Reading for the purpose of learning is inefficient without this one trick

I want to address a very important first world problem: how to make the most of your elective reading list in life. I was talking with a friend about first world problems we have and the conversation turned to how we think about our reading lists and how they might be improved and this 4 Simple Rules blog post is the distillation of that conversation.

I think that it’s very important to be intentional about reading. Your reading or learning list is part of the lifelong learning project, one of the fundamental aspects of being human (along with our ability to identify which photos contain a crosswalk). Being intentional in this context means carefully selecting your reading materials (yet sufficiently adaptive) and also making sure that you capture and use the insights you’ve gained.

How to do this?

Well, I’d like to invoke Ray Dalio and his book Principles and his firm which gives us an excellent example of how to incorporate knowledge on an ongoing basis into all that we do. Ray Dalio’s example is mainly for how to integrate knowledge within a firm but we will see how we can integrate knowledge into the rest of our lives as well.

First off, let’s look at a firm and talk about the things that they do that will serve as possible ways to enshrine learned knowledge into every day practices. A firm has process, rules, SOPs, checklists, code, tools, etc. These elements pervade everything a firm does. These are the base layer where lessons learned can be baked in.

Let’s take a true example of how I incorporated an idea into my work life. I read a book called SuperForecasters which introduced me to the concept of tracking the accuracy of predictions over time. This is called a brier score. I created a custom tool to capture the efficacy of predictions that myself and others make over time. I can confidently say that the core idea of SuperForecasters is now enshrined, ensconced, embedded, or [insert other synonym beginning with an ‘e’]. The core lesson will not be lost on me and the forgetting curve does not apply to me.

Sometimes it may be a checklist that you need to implement after reading a book. Sometimes, it may be updating your firm’s list of guiding principles or writing some code to embed the lessons you’ve learned from a book.

If you’re going to spend between 4–16 hours ingesting a book without capturing that value forever, what are you even doing? You’re leaking and being wasteful in a sense because everything that you do in a given moment comes at the expense of the options you didn’t choose to do that very moment. Your subconscious knows that you won’t capture the value of this book for all time and hence knows that reading isn’t a great use of your time which is why you don’t feel like reading that much.

In your personal life you have rules, algorithms, checklists, items, chores, schedules, etc. and something analogous can be implemented at home too.

To operationalize this, you’d likely need a way to capture the nuggets from books as they’re learned and then to also come up with a few ways to bake in that concept. This could be something as simple as a google form with a few questions and maybe a field to add the page and name of the book you’re reading.

As mentioned above, Ray Dalio really does this well as he describes in Principles. If he learns it and thinks it’s useful, he embeds it. This method can give us another way to judge the usefulness of a given book: how many embeds did it create?

These are just my thoughts following another first world conversation I had today. Let me know if you disagree or have thoughts!