Become a Better Reader in 8 Minutes

How many books have you read and completely forgotten? How many things have you highlighted and underlined in a book and just, you know, never looked at again? Do you sometimes feel that it's completely pointless to start reading another book because you've never actually used the one that you just finished? Are you semi-anxious when you are reading because you don't know what to highlight or on the other end what not to highlight because all of it just feels completely pointless and useless anyways? Well, I find that these issues come up again and again with reading and I feel that at the crux of everything it is an issue with the way that we are processing our notes and the way that we are reading in general. Especially because I feel a lot of our reading is done very very passively. The thing that works the most when reading often is just our eyes and our brains are not doing a lot of the work, especially when we are done with the book. I think this is a key time where you can make the most out of everything you've just gone through. Whenever we have an instinct which I think as readers we're very very familiar with to highlight or save something, all we do is just bold it or underline it or highlight it somewhere and let it be. When in its essence anything that provokes us to want to save it is an opportunity for us to do a thought exercise, an opportunity for us to have a discussion, an opportunity for us to create something, think about something, change, have a new learning point and all we're doing with this is completely letting it go. So to combat this issue I have a personal formula that I use every single time that I read a book and especially when I am done reading this book and I wanted to share it with you today. And of all the crazy over-the-top note-taking things that I do, this is one that I would genuinely recommend to everyone who ever reads a book. It's not that complicated and I have a free notion template if you just want to download it somewhere. But in this video I'm going to go through exactly how I use it, why it is so useful and why I feel it helps me so much with retaining and learning more from the books that I read all the time. So let's get started. The first part of the formula is the impressions bit and this is something that is more of a stream of consciousness. It tends to be sentences that I write here and there as I'm reading a book based on the things that I find interesting or the impressions that I have from the book. So this might be things like oh I find this book to be a bit condescending or I find this book to be very very engaging, I find it to be life-changing, I find the language to be very entertaining or these are parts of my life that I thought this book would be the most useful at, this would be recommendations for the type of people to read this book. So this is just like a general vague impression. You can think of it as kind of a summary in the newspaper or a recommendation or a restaurant review. So this is the kind of tone that I will put in this part of the reflection and I will fill it in as I am reading the book. It will usually be three to five sentences in general but it's enough for me to look at every time that I go back to my book reviews and go aha yeah I remember what I felt like when I was reading the book because very often I forget this impression that I have. Now the second part is the key part of the note-taking process and this is the actionable takeaways. In the past when I used to read books all I used to do is keep notes from the books which would be just highlights or comments on the things that I was highlighting but I made this sort of mindset shift when I thought I'm not finding books useful, I'm not seeing that they are changing my life and I think the reason for that is that I'm not applying anything or looking at things in a book in a way that I can apply them to my personal life. So at this stage what I decided was that every single time that I found something interesting in a book or highlightable in a book I would take a second either while I am reading or if I'm in the flow or in the zone after I'm done with the book and think about how this can be applied to a change for my life. So I have to think of actively how can I apply this to me. So for example if I was reading a book about creativity and the author was talking about this famous writer who every night before he went to bed dreamed of something to look forward to the next day and this really impacted the way that he worked I won't just underline this I will actively turn this into a sentence that is applicable to me. So I will say go to sleep every day with something you're looking forward to the next morning because this will make you more happy to wake up and eventually your day will be filled of things that you are looking forward to doing. So even by just changing the words in this highlight I am converting it into something I can personally use rather than just a story about someone else's life and I will go very overboard with this. In this actionable takeaways bit I will convert everything that I find interesting in a book into something that I can apply to my own life or to other people's lives otherwise it will not go in this section. So every single note I'm underlining I'm converting it in my mind into this thing and also another thing that I like to do is I keep this only to 10 quotes which can be extremely difficult for long and interesting books and the reason for this is to me I can underline and highlight hundreds and hundreds of pieces of information from a book but it's unlikely therefore that I will use these so I will keep it only to my top 10. I can highlight other things and I will put this in an archive in my book notes so in the bottom will be all the things that I found interesting but I will only keep 10 things in this bit of actionable takeaways and that means that sometimes I will remove things from it to add something else but in the end of the day when I look at my book notes I only want 10 very important ones for each book that can actually change my life and in this way I'm approaching the book in a very active way of thinking rather than just passively reading the book I'm thinking okay how can this be applied to me? I use this for fiction too even when I see characters say things that are interesting do things that are interesting when they have a new bit of insight or when I get to understand the way that their brains work I start to think oh can this be applicable to me and I will still turn this into an actionable takeaway. Part number three is quite straightforward and this is my favorite quotes from the book and these are things that can be mentioned and converted in the but there are phrases and words that the author has put together so beautifully that I just want to preserve them the way they are because either I might use them in presentations, videos, pieces of writing or creation that I make in the future or I just want to see them because they're so powerful that I don't want to paraphrase them myself so this will usually be three to five maybe ten if it's a very long very amazing book of literal quotes that I will take from the book and I want to save the way that they are and lastly I have a bonus section and this is for books that are really really groundbreaking sometimes they will have multiple questions or a formula that I really really want to preserve the way that it is. I read this book recently that was talking about letting go of things and of loss and it had three very important questions that you can ask yourself every time that you lose something and I think there was something along the lines of um did you know that you were going to lose this thing at some point in the near future how much more time would you want to have had with this thing and lastly do you feel that you are worth any less now that you don't have this so this three-part formula I thought was really really kind of strong and groundbreaking for me so I thought I wanted to preserve this in the way that it was in the bonus sections so either it can be something like this or it can be advice that a character gives another character that I find is really really helpful and sometimes these are scattered throughout the book or there will be a character arc or a character growth arc for someone that I will break down into steps and I will turn this into a formula that I will add to my bonus section because it is in way an actionable takeaway but it has multiple steps so it's really interesting and these are small parts that I can just keep separate and look at them sometimes so whenever I'm done with the book I now have this kind of notion page that has all of this information on the book so it kind of has my first impressions on it and who I would recommend it to then it has the actionable takeaways 10 things or 10 ways that this book can change my life in it has some favorite quotes from the book and these used these are a lot less than I used to take before I'm very picky with these now then I would go into the bonus materials or anything extra in the book that I felt was a formula or something that I want to apply to my life a lot and yep in this way I feel as though my reading becomes a lot more active than it used to be in the past it's not just me kind of rushing through books and not thinking about them but I'm really thinking about how can this add something to my life that I can hold on for a very long time and I've genuinely found that it has made reading and note-taking so much more pleasurable for me and also so much more beneficial for me if you're interested in books I actually share my summaries broken down in this form in a free newsletter which will be linked somewhere down below so as I read books I very often share some of them here with you all you can also download this notion page formula for free in my description if you have any note-taking tips I am always very very keen on knowing about them or any books that you want to recommend otherwise thank you so much for spending this time with me I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day find a brilliant book and don't believe everything you think thanks bye