Goethe's (eighteenth century German writer) quote is saying something along the lines of “Hey you - read some books and learn some things from all of the humans that came before you… otherwise you’re missing out. On a lot.” There are massive amounts of ideas and information from the past several thousand floating around the world today. It’s also more accessible than ever before via the internet (and Amazon’s same-day shipping). In my dream world, we’d be able to upload a book or resource directly to the brain, just like plugging a USB drive into your computer, in order to learn whatever ideas lie inside and tweak the lens through which we see and understand the world. Unfortunately that’s not (yet) possible, but we can get pretty close with the help of modern e-readers and spaced repetition system (SRS) technology.
For years I’d read books and enjoy the process but find that, even a couple of weeks after finishing the last chapter, I’d be unable to remember a single meaningful idea from a book that left a real lasting impression on my mind and worldview. I wanted to change that. Having experienced the power and plasticity of human memory through learning foreign language vocabulary with the help of SRS, I began to take a similar approach with everything I read. Here’s some narrative and tips regarding how I crafted my reading habit to remember more, better comprehend and internalize ideas, and intentionally change the way I view the world and my role within it.
Reading to remember starts with clear intention. Sitting down to read a book isn’t just a way to pass the next 20 minutes. It’s an active decision to hear what the author is saying, ingest new ideas, and mix those with your existing worldview. Kick off a reading session by taking a quick glance through the notes you’ve already captured from the book. Read them all - this may seem excessive, but reading through notes won’t take more than a small fraction of the time you’re about to spend reading new content, and it’s worth the squeeze in terms of setting context and getting yourself in the right headspace.
Highlight text and take notes while you read. During the reading process itself, you’re only going to spend, at most, a minute or two of your life on each page. Highlighting and/or taking notes is the first step towards taking what’s on the page and giving it the chance to stick with you forever. Some highlights will be just that, a highlight. With others, you’ll feel the urge to add your own perspective via notes, whether that be a transient thought that popped into mind as you were reading, a “to-do” that the text reminded you of, a translation, interpretation, etc. The more you interact with your highlights and mix them with a bit of your own perspective, the more your mind will be willing to hang on to these ideas over time. Hard Copy (iOS app) is the perfect companion to reading a good ol’ paper book and provides a quick way to capture notes directly from the page with your phone’s camera, add your own notes and perform quick analysis, and get back into reading quickly without breaking your flow. I no longer read printed text without it by my side.
There’s no “right amount” of highlights to capture. When reading nonfiction, I like to grab enough major ideas that, when reading through my notes after finishing a book, I can piece together the main flow of logic / understand the gist of the author’s arguments from the highlights themselves. For a 300 page book, this might come out to anywhere from 50-100 highlights. With fiction, this number is much lower as I’m focused more on experiencing the story and limit highlighting to inspiring or poetic phrases and interesting quotes and analogies. (That said - there’s some real gold in fiction that nonfiction has a more difficult time portraying, so don’t sleep on highlighting here completely). Regardless of what you’re reading, some key themes to look for when identifying highlights candidates include meaningful and inspiring quotes, major plot or thesis points in the book’s narrative, text that invokes actionable ideas or is otherwise immediately applicable to daily life, passages that will translate to vivid imagery and make interesting art, and anything that, if applied to your own worldview and lens, could help you form more interesting ideas in the future.
After finishing a book, you’ll have a collection of highlights that will serve as the raw materials for crafting the “upload” to your mind (or as close as you can get with today’s technology). It’s time to make that dream a reality and figure out what you want to take away from what you’ve just read. Get yourself a cup of your favorite coffee (and matcha… seriously, drinking them both at once feels like floating on a cloud) and get excited. To start off, give your notes another top to bottom read-through. This helps you reacquaint yourself with the flow and context of the book and will help make your refined notes more cohesive and meaningful.
Next, crawl through your notes in whatever order you’d like and start refining, combining, etc. I usually start top to bottom but end up hopping around. Your goal is to remove fluff in order to condense and combine notes into core ideas that are meaningful enough on their own (away from the context of the rest of the book) to provide value to future you. Shorten long notes by removing filler words and boiling them down to the essence. Combine notes with similar ideas. Aim for quality over quantity at this point in the process. I notice that the text content of my notes usually ends up at about 30% of where I started. For example, when starting with 100 raw highlights and notes from a book, I’ll finish with about 30 high-quality notes. This might sound like a tedious task, but again, think about the amount of time you put into actually reading the book. If you can invest just a tiny fraction of that time into strongly improving your relationship with and understanding of the text, that’s worth every ounce. Ultimately you’re giving a gift to your future self.
At this point, you’ve read a book, saved some notes, and thoughtfully refined them. Now what? After reaching a point where you have a collection of solid, meaningful notes and perspectives that you’d like to incorporate into your worldview, your time with the book itself is coming to an end. Say thanks and put the book back on the shelf or, better yet, if you used Hard Copy and don’t have scribbles on every page, give it to a friend (who can also use Hard Copy for notes and then give it to another friend).
From this point onwards, it’s up to the power of the spaced memorization system (SRS) to get this information into your brain, keep it there, and make it available throughout daily life. SRS operates on the fact that if you see something enough times, you’ll remember it forever (or at least as long as you live). The key factor is timing between each viewing instance. SRS works by showing you content repeatedly, but with greater intervals in between each instance. It’s really useful when learning vocabulary for a new language. For example, you might first need to see a new word and its translation daily in order to jog your memory and remember it well. After a few days of daily exposure, seeing it every other day might suffice… and eventually, just once a month or once a year. That pattern plays nicely with the way in which the brain makes new connections and remembers new ideas and information. The more you see something, the less frequently you need to re-see it in order to maintain those connections.
In terms of book highlights and notes, using SRS is pretty simple. Rather than making double-sided flashcards which is normal when learning new vocabulary (e.g., word on the front, translation / definition on the back), simply reading a highlight itself and dwelling on them each for a few moments seems to suffice. I use Anki to manage SRS and create notecards with the note on the front side, and the book title on the back (the back side here really exists just to fill space). I find that viewing about 10 (random) notes each day is a good frequency to allow a diverse sampling, while keeping the set small enough that I can take a bit of time with each individual note and give ‘em a good ponder. Some notes are more factual or limited in scope than others and exist purely to remind myself of information that might be useful in one way or another (check out this example which lays out the geography of Australia’s major cities… useful context when I hear one of them mentioned? Maybe ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.). Other notes are more philosophical and offer a quick change in perspective for the given day at hand. Yet others are similar to “to-dos” and give me ideas for things to try given my current headspace / what’s on my plate.
That’s it. Nothing too fancy except for devoting a little bit of energy before and after the reading process itself, and relying on basic SRS theory to make sure your mind is able to ingest new ideas of your choosing and keep them around for the long run. This isn’t rocket science but is extremely powerful stuff.
“But humans have been reading books for centuries, why do we need to change the way we read now?” Yeah, humans have been reading for centuries. Humans have also been giving birth for centuries. That doesn’t mean that intentional modern medical procedures can’t drastically improve infant and maternal survival rates. Modern tools are here to help us. We can read better and more efficiently than ever, remember more, and become smarter and more interesting people as a result.
I really like the quote “people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years.”. On a smaller scale, I’ve been impressed experiencing how much the mind can adapt in just a few months with this system at play, and would highly recommend to anyone looking to upgrade their reading habit and confidently reach for new titles (even in fields or genres to which you’re a stranger), knowing that you’ll obtain some good takeaways and make the read worth your time. All that said, enjoy reading, use Hard Copy if you’re reading printed books, and let us here at Hard Copy know how you’ve tweaked this process to fit your best interests!