various phrases that I found interesting the wordsmithing that I found beautiful or just the page numbers and then they will be underlined on those respective pages alright so we have just to give you a sample okay we have the ancient shutter that's a phrase guns and fishing as pretext I'm guessing for conversation living fiercely there are many many many quotes in here you will also notice there are a few that are starred there two here that are starred and one is circled and within book notes I'll very often do that for potential next actions or things that I could test so if we take a look at 79 it says different Church / denomination every Sunday and I will flip to page 79 and it is a discussion of John's experience going to many different churches and there's a lot of great great great great writing in here but I'll just jump to the part that caught my perspective all right but this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me he put my sins in a new perspective whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten this Minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity I hadn't been thinking very well of myself for some years but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left I wasn't a naughty child but a first-rate sinner and I was going to catch it and it goes on and on and then later on the page it says all across the country I went to a church on Sundays a different denomination every week and I thought this was worth pondering as an experiment as a way to stretch my thinking broaden perspectives and become exposed to different subcultures and belief systems in the United States that is 79 now if we come back see you here that's 79 then we jump to 179 self-contempt and then an arrow that has fine target you'll notice this goes on and on I've got notes on Texas coffee with egg whites and shells question mark and I was interested in maybe trying that but let's jump to the self-contempt with the arrow to find target and this is a discussion of his trip to a vet with his dog Charlie that's why the book is called travels with Charlie it's a road trip around the United States with his dog in the passenger seat or in the back of the RV and Charlie has gotten sick so he takes his dog to the vet and the vet for lack of a better descriptor is just dick the guy is not friendly and this is what John says as he's leaving or what he writes I should say I took the little pills and paid my bill and got out of there it and this is the part I underlined I'll show you you can see how it's all underlined and this is start all right it wasn't that this veterinary meaning veterinarian it wasn't that this veterinary didn't like animals I think he didn't like himself and when that is though the subject usually must find an area for dislike outside himself else he would have to admit his self contempt I thought that was very interesting and I believe Krista Tippett does a podcast on being very very smart woman has been quoted as saying something like anger is fear shown in public something along those lines so this talks about self-contempt manifesting as anger or contempt towards an outside object otherwise you have to admit your own self contempt on some level which is very hard to digest so that is one book a very funny beautiful poignant meaningful book for me and we'll take a look at a few other genres so the next book is straight how to this is a how-to book excellent how to book this is writing down the bones freeing the writer with ends was recommended to me many many times by a number of professional writers who are excellent writers and good friends of mine by natalie goldberg foreword by Julia Cameron some of you may recognize that name she wrote a classic called the artists way and popularized the practice of mourning pages this is one of those books that was recommended recommended recommended and eventually I saw the books and I was like you know now is the time this is a sign and I bought the book and I have many notes inside and you will notice some similarities to the previous index that I've shown and travels with Charlie so a page number of fundamental time to exercise and I create this index without the circles and stars then a day later a week later I will go through and I will star then I'll go through a week later and circle and in that way I am able to identify which chapters which techniques I have found most useful repeatedly because upon first reading first pass I might find something incredibly striking that later proves to not be terribly useful but in this case time to exercise fundamental this simply means blocking out almost like the Pomodoro Technique say 20 minutes for writing that's it start to finish you have to keep the pen or keyboard moving and 39 this was when I returned to multiple times allow yourself to be awkward so giving yourself permission to as I might put otherwise say write two crappy pages per day as a quota that's not her language but something I think about definition of freedom this was starred encircled so we're gonna jump to that for a second I haven't looked at this in a while let's see why I found that interesting alright here we go and yes you can see the various highlights original detail these chapters are very short so the book is also written to be consumed very easily which I like and I found the form out of the book itself noteworthy and a lesson in writing so here we have the piece I found interesting there's freedom and being a writer and writing it is fulfilling your function I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want and then I would say in parentheses but instead it means knowing who you are what you were supposed to be doing on this earth and then simply doing it but that there's a lot more to it but the part I found interesting about this was I used to think freedom was doing whatever you want that is common definition it's a definition that I get pulled into much like a riptide because it is conventional it's a definition I've used often myself but there's a lot of freedom and constraints and there is a lot of freedom and focus but it takes a reframing of that word so I found that very interesting and helpful rather in this book and then you can see here abstract country or original detail so forth and so on so that's writing down the bones this is straight how to but the index is nonetheless very similar alright I heard God laughing poems of hope and joy renderings of huh Fez by daniel the dense key a fez is a famed persian poet mystic and sufi and these renditions or renderings of huh Fez can be thought of on some level as translations but translations are always very contested and you will see that same exact type of index that I've used before and in this case I'm simply highlighting poems awake a while a ballroom view of love I know the way you can get so allow me to read you a poem which I never do but I'll do it right now since we're all friends here all right let's try a barroom view of love how fast I should say I love for a million different reasons one of which is humor he's hilarious really really hilarious and just to to put this in perspective how Fez whose given name was Shaun's would Dean Muhammad I'm sure I'm not pronouncing that right but circa 13 22 1389 is the most beloved poet of Persians 1300s keep that in mind a barroom view of love here we go I would not want all my words to parade around this world in pretty costumes so I will tell you something of the barroom view of love love is grabbing hold of the great lion's mane and wrestling and rolling deep into existence while the beloved that's God while the beloved gets rough and begins to maul you alive true love my dear is putting an ironclad grip upon the source Wolin balls of a divine rogue elephant and not having the good fortune to die so you may be thinking to yourself that Ferris has gone nuts he's gone cuckoo bananas but I find that a lot of meaning and many interesting oh that's a lazy adjective thought-provoking questions can be embedded densely into poetry so how Fez is one of my favorites here you have it I would recommend starting with the gift as a compilation but if you like what you heard then you may enjoy I heard God laughing next up we're gonna jump to a different format Kindle I use Kindle whenever possible because it allows me to export my highlights so I will highlight in this device then I will go see my highlights and there are different options for software you can use for this but the most native would be Amazon notebook so you can find your Kindle highlights then when you log in through your account on Amazon notebook and you can then copy and paste those or import them in two different programs I often will web clip that into Evernote where I can then go through my highlights much like the multiple passes and the print books and add three asterisks so three stars so to speak next two things that I find interesting in my highlights interesting I'm loving that adjective today on multiple passes and then I can just use ctrl F and search for those asterisks three asterisks to find the highlights of the highlights of the highlights and in this way I can review books after I've done a few passes of the highlights I can review what are most salient in terms of points and lessons and actions in a few minutes might be a five to ten minute review of a book that took me five to ten hours to read alright so I'll show you a book here which is already free and this is in Chapter three but this is what it looks like and you can adjust the brightness of the screen very easily I won't bore us by going through a tech tutorial of the Kindle but here is the paragraph that I found most gripping in this particular part of the chapter and it actually ties into a bunch in the previous books that I've spoken about in terms of perception stories narratives we tell ourselves and so on here we go and this is in the context of psychotherapy Western developmental psychotherapy combined with Buddhist fruitional view relating to whatever is and that might sound very strange but this book already free was recommended to me highly by Marcelo Marcela with AH Laura who is a therapist and also runs much of the training if not all the training for maps the multidisciplinary --ss association of psychedelic studies who is conducting phase 3 trials on mdma-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD that's how I got to this book another helpful reframe is to present all of our out-of-date survival strategies as an expression of our health our best efforts to take care of ourselves another is to offer the view that whatever happens to us when young if you want to strengthen our sense of being an adult it's important to practice an attitude of complete responsibility for working with our experience regardless of how it might have been shaped by our history and it talks quite a lot about practicing taking inventory of your sensations and feelings much like a Komi therapy when certain stories come up oh my boss always does this oh this that and the other victim narrative that might pop up as an example so this is a book and I have greatly enjoyed and a format that I greatly prefer when possible because I have many cases taking copious notes in print books and then lost the print book that is a sad day ladies and gentlemen makes me very very sad alright the last book that I'm going to talk about is this one here and it is a hilarious book it is a useful book full of lessons alright in pursuit of the common good 25 years of improving the world one bottle of salad dressing at a time Paul Newman and AE I'm guessing Hotchner but those one of those Ellis Island situations I don't know how to pronounce that in Americanized English nonetheless the back I'll just do give a quick read here shameless exploitation has never been more fun or done more good for more people than when done by newman's own the first green food company to use all natural ingredients and still the most successful alright if we jump into this this is a effectively a business memoir but full of great lessons and how-to advice so if you look here you can see I have tons and tons of notes and this is a page driven index and it goes on and on it goes beyond the two pages but if we look at this page there are negotiating notes importance of terms page 48 you can see 53 plus PR stunts launch make it a joke there's a lot of humor and a lot of using PR to drive a suppose social cause entrepreneurship which I found fascinating they did very very little paid advertising or marketing but a lot of PR and a lot of telling good stories the vast majority of which were parodies or satire all right so we have revenue numbers I wanted to track their revenue numbers as it corresponded to different types of initiatives to try to correlate in my mind at least what had potential causal effects alright using puns long names ridiculous claims right one of their claims on one of the products was restores virginity that's what's known as puffery I think that would be considered puffer legally speaking if you buy a shampoo that says volumizing hair volumizing that is no scientific meaning and so it is not a structure or function claim that the FDA would have problems with it's just made-up quackery basically and there's term for that pretty sure they're words puffery so when you make a ridiculous claim like restores virginity it is so beyond the realm of believability that it becomes something you can use that is my understanding not a lawyer so consult your legal counsel before doing anything like that and I highlighted a few things fake / stunts news release well it's their crafting of news releases was just brilliant 1:13 I started three times so charity competitions three annual events fake interviews incredible writing hahaha and then in the bottom right here there is something worth noting so very often when I'm taking notes I'll have these boxes in the bottom right hand page and those are prospective next steps next actions so it doesn't get lost in all of the various notes especially when I'm taking tons of notes as I would on a book like how to change your mind by Michael Pollan pages and pages of notes so to create some semblance of order for next actions because I'm always looking for next action it's great you read a book so what how is it going to affect your behavior or your beliefs your actions and it took in a audiobooks list of unlikely suspects in support of psychedelic scientific research question mark to de-risk CD media top teams at bottom that's right all these ideas based on the charity competition and three annual events this is one thirteen plus to copy and paste some of these best practices into the cultivation of scientific funding for psychedelic related research which I was later able to do so this and other books even though seemingly unrelated helped me to fundraise and raise half of so let's just call it eight million nine eight eight million or so dollars out of 17 for the first dedicated psychedelic and consciousness Research Center at Johns Hopkins which was a very big deal and was featured on the cover of The New York Times and the cover of the science section and it's because I am taking notes and planning at least plausible next actions and putting these things together and I liberally will borrow from nonfiction to think about imaginary worlds and fantasy and fiction I will also borrow liberally from fiction saydoun and try to copy and paste lessons learn about leadership as an example into so-called real life and the non-fiction realm so I love reading but more than just reading I love reading with real behavioral change afterwards with real impact and I certainly read things just for fun the UH Fez I greatly enjoy but there is value even if it's not obvious at the outset so those are a few of the approaches that I use they're not necessarily the best but they work for me for not just reading but taking structured notes to better structure thinking to make better decisions and to have a greater impact on yourself on those you care about and on the world in general you

Channel: Tim Ferriss

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Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, angel investor, ferriss, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast, how to read books, how to remember what you read, reading books process, favorite books, roam research, evernote, readwise, notion, Zettelkasten

Id: YQOrqAKKcUQ

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020