When I’m reading a book, I generally do a pretty good job of highlighting relevant bits of text, and then going back through it when I’m finished.
As I shared in my “big reading shortcut” post, I’m also pretty good about getting those highlights saved for future use, but I’m not as solid about creating my own notes to go with them, and that’s something I need to work on.
Saving highlights are great, but taking the time to rewrite them or include your own thoughts makes a much bigger impact.
In the book “The Coaching Habit“, author Michael Stanier shared some thoughts that I think are similar to my lack of proper note-taking. In his world, it’s the difference between telling something to someone (highlighting text) and instead asking a question to make them think about it a bit more (rewriting in your own words).
“I can tell you something, and it’s got a limited chance of making its way into your brain’s hippocampus, the region that encodes memory. If I can ask you a question and you generate the answer yourself, the odds increase substantially.”
Highlights are great, and they’re a necessary step in the process, but taking time to rewrite them in your own words and connect them to other ideas will make them much more powerful.
