As I read more and more, I come across a lot of great systems for business structures, meeting cadences, and many other little tools that can be useful to know.
For example, the “SMART” framework is a great way to set goals: Make sure that your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. That’s one I’ve worked to memorize.
Another would be Kim Scott’s concept of “Radical Candor” and the various angles around it, which Kim unpacks in this short video here:
For items like that, I put them in my Anki flashcards and slowly learn to memorize them. However, I come across so many frameworks that it’s not really helpful (or even possible) for me to memorize all of them. Still, it can be helpful to understand most of them to gain overall understanding and contribute to making me who I am.
A recent example came from a friend of mine on LinkedIn who shared the “5 Levels of Development” (Survive, Sustain, Scale, Succeed, Steward). It’s a great framework, and got me to think about our business a bit more, but I don’t think it’s worth memorizing as I don’t see a case for needing to be able to recall it in a moment’s notice.
There’s still a lot of gray in there, though. Is any given system worth taking the time to memorize? I don’t have a clear line for what is and what isn’t, so I take them individually.
Do you have a benchmark for determining what’s worth memorizing versus what’s worth just getting a basic understanding of?
Radical Candor is one of my favorite books!
It’s a great one, for sure!
This is a tangent to your question. What’s the right answer for note-taking when, or after, reading a book? I really struggle with this. I want to remember *everything* from a good book. Well, that’s not going to happen, so I want to take “the right” notes from a book. And that’s the problem. Sometimes I make notes from every single page. That’s crazy! Sometimes I have one line from a chapter. That’s better, maybe.
What I’m trying to do, not very successfully, is determine how I might want to reference something ahead. “When and where might I uses this snippet?”
You do a great job referencing what you’ve read, so I partially want to mimic what you do, whatever that is.
To your real question, what do I try to memorize? Very close to nothing! Back to David Allen’s ideas, if there’s something I might need to reference, I put it in my trusted system … which is NOT my brain!
Yes, that’s a fantastic question and it’s one I struggle with a lot! How many items should I be highlighting?
I generally follow three ideas for highlights:
1. Is it something I want to see again? I know that all of my highlights will show up in Readwise, and I review some highlights from Readwise daily, so would it be helpful for the highlight to show up there?
2. Do I want to share this highlight with Ali or with the team?
3. Does this highlight bring up a specific idea for a blog post?
Those are imperfect but at least give me a starting point for framing the “should I?” on any given piece of text.