How I read books (and a Note on Speed Reading)

I don’t speed read. But I do read books faster than an average person. Telling you that I’ve always read this way would be misleading. I used to be a slow reader. So what did I do? Nothing.

Let’s face it. Books are being produced at a rate faster than we can read them. Even if we read at 1000 wpm, we won’t be able to catch up. It’s obvious speed reading books isn’t the answer. A probable answer is Prioritization. Not all books are meant to be read.

Here’s how I read books:

1. I select a list of books around a particular theme. For example, let’s say “Skill Acquisition.”
2. I visit different sources like Goodreads, Quora, Youtube, Blogs, etc. to scout for books
3. I shortlist 8–10 books that I’ll read over a couple of months

There’s a good chance that the books reference each other’s ideas. That’s fine. There are that many ideas around a theme. That’s also going to help you to skim through and finish the book faster. Each book would have 4–5 original ideas and then some similar ideas “borrowed” from other books. Assuming Pareto’s Principle holds true, you would’ve gained around 80 percent of the knowledge in that particular theme by the end of your 8th book.

This approach is based off learning techniques adopted by many famous people. Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Elon Musk, etc. use this learning concept. They give it different names. Charlie Munger calls it “Mental Models.” Musk uses the tree trunk and branches metaphor. The idea is the same.

Here are Musk’s words —

I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.

One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.

Here’s what Munger says —

Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does…

It’s like the old saying, “To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you’ve got to have multiple models.

And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.(1)

Reading 8–10 books around a particular theme, would provide you enough fundamentals that whatever new concept comes up, you should be able to relate it to the fundamentals existing in your brain’s vault. New information would be, most likely, a combination of the fundamentals already known to you. This helps you to read faster because you already know what the author will say. This is how I read books faster now.

If you’re interested in different themes I’ve read books on, click here (later post). If you’re interested in creating themes and finding books, click here (later post).