You Don't Hate Books: The Simple Method I Use to Read 100 Books a Year

if you recognize this book and you bought it chances are you never finished it this is thinking fast and slow and like me it is one of the most abandoned books of all time this basically means according to the Hawking index that it scores amazingly as far as buying it starting it and stopping it goes people just can't seem to be able to get through this book no matter how popular recommended or incredible it is and unfortunately this is not at all uncommon almost everyone has a last book that they never finished from last month last year or back when they were in high school feeling that you know maybe books aren't for them and then as adults we get recommended these really dance but incredible bugs and added on to our already crazy personal and work lives we just feel that because we're not enjoying or distracted from this reading we're maybe just not the kind of person who is into those sort of things as someone who has read and enjoyed thousands of books in my life I am fully convinced that it is some small but significant changes that make all the difference in being able to enjoy and continue a reading habit and so today I wanted to share with you a life's worth of intuition and experience when it comes to approaching and conceptualizing books and reading so that hopefully by the end of this video you might pick up something that might change the way that you approach books maybe help you understand why you couldn't finish thinking fast and slow and maybe also how you could be able to do that if you wanted to I am going to talk today about how to train your eyes and how to train your focus to enjoy reading so let's get straight into it the first thing I'm going to be talking about is the ability to train our eyes to distinguish between different types of books and I'm not talking here about book categories like is it fiction or non-fiction or Memoir or history but I'm talking about the categories based on the way that the content is delivered and how that affects my energy I find that if there is a mismatch between my energy energy levels or what I currently need to be entertained and the wavelengths or what the book requires in order to be read that's just a bad time and I'm going to stop reading and hate what I'm doing so in my life I use three categories of reading based on how they deliver the content and how they affect my energy in the first of these categories is informative books and thinking fast and slow is definitely there as is Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design the purpose of informative books is to get me educated on a specific topic or bits of information and the way that they deliver their content is in very very clear chunks and these chunks tend to be in chapters so every chapter makes a clear point and it's kind of distinguished and delineated very often at the end of these chapters I feel like I am done so I describe these books as being more swappers or Stoppers a swapper in the sense that sometimes I read Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design and I might get halfway through it and think actually I'm much more interested in black holes than everything else that he's talking talking about so I'll swap it for another book because it's information for information or a stopper in the sense that I might just get too tired by focusing on something dense for a long time and I just want to stop reading these books are not bingeable in the second category I put expressive books and these are books that share the thoughts and opinions of the writer this is a book that I'm reading at the moment Beauty basically books like this tend to be essays or philosophy where it's just an opinion piece but more importantly the way that this information is delivered is in tiny little chunks usually every concept is centered around a paragraph or sometimes if you're reading pure philosophy I find that the concept is delivered even in single sentences where I'll read a sentence and I'll have enough to think about it these are Stoppers they take away my energy it's very difficult to get through these books in one sitting I don't think they're even made for that but if I don't keep this in mind it's really difficult to read Because I'll start them and then I'll just want to stop and think these are to be contrasted with my third category which are store books and these are books that deliver the whole content in one group a great example are fictional books of course but it doesn't need to be just romance or crime or fiction or thriller it can also be well written Memoirs and I'm going to use some examples of things later too in a storybook there is a clear line the way the content is delivered is in one big chunk you either read the whole book or nothing at all almost but it keeps you interested and entertained from start to finish it kind of pulls you along it so I can already see in these three categories there's a very different method when I will approach a book what I will do is look first at of course the title and the synopsis so the summary that tells me what the book is about and then later I'll just have a flick through the book itself here are what I'm trying to see is the language of the book How complicated or easy it is because this will definitely affect my binge ability of a book A book with very easy language that I'm very interested in or familiar with will be something that I'll want to definitely binge no matter what the content is like and and on the other end for example even though Shakespeare is technically fiction the fact that it is written in language that I'm very unfamiliar with makes the chunks a lot smaller rather than having this bingeable quality to it and lastly to determine the language what I would do is I would look at the beginning of each chapter of the first sentences and see how they start the more story like they seem the more context defining they seem then the more likely that this is going to be a book that's going to have a story element to it or an engaging element to it rather than being this pure almost school science book or essay the value of being able to quickly categorize books like this means that I know how to approach them and how to read them when I pick up something bingeable which is informative I know I can get through this book fairly quickly and that's absolutely fine and even when I pick up a short book which is philosophy and is quite expressive and information dense I know that this might sometimes take me weeks or months to get through so knowing how much energy and attention this will need will kind of set me up for my next step which is training my focus to read and I find that this is the biggest issue the thing that people mentioned the most to me is that they often get distracted for reading and the reason that they don't read as much as they want is because their focus just goes away and I find this absolutely hilarious because being the most unfocused person ever I feel like it has more to do with how you are matching the book Vibe with your focus at the moment rather than being generally a focused or an unfocused person so let me just explain if you come back from a long day of work and you're tired and exhausted and you know you have a million other things to do tomorrow and you want to unwind with thinking fast and slow that's not going to be a guaranteed success and actually it's probably not going to be an activity that you can keep up for long but that doesn't mean that you hate the book or that you can't read the book it just means that there is an energy and a focus mismatch in order to discuss Focus I'm going to use Barbara Oakley's two main modes of functioning which are diffuse mode and focus mode I would Define diffuse mode the mode that we are mostly in when we are considering to read this is kind of the state where you can have a TV show in the background know you're just like scrolling through a feed on some social media app and you're kind of thinking of the messages you need to respond to this is the diffuse mode you can focus on a lot of different things but nothing specifically you're kind of like mellowing and doing nothing and this is when the thought might come into your head that maybe I should read right now as opposed to focus mode which is something that requires a hundred percent attention on the thing that you are doing now the issue with diffuse mode is that because our attention requirement is really really low we can very easily think that oh I should read right now that might be a thing that I want to do but if we pick up a book which is very very dense like thinking fast and slow or Stephen Hawking's books the attention requirement in order to enjoy this book and understand this book is so much higher that this mismatch means that we're very very quickly just going to lose our Focus the little bit of focus that is on it is not engaged enough we're not enjoying the book so we're just like I'm just going to pull out my phone so I think this is where the mismatch comes from the most and what I would recommend in this case is that if you are in diffuse mode where you're like my brain does not want to do a lot of work right now I cannot commit to working 100 on something which is very dense I just want to chill and you still want to read I would recommend picking up a book which has a really really strong storyline something that has a low energy or attention requirement but that keeps you very very engaged in this way either your attention ramps up as you're reading it or you can actually enjoy it with a low attention that you need so this might be like a novel or a fictional story or I keep imagining Markham guard wall but some sort of non-fictional or educational writing that is really informal and written in a very very engaging style this might be a good match for that time in order to keep your attention on the thing that you are doing the times of the day that I personally read in diffuse mode are usually before I go to sleep because this is where I am either completely exhausted and happy or I am most likely completely exhausted and stressed and overthink thinking so my focus is either on the fact that I want to sleep or what I'm happy about or the majority of my focus is kind of on the things that I'm stressing about that I want to be distracted from so I'm definitely in a diffuse mode where I don't have a lot of attention or energy because it's really late to give to books and in this case I always read something fictional something really really light easy language something to just help me like grab some part of my attention enough for me to just Drift Off to Sleep When I get tired and these are the sorts of reading I would recommend in those instances on the other hand we have Focus mode and focus mode is where we wish we all were all of the time this is where you're paying 100 attention to the thing that you are doing and it's really great to be reading in Focus mode because you're actually if you're in it you're actually enjoying what you're doing and you're getting a lot of benefits from the book that you are reading or the tasks that you are doing but the thing is we only have so much Focus or energy to give things in a day there's this huge barrier tantry and this huge friction to start where when you see the requirement of this book and you go oh do I want to do this right now if you say yes and you actually want to do it that's great you're going to love the book if not you're probably going to like drop it and leave it my recommendations for books which require Focus mode are one to either increase the amount of attention that you can give it in the moment and I'll explain how I try to do this or to take it with you when you have no other option but to read so in the first instance what you're doing is if you're trying to read thinking fast and slow it's much better to actually answer the questions of why did you stop reading it last time why did you actually want to read this what results can you get from this why is this a good use of your time right now and kind of doing these analytical questions will actually help you a lot more to increase your motivation to do this task in the moment rather than trying to like unreasonably almost force yourself to do it which might not work or if your answer is no but you want it to be yes you can match this with trying to negotiate with yourself what you feel either way on the other hand these are the books that I would put in your bag so if you're stuck on the Underground and your headphones died or are your train stop somewhere and you're stuck for 30 minutes or you it's really to put up on your headphones somewhere or you hate your music and you don't have internet access I would pick up this book then so when you are somewhere that you have no other options airports things like that where you have no other option but to read this is a good space to have this book as an option because this is a time where you're kind of frustrated you have a lot of focus to give something because you usually have a lot of energy but you have nothing to focus on at the time and this can then become your default these are also great books to Tire you so for example the book Beauty I always keep in my bed so when I have a day where I am wide awake for some reason when I'm supposed to be sleeping and I have a lot of energy I will pick this book up because it has a huge friction to start I know that my function at that time is to enjoy myself and also Tire myself enough to get a sleep and also because the chunks are so small I can stop at any paragraph or any sentence and I'm absolutely fine I can start reading later versus a story where it's really difficult to do this and also my last bit of advice is to create artificial special Cliffhangers so for example a lot of non-fiction writers or educational writers don't really stop the book at an interesting place they kind of resolve every chapter because they're obviously optimized for giving information rather than being interesting but it's therefore sometimes our task to make the book interesting so maybe stop the chapter before the last three pages of it or stop resolving your needs to understand something and leave it for another time so you have an extra reason to pick up the book where you left off with these Concepts it's hopefully easier to understand where you stand when it is or isn't a good time to read what the vibe of the book is in general and not beat yourself up if you're curious about the thoughts that I read specifically and my thoughts and opinions on them which can be really brutal and honest sometimes I kind of grazed over these topics almost and didn't go into the depth that I would have wanted in order to make it stand out for me necessarily I have a whole series of videos where I go into detail and just sit down casually and talk you through a summary my main learning points what I love and what I hate and what I change in my life from the things that I gather in the books that I read this series of videos is over on nebula a platform where me and a bunch of other educational creatures have come together to put a lot of other videos that don't really fit the algorithms and the platform on YouTube this is a space for us to experiment with different types of content and videos I find it a great space to talk more about reading which I absolutely love but I also take video recommendations is there if there's anything you would like me to put there I already have a few of these book summary videos up on nebula if you would like to have a look at them immediately but I will also be adding more as I go forward with the books that I read on nebula there's no ads there's no algorithm so you're not distracted by other things you just go to watch the thing that you want and you can leave and also a lot of educational creators are actually on the platform so you might find they're able to watch a lot of our main YouTube videos ad free over there so it's actually overall an incredible package I will have a link in my description which will give you a monthly or a yearly discount to access nebula but I do want to thank them so much for sponsoring this video and making the platform and those book summary videos possible because I actually find that side so much fun and lastly I do want to mention that as someone with challenges of my own I do dye and cringe inside a little when I do mention numbers or being able to do things like read as much fully well knowing how underdiagnosed lots of reading and learning disabilities are so if you are struggling with these things I do apologize this video is not at all potentially helpful for you and um yeah I just wanted to say sorry about that but otherwise if you made it so far thank you so much for spending this time with me I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be kind to yourself and others and don't believe everything you think thanks bye

Channel: Elizabeth Filips

Views: 458,770

Keywords: reading, books, how to read, how to read faster, how to read more, booktube, booktubers, note taking, note taking apps

Id: 1tOcYYGHCO0

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 07 2023