Years ago, a friend of mine told me that if he had the ability to choose one superpower, it would be infinite memory - to never forget anything he saw, did, or read. I think he had the right idea. If you read the biographies of great men in history (Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill come to mind), a common characteristic among them is that they were often voracious readers. The importance of reading is no great revelation to those of us here, but I'm often left wondering how to best reconcile the reading habits of men like Roosevelt and the superpower that my friend envisioned to retain one's reading. How can we read in volume while maximising our retention of what we read?
I've seen a lot of guides to address the former aspect (how to build lifelong reading habits, speed reading techniques, etc.) but fewer that discuss the latter. I also find that focusing on reading a lot, quickly is not conducive to deep understanding. Moreover, my experience is that higher education today does not promote good reading habits. With a few exceptions, gone are the days of universities encouraging young men to sit down with great works of the past, engage with them intimately, discuss the amongst one another, and take part in the ongoing Great Conversation. My university days have been filled with academic articles or only short extracts of books, and such a volume that deep reading is almost never an option - we are encouraged to skim, extracting only the necessary information for a presentation, paper, or exam before bouncing on to another reading. Although this may be a useful skill for professional life, it's not conducive to building good reading habits for personal development. My level of reading retention has probably decreased at university, and building it back up is what I want to address here.
The first piece of the puzzle is completely internal, and has to do with focusing all of your attention on the reading at hand. There's a lot of good information out there about what you can do to improve this skill (meditation, mindfulness exercises, isolation from distractions/unplugging, etc.) so I'm not going to touch on it. The other side of the equation is external, how you interact with what you're reading, and I've seen less information about this. The two best approaches I know of are Mortimer Adler's active reading techniques and the practice of maintaining a locus communis.
Adler outlines his approach in his 1940 How to Read a Book. A solid summary of the book can be found here: https://carmenrodrigueza.wordpress.com/2...van-doren/
He elaborates four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical. The ideals we should strive for in our reading for personal development are the latter two, analytical (actively asking questions of a book, using it as an absent teacher) and syntopical (taking the understanding from one work and making connections with past reading or experiences to build new understanding, greater than the sum of its parts). Adler offers some practical advice to building these skills, but consistently hammers home the message that deep reading is a difficult skill that takes time both to learn and to perform. One of main techniques he suggests is to chart out the ideas you extract from a book, building an outline of the author's thoughts as you go along. This easily feeds into the next practice, the locus communis.
In past centuries, the locus communis or commonplace book was standard practice for all thinking men - think of it as an intellectual journal used to keep track of one's ideas and revelations. Unfortunately this has fallen out of practice, ironically just as technology has made maintaining one easier and more intuitive than ever before. I was introduced to this by Ludvig Sunström of the blog Start Gaining Momentum (highly recommended if it's not already on your blogroll), and I have to say that this is the one thing that revolutionized my life more than any other in the past year. He's done a far better job of explaining the idea behind it and offering ideas of how to implement it than I could, so rather than re-invent the wheel I strongly encourage you to read his thoughts:
General idea: http://www.startgainingmomentum.com/how-...mmonplace/
Implementation: http://www.startgainingmomentum.com/how-...mmonplace/
I've been using OneNote for this, which I like because it synchs across my PC and phone and stores all the data on a cloud drive. I track my daily use of time, nutrition, to-do lists, workouts, game notes, random ideas, personal vision and strategic plan, as well as building a database of my readings. This is where Adler's advice comes in: if you're already using his active reading techniques and outlining the thoughts in a particular reading, it's simple to put that outline into your commonplace with pertinent quotes or your immediate reflections/reactions below. OneNote does a superb job of this because of the way it lets you organise your notes: within a notepage you can create a collapsible, hierarchical tree outline, and you can group notepages by a particular author (or whatever criterion you choose), and then notepages or groups of notepages by theme or genre. Afterwards, retrieving the ideas you gleaned from a particular work is extraordinarily easy.
The main downside to these two techniques is that they are time-consuming. Active reading, manually outlining the thoughts in a book is a slow process, and then copy-pasting (or manually transcribing, if you're reading a physical book) into the locus communis takes even longer. This starts to impinge on the volume of reading one is capable of, to the degree that I think this isn't the optimal solution - it needs further refinement and tweaking.
Let's share notes on this. Have you guys given thought to how to optimise your reading retention, rather than immediate comprehension or overall volume (or, indeed, how to balance the three)? Have any other techniques proven successful for you?
I've seen a lot of guides to address the former aspect (how to build lifelong reading habits, speed reading techniques, etc.) but fewer that discuss the latter. I also find that focusing on reading a lot, quickly is not conducive to deep understanding. Moreover, my experience is that higher education today does not promote good reading habits. With a few exceptions, gone are the days of universities encouraging young men to sit down with great works of the past, engage with them intimately, discuss the amongst one another, and take part in the ongoing Great Conversation. My university days have been filled with academic articles or only short extracts of books, and such a volume that deep reading is almost never an option - we are encouraged to skim, extracting only the necessary information for a presentation, paper, or exam before bouncing on to another reading. Although this may be a useful skill for professional life, it's not conducive to building good reading habits for personal development. My level of reading retention has probably decreased at university, and building it back up is what I want to address here.
The first piece of the puzzle is completely internal, and has to do with focusing all of your attention on the reading at hand. There's a lot of good information out there about what you can do to improve this skill (meditation, mindfulness exercises, isolation from distractions/unplugging, etc.) so I'm not going to touch on it. The other side of the equation is external, how you interact with what you're reading, and I've seen less information about this. The two best approaches I know of are Mortimer Adler's active reading techniques and the practice of maintaining a locus communis.
Adler outlines his approach in his 1940 How to Read a Book. A solid summary of the book can be found here: https://carmenrodrigueza.wordpress.com/2...van-doren/
He elaborates four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical. The ideals we should strive for in our reading for personal development are the latter two, analytical (actively asking questions of a book, using it as an absent teacher) and syntopical (taking the understanding from one work and making connections with past reading or experiences to build new understanding, greater than the sum of its parts). Adler offers some practical advice to building these skills, but consistently hammers home the message that deep reading is a difficult skill that takes time both to learn and to perform. One of main techniques he suggests is to chart out the ideas you extract from a book, building an outline of the author's thoughts as you go along. This easily feeds into the next practice, the locus communis.
In past centuries, the locus communis or commonplace book was standard practice for all thinking men - think of it as an intellectual journal used to keep track of one's ideas and revelations. Unfortunately this has fallen out of practice, ironically just as technology has made maintaining one easier and more intuitive than ever before. I was introduced to this by Ludvig Sunström of the blog Start Gaining Momentum (highly recommended if it's not already on your blogroll), and I have to say that this is the one thing that revolutionized my life more than any other in the past year. He's done a far better job of explaining the idea behind it and offering ideas of how to implement it than I could, so rather than re-invent the wheel I strongly encourage you to read his thoughts:
General idea: http://www.startgainingmomentum.com/how-...mmonplace/
Implementation: http://www.startgainingmomentum.com/how-...mmonplace/
I've been using OneNote for this, which I like because it synchs across my PC and phone and stores all the data on a cloud drive. I track my daily use of time, nutrition, to-do lists, workouts, game notes, random ideas, personal vision and strategic plan, as well as building a database of my readings. This is where Adler's advice comes in: if you're already using his active reading techniques and outlining the thoughts in a particular reading, it's simple to put that outline into your commonplace with pertinent quotes or your immediate reflections/reactions below. OneNote does a superb job of this because of the way it lets you organise your notes: within a notepage you can create a collapsible, hierarchical tree outline, and you can group notepages by a particular author (or whatever criterion you choose), and then notepages or groups of notepages by theme or genre. Afterwards, retrieving the ideas you gleaned from a particular work is extraordinarily easy.
The main downside to these two techniques is that they are time-consuming. Active reading, manually outlining the thoughts in a book is a slow process, and then copy-pasting (or manually transcribing, if you're reading a physical book) into the locus communis takes even longer. This starts to impinge on the volume of reading one is capable of, to the degree that I think this isn't the optimal solution - it needs further refinement and tweaking.
Let's share notes on this. Have you guys given thought to how to optimise your reading retention, rather than immediate comprehension or overall volume (or, indeed, how to balance the three)? Have any other techniques proven successful for you?
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