I used to take endless notes on .org documents and build myself small wiki sites in django...<p>You know what makes the difference?<p>Take a walk, or catch a train and think about what you read. Find the main ideas and how the material relates to yourself. Play with it and ask yourself questions about it.<p>Then next day try to answer them in paper without extra material. And only after that reread the book to check or find unsolved the answers.<p>Learning is hard. There is nothing as easy learning. The good news is that it can be hand AND fun.<p>About reading:<p>Engage in every sentence, ask yourself what the writer is trying to tell you in every sentence, after that translate it to imagination and relate it with yourself and what you already know.<p>There is shallow reading and deep reading. Deep reading is a must for technical books, but also a joy for fiction. I still remember so vividly the coldness and texture of the walls of the hobbit's first mountain tunnels despite haven't been told about it.
I distinguish between forgetting the content VS. forgetting the effect.<p>When new information is ingested, it "changes you", i.e. is having an effect on your views and thought processes. Sometimes subtle, sometimes profound. So I might not remember what a book was about, and upon re-reading I have this weird experience: it feels familiar, ideas were somehow already processed in my brain, but due to forgetting the content I feel like I already read this in a past life.<p>I forget the content of most books, articles, movies, etc., and I have to constantly remind myself that not remembering it is not a bad thing, is not a failure, and it was not useless. It's like my brain RAM + cache are large, but short lived, but the permanent storage is small, too abstract and incompatible with the raw data content.
Katarina Janoskova, linked in the article, writes:<p>> Is [reading] just a waste of time? Well, no, I don’t think so. Every book makes a mark. Even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory. Just as every single thing that happens to you does and every person you meet.<p>I once read a short essay by Patrick Süskind (author of "Perfume - The Story of a Murderer"). I am paraphrasing, but in it, he discusses his embarrassment that he cannot remember even major plot details or character names of great works of world literature, although he has read them multiple times and they deeply inspired his own work. He then makes an interesting speculation: if a book really and deeply influences you, then maybe actively remembering facts and insights of the book becomes harder and harder, because the book's ideas have been so deeply ingrained into your brain and thinking that you cannot remember them as facts independent of your own thinking. But this doesn't mean that you have "forgotten" them.
As Katarina Janoskova says, "So you read a book. You finished it, liked it, maybe even recommended it to others. It changed your life slightly while you were reading it and for a bit afterwards. And then you moved on with your life." I like that. That says it more succinctly.
> The first reason for this is that forgetting is a filter. When something you read resonates with you sufficiently for you to recall it without effort, that means something; it means it connects with your ideas and experiences in some relevant way.<p>I take an issue with this assumption. When I leaf through my past notes, highlights—hell, even stuff I have written myself—I am surprised at many relevant things that I completely forgot about. It's true forgetting is a filter, but one mustn't underestimate the brain's capacity to forget useful stuff too. Maybe it's something you didn't need in a while, and need it now. Maybe it has become more relevant than it was in the past. For eg, I have restarted journaling recently, and this highlight from "On Writing Well", immediately hit me:<p>> “Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. … Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past.<p>It's written for a different context, but it made me realize a different way to approach my journaling.<p>However, I agree wanting to retain everything is needlessly ambitious, and counter-productive. I was once obsessed with making notes about everything I read, but soon, I realized how unenjoyable it was making my reading. The better approach, I found, is to just make highlights. And go over them once in a while (a few months or so). That's enough of a knowledge-retention system for me.
I've done something quite simple that has worked for me this year.<p>I read with a highlighter pen, just highlighting the places I find interesting, and maybe cornering a few pages once in a while. That costs no more energy than just reading the book, if anything highlighting allows my mind to stay focused on the book.<p>couple weeks after the book is finished, I'll come back only to the highlighted parts and write some of them down in a a4 page, which I then fold in the book.<p>That way I have a personal 1 page book summary which I come back to from time to time.<p>I liked an idea I saw on Youtube from someone saying "for each chapter, I find something actionable I commit to do for a week". A bit on the heavy side, but I like the actionable aspect of it
I think there is more to be said about the topic that organically sticks to you.<p>I have realized that this depends a lot on what you are "up to" at the moment.<p>In my experience, I have a really hard time internalizing information about a topic that is far from some topic or work I'm engaged with at the moment.<p>This means, I think:<p>1. That you can to some extent influence what you are "up to".<p>2. That you should probably organize your reading and other learning activities around the seasons of thinking themes in your life [1]<p>[1] E.g. to me, that often means I'm into quite different themes during work days versus weekends, where I'm often exploring some slightly different topics.
Spot on. Just another symptom of a quantity obsessed culture. It's telling that people ask <i>how many books did you read this year</i> and not <i>what was the best book you read about</i> (a question of quality, over quantity).
Last year, I aimed to read 30 books. But I realized I usually forgot most of the stuff, just remembering some main ideas. Really getting the hang of a topic takes time. So this year, I'll read fewer books but focus more on understanding what I'm reading.
<i>>forgetting is a filter</i><p>Exactly. Spaced repetition is a remarkably effective learning technique, but it can't tell you <i>what</i> to learn.<p>At some point I think we have to stop listening to external authorities and rely on our own judgement about what to learn, and how to do so, as signalled by feelings of excitement about particular authors and ideas. One of the effects of formal education is to dampen or corrupt that intuition, e.g. by instilling the desire to learn things 'properly' (say in a certain prearranged sequence) or by the desire to only learn prestigious topics in order to impress other people.<p>If we are engaged meaningfully with reality we will inevitably revisit particular subjects or authors multiple times. This is an organic form of spaced repetition. Forgetting certain things is part of that: we learn to swim during the winter and to skate during the summer.
Learning from a book without having a real life problem I want to solve with this learning is really hard for me. If I have a problem I want to solve and use a book to find a path to the solution within it's pages, learning from the book is no problem at all.<p>If I have no real life problem to solve and only read the book because I like the topic or want to learn from it for my future I only remember the broad concepts. But nevertheless, at least you know what's in that book and if you encounter a problem in the future you can revisit the book again.
> Otherwise, wasn’t reading it in the first place a waste of our precious time?<p>I weirdly wish the article entertained the answer of “yes!”<p>Instead of doing that it barely backs the knowledge-obsessed away from the cliff in an attempt to convince them to just don’t take quite so many notes, maybe step back and stop pretending like you’re crunching for an exam and absorb the information you’re reading.<p>But I would actually take this a step further for a lot of people and say that, depending on what you’re reading and why you’re reading, it might be quite literally a waste of time, especially if you’re reading not for enjoyment but because you feel pressure to gain knowledge and constantly upskill.<p>There’s a concept of the movie buff being cursed to watch worse and worse movies over time. They start with the best must-watch movies and it’s all downhill from there. They get done watching something like (wildly random examples) Amelie, Spirited Away, or the original Star Wars trilogy and hunt for something that scratches the same itch, only to find out that they just watched the best/only example of that particular concept done well.<p>In the same way, something I notice about frequent readers is that they’re reading utter trash, and probably for a similar reason. Luckily for them, there are far more books than movies, but I think there’s merit to this concept.<p>Obviously, there’s a ton of value in reading especially during grade school as it helps you gain valuable language and writing skills, but I think my advice on top of what this article says is that you don’t have to read shit if you don’t want to. Life isn’t really only about knowledge-based enlightenment, that’s just one feature of life among many.
I started learning some introductory maths on my own recently--via a relatively rigourous proof oriented text, a format of which I had no background with--and on one of the first few pages the author says something along the lines of 'if you're learning this for the first time, you should be spending at least an hour per page'. I was shocked at first, a bit incredulous, an hour? per page? ridiculous -- until I started reached the actual text.<p>I thought I was bright as a child, not studying, but as I got older I realized this was not the case (albeit still holding out some hope). At first, in this endeavor, I was discouraged spending so long, but then, oddly enough, I found myself proud of the fact I spent so much time trying to understand the content. Reading and re-reading until I understood what was going on -- and then the next day, I would forget some of it, so I would read it again (this time spending less time (woohoo!)), until I could now not only recite the content but understand it.
I believe the root of the problem is a misconception of how humans function. The prevalent trends in related fields, from AI/Neuroscience [1] to PKM/TFT [2], are further entrenching this crude rational/willpower-based perspective.<p>Perhaps the true (meta)rational perspective is to actually understand how to embrace the larger complexity of human experience (including sensibility/creativity/play...). Maybe the real willpower is to stop obsessing over this limited viewpoint (and the fears it produces) all the time.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_brain" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_brain</a><p>[2] <a href="https://numinous.productions/ttft/" rel="nofollow">https://numinous.productions/ttft/</a>
Completely agree based on my experience. The author's experiences are shared by me and what finally forced me to change my process was reading Alexander Grothendieck. I was not expecting such a prolific writer to espouse such relaxed principles to learn. More than anything, I noticed he emphasized taking time to just _sit and think_. Put things into your own words and pictures as you do. Don't act like a hammer trying to crack the nut, but instead simply "sit and listen to the voices of things". I also just enjoy life more with this method, no more rush. Much more listening.
this one really hit me at just the right time as a book I've really been enjoying, Thanks for the Feedback, has been lying unread on my shelf as I increasingly had decided the need to jot down everything that might be important as a read<p>previously, i devoured, and loved, difficult conversations by the same authors and found quite a lot of things that resonated with me personally and professionally. some of these i've continued to use and integrate into my daily job as an assistant principal with staff, students, and parents, with great effect<p>the long and short of it is that i gleaned quite a lot from simply reading through one book while stalling out on the second in an attempt to get everything out of it that i can. it is clear to me that simply reading through the first one was not only an experience enjoyable for it's own sake but also helpful in my day to day<p>i'd say this hits on a few things that have come about to me recently<p>- embracing finitude, ala four thousand weeks by oliver burke, that we can't and won't be able to learn or know everything while simultaneously embracing the fact that it is okay to simply do something for the sake of enjoyment, feeling awe, etc.<p>- people tend to change in fits and spurts and massive changes are relatively uncommon in a short time span. think of oneself as a growing plant as opposed to a suddenly exploding fire<p>- i've long felt that we think and understand the world around us in metaphors. read this in 'metaphors with live by' in college and since then the connections have tended to be endless. i'd say i am moving towards a different metaphor for people, not sure exactly how i'd word it, but it is moving away from humans as a machine or time is money and more towards humans a plant needing care and cultivation and..i don't have one for time yet