Getting more out of the books I read

I read a lot of books, but I’ve noticed that I’m not retaining what I read particularly well. That’s frustrating, and this blog is intended to help with that. I think it does a little bit, and my retention would be even lower without it, but more needs to be done.

I shared a few months ago that the value of summarizing a book is far greater than the value of reading that summary, and I’m taking a few steps to create additional summaries.

First, I have the new Sunday Summaries every week that lightly touch each of my posts from earlier that week. This forces me to go back and look at them again, and many of them have content pulled from books that I’ve recently read.

Next, we’ve recently started a monthly virtual book club with our Meetup group. This creates a mixture of “I need to read that book before the meeting” or (more often) “I need to refresh myself on that book again before the meeting”. It’s free and open to all and you’re welcome to join us. Details are here.

Lastly, I’m starting another podcast (to go with “A Brighter Web” that Robert and I already host). The new podcast is called “Stacking Knowledge” (website, Apple) and it’s another way to revisit the books that have impacted me the most. The format is loosely based on the “Founders” podcast, but I’ll be covering a wide range of business books and I’ll have a guest with me each time to help unpack them. It should be a great way for me to dig back into those books, and getting another perspective in each episode should be fantastic.

Refreshing a book

In both of the book-related items above, most of the time I’ll be digging back into books that I’ve already read but I’ll I want to make sure I tighten up my knowledge ahead of time so I’m ready to go. To be honest, the forcing of that tightening is a big part of the value here — just taking the time to prepare for the book club and the podcast is of huge value to me.

For the actual prep, I’m doing four main things right now:

1. Assuming I’ve read it before, go back through my notes to see what stands out.
2. Re-read the book (if I have time and the necessity exists) or at least Blinkist it.
3. Find another summary or two to consume. This could be YouTube videos that people have created, or perhaps a summary from someone like Derek Sivers or Nathan Lozeron.
4. Dig back into any blog posts I’ve written that discuss the book at all.

From there I build a new page of notes with quotes and ideas to share. Building that summary is the important part, at least for me, but I know that sharing the output of it can be valuable for others.

I hope you’ll consider joining us at the book club or subscribing to the podcast to keep us all moving forward.