LEARNING BETTER.
Stop Reading & Start Thinking
How to get the most from every book you read.
Tell me if this sounds familiar.
You finish reading a book, and you’re like, “Damn.”
You’re feeling enlightened, empowered and can’t believe you’ve gone this long without having known these life-changing ideas.
One week passes, then a month, maybe even a year, and you realize nothing has changed in your life since you read that book. All you remember is that it was good… but you don’t remember why.
A lot of us are avid readers. We like to think of ourselves as intellectuals, ripe with knowledge and insight, and therefore believe we’re the best positioned to enact great change or to create big ideas.
But… if we let everything we learn slip away, we might as well have never learnt it in the first place 😕
There’s a solution though — and it’s pretty simple:
Write a review for every book you read.
Or at least, every quality book.
Why, you might ask? There’s 4 key reasons we’ll dive into:
- Teaching is the best way to learn
- You become a thinker, not a follower
- Repetition and simplification aids memory
- You communicate better
Already convinced that writing book reviews is a good idea? Learn how to write a good book review here!
Teach what you preach — you’ll learn it better.
When you write a book review, you’re forced to really distill and ponder the key ideas that are worth explaining to a reader.
Because no one wants to read a 500 page regurgitation of what you just read… that’s what the book is for.
Throughout this process, you’re making sure you UNDERSTAND what exactly it is you think you’ve gained from this book by retelling it to someone else.
Let me give you an example.
How many times have you sat through a lecture thinking, “wow, I get it!”, only to sit down, try to do the homework, and realize you know nothing… because you don’t know how to apply these concepts.
It’s easy to nod your head and follow a path someone else has traced for you, but finding that pathway yourself is a lot more difficult — which is what makes it so worthwhile.
The same way homework forces you to stop and think about what you’ve just absorbed, teaching someone what you’ve learnt forces you to grasp ideas well enough to explain it to someone in a way they can understand.
Summarizing and reviewing also forces you to logically link the ideas you’ve read.
You’re checking whether you actually understand how or why A leads to B as you (hopefully) try to extend the concepts to metaphors or examples in reality.
This allows you to discover the holes in your understanding that need patching, and to solidify what you do know by thinking about the concepts from different perspectives!
Be a thinker, not a follower.
When you try to draw connections between the points of the book, you have to think about whether these ideas actually made sense together.
You’re trying to figure out whether you’re being dumb or the author’s being dumb, or maybe even a bit of both.
It’s easy to blindly consume and regurgitate ideas, regardless of how valid or true they are.
But this is what leaves us gullible to being mindless followers, just photocopies of the status quo that continue to perpetuate the same ideas.
On an extreme level, this is how propaganda works. With punchy slogans and passionate rhetoric, we stop thinking about what we’re being told and follow through on beliefs that aren’t truly our own.
But when you write a book review, all this extra time spent reflecting allows you to re-evaluate whether what you read is actually worth carrying forward with you.
The smartest people think twice about what they read. They take the best of what they’ve seen, criticize the worst, and form their own opinions. It’s by doing this that they help to move the world forward by thinking differently.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with agreeing with an idea. If after mulling over the evidence, the opinions, the arguments you still think, “hey, that makes a lot of sense” then that’s awesome!
Just remember: the issue isn’t with agreeing, it’s with following.
Drill it in — The Power of Repetition & Simplification
In a world that’s loaded with information, we often feel the pressure to absorb as much as we can. We take extra classes, listen to podcasts during our commute, and read extra articles in our spare time.
But none of this is meaningful if you forget it all!
Rather, it’s far more impactful if you retain and find ways to weave just a few new principles into your life than failing at trying to integrate 50 of them.
Like we mentioned before, writing a book review means you’re forced to spend a lot of quality time thinking about the ideas inside the book, and simplifying each of them in a way that makes sense for you.
This process therefore makes it way easier for you to remember these concepts.
When I reteach someone a lesson I learnt in class, I also retain it just by walking my brain through the thought process again, by hearing the lesson another time.
Heck, there are piano pieces I spent hundreds of hours practicing — and those are the ones I remember 5 years later.
Spending all of this quality time means you better understand the impact of these ideas, making you more likely to want to embed them into your daily life, and therefore more likely to find ways to make it happen.
That is the goal of learning:
To find ways to connect ideas to reality.
Communicate Better.
Understanding purpose and adopting the reader’s perspective is one of the most important parts of writing anything.
When you tell people you read an awesome book, you have to reflect and think beyond “this was a really good book!” You need to understand WHY that’s true if you’re going to be able to convince anyone else this is a good (or bad) book too.
Understanding what makes ideas strong or weak means you’ll be able to identify the strong and weak components of your own writing.
Having these skills means you’re able to drastically improve your own writing, because you can’t create good work if you don’t know what good work looks like.
Also, writing a book review means, well, writing. And the more you write, you inevitably become a better writer, no matter how bad you might think you are.
Obviously you don’t have to publish every single “book review” you write. But to get more out of the process, you want to write it in a way that actually makes sense — for both yourself, and those potentially reading it.
Cause I mean, if you’re going to write a book review… might as well publish it, eh?
This means using the right words, coming up with good analogies, being concise in your writing and so much more. And the more you do it, you’re bound to get better.
And hey, maybe one day with these newfound writing skills, you’ll write your own book and someone else will be writing a book review on your own work!
Okay so book reviews are cool, but how do I write one?
If you want to make it easier for yourself, think while you’re reading, rather than finishing a potentially long-ass book but then having to reread half of it just to remember it well enough to reflect upon.
While you’re reading…
- Take notes
- Summarize
- Find central themes
- Think through the confusion
- Understand and connect the best ideas
As your read, highlight key concepts, thoughtful examples, interesting analogies, profound quotes, and especially the things that confuse you.
At the end of every few chapters (depending on how long your book is) type up a quick summary of these sections and add all the things you highlighted. Make sure these are in your own words — it’s harder but makes a big difference.
While your typing up your notes, start thinking about some central themes of these sections that can be summed up in 7 words or less. You’ll use these at the end to recognize the core overarching ideas woven throughout the book.
Now, remember those moments of confusion?
Think about them.
Reread the sentence.
Reread it again.
What part of it doesn’t make sense? Are you just forgetting to contextualize the idea based on previous concepts? Is the author making a claim without evidence to back it up? If so, can you think of one to support it?
This is your time to start challenging both your own and the author’s understanding. The idea doesn’t end with this book or this author. You can be the one to take it to the next level!
Same applies for the key ideas you love. Think about them, but think about why they make so much sense.
What’s supporting this? A personal experience? A real world example? Collect and link the best pieces of evidence to your beloved concept. Use a list, mind map, whatever’s your jam.
In short:
Think about the way you feel while you’re reading and try to understand why you’re feeling that way.
Once you’re done the book
Yay! You’re done the book, but not the book review. Now is your time to draw connections between all the different sections you took notes on and reflect on your general opinion of the book.
There’s two ways to go about this.
- The General Sweep
- The Deep Dive
THE GENERAL SWEEP
Go back to those themes of each section of the book you jotted down. Are there ones that continuously show up? These are most likely the most important ideas the book is trying to convey that you might also want to highlight.
Looking at the sections with similar themes, are there now connections between ideas you didn’t realize existed? Talk about those. How exactly are they similar? How are they different?
Now focus on these recurring themes and go back to your previous notes. Pick the best examples, best analogy, and best quote that aligns with each theme. If you’re really undecided, you can pick two, but no more. No. No more — no one wants to read a 30 page review.
Also feel free introduce any criticism you might have! This is your chance to pull out your critical thinking skills and dissect the ideas down to their core.
THE DEEP DIVE
Here’s where you can take a niche approach.
Is there one theme or idea (regardless of how prevalent it is) you find remarkable or want to look at differently?
You can focus in on that.
You can develop the idea even further than the author did, you can criticize them, you can do anything you want. What you’re going for here is having a unique, well-developed take on one single concept within the book.
As a whole…
- Make some general commentary and summary of the book.
- Talk briefly about its strengths and weaknesses.
- Talk about how utterly spectacular or unspectacular this book is.
As an example of some general commentary: your book might have had interesting ideas that lacked development, or it had beautiful, descriptive writing, or it was robotic and concise.
Ultimately, the goal while you’re writing is to narrow down the characteristics of this book (good or bad) that are worth knowing.
So why don’t more people write book reviews?
A lot of us are readers, but so few of us are creators… why?
Because it’s easier to just read than to come up with something to write. It’s easy to pick up a book or listen to a podcast and let the words wander into our minds, then wander right out.
It’s easy to indulge in that simple sense of accomplishment and illusion of productivity and say, well, reading is a “productive” thing to do so all I need to do is read to be productive!
What we so often forget though, is that productivity is a function of inputs. If what you do or retain from all those hours of reading is nothing… then nothing about your productivity (or anything in your life) is improving either.
Is writing book reviews more effort? Yup. I won’t sugarcoat it.
It’s hard to take time to think about ideas, to challenge and analyze and make them our own… But it’s always the hardest things in life we seem to learn the most from.
The more we invest in understanding what we absorb, the more we’re able to grow, change, and contribute unique insights to the world. And this principle extends to anything you try to learn.
You don’t need to psychoanalyze the hell out of every book you read. It’s okay to say you know what, this book is just for kicks, I don’t care.
What’s more important is that you stop “just” reading,
and start thinking.
Thanks for reading! Want to read more?
- 4 Design Principles to Live By
- STEM Is Not the Only Way to Be Smart
- Searching for Certainty won’t Lead You to the Truth — Maybe
- A Morbidly Motivational Take on Fatalism
Want some examples of good book reviews? Check these out!
Thanks to Albert Lai and Thomas O'Dea for reading over the draft and giving some awesome feedback!
