[Day 291] Reading books "the right way"

Hi there!

   As you might have noticed, this blog has been on a hiatus for about 4 months (the timestamp is somehow incorrect, I uploaded this article as of 20.12.2018) - the main reason is me being overwhelmed with my other projects, school and being subject to my own poor time management albeit I don't want to whine about it too much.
  To be frank, even though I was rather busy, these last 4 months have been great. Besides school, I've been working on projects I truly enjoy (exercising regularly, viciously reading and focusing on my poor Japanese skills while developing an app that would help others like me), while also working on my mentality as a person.
  Anyhow, intended to write an article many times on some occasions but I simply wasn't satisfied with it when I finished it, so I scraped it and tried again in a couple of weeks. But right now, with semester being almost over and Christmas just around the corner, I regained my spark and want to continue where I left off: continue to focus on creating sensible and engaging content.

   I would like to dedicate this article to the problematic of how to read books "the correct way." Of course, there is no correct way because there is large interindividual variation in a way people read books but I wanted to share my two cents on what I found to be really helpful in my reading endeavours. 

   As I said earlier, even though I haven't been posting recently, I've been reading quite a lot. In the last couple weeks, I've read the (in)famous 4 hour work week followed by a rather innocuous book called Superconnectors. I do not intend to write reviews on these books because I didn't find them as helpful or as "knowledge rich" as some of the previous books I've read. In spite of that, I plan on referencing them briefly throughout this article. Talking about some things I didn't enjoy about them. After these two books, I've read some of Robert Greene's works such as 48 laws of Power or 33 strategies of War and on the contrary to my previous reads, I've enjoyed them a great deal (expect a review on them soon!).

  Okay... without further ado I'll try to lay out my thoughts on what I found to be useful while reading non-fiction literature.

   Reading books vs using books

   I've discovered the term "using books" quite recently while watching some video of an e-mentor named Dan Lok and I think it fits my reading style perfectly. It's pretty self-explanatory that people read self-help books to improve in various areas of their lives. If we accept the premise that we want to get as much as possible out of a particular book we are currently reading, we should optimize the reading process to facilitate that goal. Many people simply read the self-help books as if was poetry and put it down never to re-open it. I don't believe that's correct. Indeed in some cases (*cough* 4-hour workweek *cough*) you want to put the book down and never to re-open it because you didn't find it particularly helpful but in other cases, it's better to revisit the books from time to time and quickly breeze thought its contents trying to recall as much info as possible, especially if it contained a lot of info you found helpful.

  I personally read books like this: When reading the book for the first time, I write into it a lot (with a pencil). For me, it's really important to mark down which parts of the book were especially interesting/helpful to me so I can find them quickly when re-opening the book. After I read the entire book, I put it down for about 3-7 days. The unconscious mind has a remarkable ability to sort out and absorb any kind of info when given enough time. I use this downtime to do other stuff, and after this period is over, I go back to the book and write a 3-7 pages long summary in the form of word doc. This way I refresh the information I saw when I read the book for the first time, and I add another layer upon it because I transform it into my own words. In order to do that, a person needs to really think hard about the contents of the book which gives you a higher probability that you will successfully recall and use knowledge from that particular book later on in life.

Quantity vs quality

   Ever since I've started reading non-fiction books, I've always been wondering - what is the right intensity of reading books. I thought there is some kind of magic formula for how much you should read to optimize the whole process but to my bewilderment, the answer constitutes just a vague "it depends" because it really does depends on many factors concerning individuals themselves and the type of books they frequently read. 

   One thing we can be certain of that, like with everything in life, you need to find the balance. Reading too much will overwhelm you with lots of redundant info resulting in you not internalizing the contents of the book enough for it to have much of a value to you while on the other hand reading to little will impede your personal development because you are not improving as fast as you want to hence you are not becoming the person you desire to be as fast as you want to.  I've established 15-20 day and cycle during which I want to absorb as much info as possible from a particular book and write the aforementioned review of it to solidify my knowledge of its contents. 15-20 days to read a book means that I have to read for about an hour a day on average which is not a big commitment.

   As a followup, I would like to express my opinion on this whole "you should read every day" thing. On the one hand, reading is a kind of habit you want to develop because it might help you to transform your life for the better but I don't believe that trying to shoehorn this type of activity into a predetermined routine/time is going to do you any good in the long run. You, indeed, should be consistent with your readings but not in a mechanical "it's 9 AM therefore I have to read for an hour" fashion. You have to have a certain state of mind to read effectively, try to look for it throughout the day and when you see it coming, grab a book and see what happens.

"Good" vs "bad" books

   Another subjective remark but this one is extremely important to me, so I'll express my thoughts on it. How can you differentiate "good" books (books you will find helpful) and "bad" books (books you probably won't and waste a disproportionate amount of time reading them given the meager value they provide)? Unfortunately, there is no easy answer either. 

   Unless the book is complete garbage, it has 4+ rating on Amazon and Good Reads, moreover, reviews of most of the people are rather biased and purely subjective, so they are not a very accurate indicator on how good the book is for YOU. As for me personally, I can only start differentiating if the book is "good" and "bad" when I am about 1/4th way through the book. Once I realize that I am reading a "bad" book I start giving less attention to the entire context of the book, trying to distil as many golden nuggets out of it as possible. I always "finish" the book from cover to cover (even if it means reading in this time-saving manner) because you never know what you can find in it. I didn't personally enjoy reading 4-hour workweek nor Superconnectors, but both books provided me with at least some insight which I found about 2/3rds through the book. If I had put them down after the first 50 pages, they would have provided me with NO value, but upon having read them in their entirety, I realized that they indeed have provided me with at least SOME value. In my opinion, reading is a qualitative process not a quantitative one to I would rather "read" an entire book in 8 hours (instead of 20 because I decided to apply my time-saving strategy when I was 1/4th through the book) and learn something than to put it down after 5 hours and walk away with nothing.

At last but not least, I would like to share some parameters by which I judge the usefulness of a book:

1. Redundancy - if the book has too much text that does not discuss the core issues outlined at the beginning of the book, that's a red flag. (Anectodes and personal stories are fine by you don't need 6 personal stories and 13 anecdotes to make a point or explain a concept.) Also some books (*cough* you should know by now which one I am constantly referring to *cough*) offer information that is useful but is just too time and place specific. You don't want to be reading how to set up your business model using MySpace in 2018 just because the book happens to be from 2007.
2. Repetition - some amount of repetition and overlap will invariably happen in every book because an author is not talking about ideas that are unrelated but he is looking at these ideas as if they are a part of a cohesive picture he wants to present to the reader, but sometimes it's just too much. I detest when someone is repeating the same idea over and over disguising as something else to make that page count go up.
3. Oversimplification - some of the books try to take complex topics (such as Jungian psychology) and distil it into an abridged form suitable for an average reader. The main issue is that most of them fail miserably and here you are, reading a book that quickly goes over all of the important concepts (about 100 of them) but explains none of it. Consult any book named "100 ideas that improve your xyzq", there is plenty of them.
4. Expediency - what is expediency? Expeciency could be regarded as "cheapness". There is an incredible amount of books that simply take other great books and aggregate their ideas together without adding anything on top of it. Also, they explain the ideas presented in the original books insufficiently most of the time that's I try to avoid expediency like a plague. When I see it (*cough*), I automatically switch into a time-saving mode. You can do shenanigans like that in an article people can read for free but not in a books people are supposed to pay for.

   Okay, that would be it for today's post. It was probably a bit longer than I wanted to be but I think I covered all the important post I've discovered about reading self-help books in the past couple of months. I definitely plan to catch up on some of my books reviews so expect more of me soon (yikes).

   And as always, hope you are having a good day.

   Cheers.