Want to get Smarter? Read. A lot.
Go to bed smarter than when you woke up says Charlie Munger, business partner and friend of Warren Buffet, American businessman and philanthropist. That’s the goal. In an article by Farnam Street, it’s stated that Buffet spends about 80% of his day reading and thinking and that Munger wasn’t naturally smart but got smart because of all the reading that he has done.
So there you have it — advice from multi-millionaires on how to get smart. Whether you’re a student or a teacher or even anyone outside of the daily realm of education who considers him or herself a continuous learner, reading is the key. Finding the time to read may be the first challenge to conquer. I’m not sure any of us can afford to sit around reading and thinking for 12–13 hours a day although it does sound like a noble idea.
The strategy to start reading seems to be tied into the age-old question how do you eat an elephant to which the answer is one bite at a time. Thinking about reading a lot is like thinking about eating a whole elephant. Thinking about eating one bite of an elephant is not so bad and neither is reading a few pages every day. 20 pages? 5000 words? 1 hour? Pick your mark, something manageable that you know you could do, and stick to it. No excuses. Farnam Street makes an argument for 25 pages a day saying that it doesn’t have to be that literal number as long as you read daily. Whatever the amount is, by the end of the year it means you’ve now amassed a large amount of human wisdom that most of the people around you probably won’t have.
How do you know that you’ve done enough reading on a topic? Try explaining it to someone else who knows nothing about the subject. If you can help that person to understand it, you’ve got a good working understanding of that information. This is now the time to go out and apply it in the real world. That’s the final step. Knowledge untested is like a thorough bread racehorse left in the paddock. Use your knowledge. Apply it and learn from that application.
Now, the act of reading is a start and testing the knowledge you’ve amassed is also important but in between those two acts is another very important step. You need to read smartly and with purpose. It can’t just be mindless reading where you start at the top of the page, eventually reach the bottom and then flip to the next page. In yet another great article about reading, Farnam Street suggests you should not read books you don’t like. Just because it’s a classic in your field doesn’t mean you have to read it. There are other ways to gain the same lessons that only the supposed iconic literary works can give us. Their advice is to read what you find awesome and interesting now and then let your curiosity grow organically from there. Or maybe you are a student who is in the unsavoury position of having to digest one of those literary classics? Whether you’re intrinsically or extrinsically motivated to read, you still need to read smart to maximize your return on investment. Enter here close reading and the skills of annotation.
With this skillset, the aim is to make your reading experience as active as possible. I warn you now that this also means it will take more time to engage actively with your chosen material than to sit there curled up in your favourite chair just reading for the sake of reading. The goal is to understand what you are reading and to ask questions about it to yourself when you don’t. That means you need to be prepared to mark up your document. And the set of marks you use needs to be more detailed than just underlining and/or highlighting words, sentences or paragraphs.
These annotations as they’re called could, for example, include one for important things, one for things that surprise you, one for things you understand, one for things you don’t understand, one for things that show you’ve made a connection and one that shows this got you thinking. The marks themselves are not enough. You need to write down notes with them. These notes need to be thorough enough that when you come back to them after a time, you won’t be left scratching your head wondering why you marked that part. At the same time, they should be brief enough that they’ll fit in the white space that is usually provided around the text of documents.
Beyond the marking legend you use, it is also possible to take it up another notch by using flags as well. Like Post-it Notes of different colours that you stick to pages so that you have a quick visual index of where certain types of marks can be found. The sky’s the limit, really. Pinterest is, as always, a great place to find a collection of ideas around a subject like annotation. To do this process properly, you’ll probably have to read whole chapters or at least passages two or three times. This is part of the close reading process. Here’s a link to a good document on the practice of close reading in the arts and here’s one for the sciences.
In the end, suggests another excellent Farnam Street article, “success in reading is determined to the extent that you receive what the writer intended to communicate.” Annotation and close reading skills pair well with note taking skills for learners of any kind. Read, read and read some more. And do it every day until those days become weeks, months and years. A little bit at a time, like compound interest, that is how knowledge builds.
