Why You Should Read The Book Instead Of Its Summary

Bruno Boksic

February 21, 2019

Companies like Blinkist, Accel5, Soundview, CliffsNotes inform us that we can get the value of an entire book if we just read or listen to their short 15-minute summary of it. Some companies even claim to have it down to four minutes.

Even though these services have value, to really learn from books, you should be willing to make the effort of actually reading the whole book. Instead of reading summaries or short articles, or skimming and speed reading, sit down and read the book, cover to cover.

Here are some reasons why.

Importance Of Narrative

We started writing down information only around 3200 B.C.E. Before that, we used to transfer knowledge through oral storytelling. Stories are how we share lessons with new generations, how we explain complicated points and how we influence people, and our brains are adapted to processing information through stories.

Unfortunately, in their effort to summarise books, most apps like Blinkist cut out the ‘story’ aspect and choose to focus only on the insights. As a result of this most of the “logical” things laid out in the book will not make much of an impact on you when you only read the summary as we simply aren’t wired to just accept anything told to us, that too in less than 15 minutes. Furthermore, because of the narrative the book provides, you are provided with the relevant context to better understand the profound messages they carry. Take Peter Thiel’s Zero To One– you’d never actually understand (or even believe) all the revolutionary ideas he proposes until you read about how he actually implemented them while creating PayPal or Palantir.

How To Think

Books pack plenty of information and offer analysis which you might not agree with. However, irrespective of your opinion of the findings, it is important to understand how the author arrived at his conclusion. By doing so, you don’t learn what to think, but more importantly, how to think. You learn how to make arguments, how to get insights from data, how to use statistics and stories, and how to make your ideas bulletproof.

This process can only be learned from reading the entire book and not from the nuggets that you get from perusing summaries. Imagine watching the trailer of a movie and not the actual movie. You would get an idea what the movie is about, but till you watch the entire movie you will not understand the nuances.

Ability To Focus

Who do you think has a bigger attention span, a goldfish or a human being? Well, studies show that now the human attention span is less than that of a goldfish at a measly eight seconds! However, one of the keys to being successful is the ability to focus for a long period of time. The constant buzzing of the phone, email, WhatsApp, DMs, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat- the list of distractions is endless. It’s no wonder we tend to work more but produce less.

To quote Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World, “To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.” When was the last time you were bored and didn’t grab your phone to scroll through Instagram or Facebook?

Here books play a very important role in helping us build up our concentration. They challenge us to focus for a long period of time while trying to absorb the information in them. Reading an entire book and not just the summary requires you to concentrate. So now you know why you might often get sleepy or drowsy after reading just a few pages. Your brain needs time to adjust to focusing on a single thing for a longer period of time because we are increasingly becoming easily distracted. If you can read an entire book, and train yourself to resist the inexplicable urge to pick up your phone, it is an incredible way to build up your concentration.

Develop Empathy

I’m sure you’ve heard the much bandied about travel quote, “It is the journey that matters, not the destination“. It is similar when it comes to books- we don’t read them just for the end results, but because we enjoy the experience (the journey) of reading a book. The journey counts because ultimately that is what changed the author, and that is what will change or affect us.

Joseph Campbell probably described it best in The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Take a look at what he says- “Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the high road to the soul’s destination.” So by not reading the book, we are definitely not going through the ‘dark and devious ways’ or any way for that matter.

Think about Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning. Now imagine all you read is that he was brutally tortured in Auschwitz back in 1943. Next, imagine you read about how on a cold winter morning, at 5 a.m., he was forced to walk 10 kilometres and then made to dig the frozen dirt with his bare hands while the guard was kicking his 26-kilogram body, breaking his remaining ribs. What gives you a better idea of his experience and makes it easier for you to connect with him? Summaries do not have even a tenth of the detail that the full books do.

When you read books, you question and challenge the way you view the world. Whether it’s a book on love and dating (The Game by Neil Strauss) or business and entrepreneurship (The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco), or about psychology and economics (Thinking, Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman). Books such as these have caused paradigm shifts and you will never really understand why or how they did so, without reading the entire book.

An easy way to rest my case would be this- reading a summary may work if you need to memorise the salient features before sitting for a multiple-choice exam, but it would definitely not work if you were required to present a well-thought-out analytical essay on the impact of the barbarities of the Nazi regime or the importance of metaphorically journeying through hell and heaven to know oneself.

So next time you want to truly understand a book, read the book and not just a summary.

Do you think it’s better to read the book instead of its summary or is a summary enough? Have you ever used Blinkist or apps like it? Share with us in the comments.

How To Read History So You Can Predict The Future

Bruno Boksic

July 25, 2018

“We have fallen upon evil times, the world has waxed old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their elders. Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book.“

When do you think this quote was written? Doesn’t it sound like something which is relevant today?  I was shocked when I found out it was written in 5,000 B.C.E. which means that this quote is more than 7,000 years old.

If someone asked me today to predict what will stay relevant 7,000 years later, I wouldn’t know where to start.

Well, for us to answer that question, we need to go back in time and see what didn’t change because in a world that is constantly changing we need to focus on what has remained constant.

As Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, says, “Don’t ask what is going to change in the next ten years. Ask what’s not going to change in the next ten years. Because you can build a life around the second one but not on the first one.”

How To Study History

How do we study history in order to be able to predict the future?

It’s a notorious task because in today’s age all information is available, almost for free and with a single click. Before the Internet, the person who had access to the information (newspaper editors, the head-honchos of news channels, radio broadcasters, etc.) had immense value.

But today, with all the information available to us, it is the ones who can ignore the noise and focus on the right information who will have the advantage. So it’s no longer about the availability of information, but about finding and focusing on the correct data.

And with that, we come to the books that can show us what history was like – the history we are doomed to repeat if we don’t learn from it. But how do we decide, in a world where “everyone wants to write a book”, what kind of a book we need to read to get the right information? How do we know what kind of information we need to focus on?

To determine that, we will explore two concepts that can easily cut out almost 99% of the books (noise) and leave us only with those that will teach us history that will enable us to predict the future.

The first concept is  “The Lindy Effect” and the second one is “First Principles Thinking”.

The Lindy Effect

I will borrow the words from Nassim Taleb’s 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder to explain “The Lindy Effect”:

“If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “aging” like persons, but “aging” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!”

Think about books which have been in print for 50 years like A Hero With A Thousand Faces by American mythologist Joseph Campbell or How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie, which was first printed 80 years ago.

Will these books continue ‘living’ for another 50 or 80 years?

How about books which are even older and which teach us even more profound life lessons?

You have philosophical masterpieces written 120 years ago by Nietzsche, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, written 150 years ago, political pieces like the 500-year-old Machiavelli’s The Prince, and even religious books like the Bible, which was written 2000 years ago. We can also go back to the Greeks and read pieces like Plato’s The Republic or Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics written in 350 B.C.E.

People read these books today because they give us answers to (and make us question) the problems we face today. These books show us that people, even 2,000 years ago, faced similar challenges and problems, and had similar aspirations and ambitions as we do today.

These books have been written on subjects that didn’t change over the years and that’s why they are still relevant. It is the lessons from these books that we must internalise.

But just because a book is old and still being bought and read, does it mean that the information inside it is accurate and good for predicting the future?

To deal with this conundrum, we have the second criteria a book must fulfil and it’s called “First Principles Thinking.”

First Principles Thinking

Farnam Street, a website devoted to mental models, which help you learn, read, understand the world, and make better decisions, defined First Principles Thinking as:

“…, it’s a tool to help clarify complicated problems by separating the underlying ideas or facts from any assumptions based on them. What remains are the essentials. If you know the first principles of something, you can build the rest of your knowledge around them to produce something new. “

First principles are the fundamentals of academic disciplines. These include the main laws of physics, the main ideas driving chemistry, big tools of mathematics, the guiding principles of biology, basic concepts of human psychology, and the working concepts behind business and markets.

The closer a book is to the big, central ideas of a field and the older it is, the better the book will be. You will be able to understand the fundamentals of the discipline and predict the future better by taking in that information.

For example, It’s better to begin by reading and learning about the fundamental ideas of capitalism and economy from Adam Smith in his The Wealth of Nations to understand the basic idea of politico-economics. Once you have a deeper understanding of the discipline and its fundamentals, then, and only then, should you move on to a narrower area within the field.

If you read books which fulfil these two criteria, you will be better equipped to understand the past and the present and to predict the future.

Looking Past The Present

If you want to build a big building, you first need to dig deep foundations. It’s the same with books and our lives.

If you want to predict the future, you need to understand the present. And if you want to understand the present, you need to study history.

Make a list of the books that pass the two criteria of “The Lindy Effect” and “First Principles Thinking” and start reading – your future may depend on it.

Have you ever used “The Lindy Effect” and “First Principles Thinking” while deciding what to read? What do you think of this method? Share with us in the comments.

The 4 Reading Levels: Different Ways To Read Different Books

Bruno Boksic

April 10, 2018

I bet you already know how to read a book because you were taught in elementary school. But do you know how to read so that you can gain the most out of it? Reading more books is pointless unless you can make something out of it.

You see, there is a difference between reading for information and reading for understanding.

The difference in reading for information and reading for understanding is like the difference between simply knowing the name of something and actually understanding it in the context of the real world.

Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren first conceptualised the four reading levels in How To Read A Book, first published in 1940, and updated in 1972. Despite the book having been conceived in a pre-digital era, it is still relevant today and almost seems prophetic in how we read in the digital age.

Today, we will explore the four different reading levels. They are:

1. Elementary
2. Inspectional
3. Analytical
4. Syntopic

Each of these reading levels has the characteristics of the previous one, and builds on it, till you get to level 4. So syntopic reading (level 4) includes characteristics of elementary reading (level 1), but it doesn’t apply vice-versa. So let’s see what these reading levels look like, shall we?

1. Elementary Reading

Elementary reading is the basic, rudimentary level of reading. It is the one you learn at school. The main question this level of reading is trying to answer is “What does the sentence say?”

When you are trying to learn a foreign language, you are using elementary reading – you actually don’t understand what is being written and you simply see black stains on a white background, trying to understand the individual words being written there.

An example would be if I just started to write in my native jezik pa ti onda ne bi ništa mogao razumjeti i sve bi ti ove riječi izgledale kao hijeroglifi.

The next reading level is where it gets interesting.

2. Inspectional Reading

Inspectional reading actually has two sub-types- systematic skimming, and superficial reading. The main question this level of reading is trying to answer is “What is the book/article about?

2.1 Systematic Skimming

This can be applied to almost everything you read so I will take an example of an article here.

First, you look at the title of the article and if it’s appealing, you open it.  Then you scroll through the article and read the sub-heads to see what the article is all about. If it seems interesting, you scroll back to the top and read the first 30-50 words of the intro and then scroll down to the first subhead. After reading a few sentences under it, you proceed to do the same for each subhead till you reach the conclusion and get the overall point/idea of the article.

We use this kind of reading when we lack the time to read the material in-depth or when we need information urgently.

2.2 Superficial Reading

The second sub-type is when you simply read. You go from page to page, reading every single word but not stopping at any. It doesn’t matter if you understand it or not, you simply move along. You don’t ponder the arguments presented by the author or try to write in the margins.

This type of reading is most commonly used for entertainment and information.

This is what people usually do when they read newspapers, taking in every information at their disposal. When discussing what they’ve read, they often regurgitate someone else’s opinion without questioning it.

But this kind of reading is also used for relaxing, for example, when you are reading Bridget Jones’s Diary or Twilight. So if you want just information and relaxation, you mostly use this kind of reading level.

But if you want to understand, you need to use the next level.

3. Analytical Reading

Analytical reading can be called ‘the best type’ of reading, and is the most complete form of reading, but is only possible if you have unlimited time and it tends to take a heavy toll on the reader.

This style is used if you want to understand the topic in depth, as you end up asking many questions about the book you are reading, and you have to organise your thoughts in a systematic fashion. It is recommended that you use this style only when you want to understand the topic – otherwise, inspectional reading is adequate.

Francis Bacon said, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” When you are reading a book analytically, you are chewing and digesting it.

You end up writing in margins because it is like having a debate with the author. You ask yourself what problem or problems the author is trying to solve and how he reached a particular conclusion.

After this kind of reading, you will have an understanding of the book and the author’s point of view on the subject.

But that doesn’t mean you will understand the broader subject. You will only have one piece of the puzzle. For you to achieve an understanding of the broader subject, you will need to use syntopic or comparative reading.

4. Syntopic Reading

Syntopic reading is also known as comparative reading. So what do you do here? You read many books on the same subject and compare and contrast the ideas presented, the vocabulary used to define elements, and the way arguments are presented.

Syntopic reading includes finding the relevant passages where the information resides, translating the terminology of the book (and creating your own), defining the questions you need answers to (and looking for them in the book), and at the end, forming an intelligent opinion by analysing all the information you have gathered.

Syntopic reading is one of the most demanding and difficult of them all and at the end, you will find opposing views which stand almost equally strong. But just remember, it’s about your purpose, not the books you read.

We have covered the four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopic. And at the end, reading is all about figuring out the answers to our questions.

So remember the next time when you read a book or an article ask yourself “what do I want out of this book” because that should determine what kind of reading you will use for it. You will be surprised by how different your experience of a book is depending upon which level of reading you use.

What do you think of the four reading levels? Which level do you use the most? Share with us in the comments.

The Proven and Easy Way to Read 47 Books A Year

Bruno Boksic

February 20, 2018

I was talking with my father the other day and we were discussing an event on TV. It was an interview with a famous person and the interviewer asked a tough question to which the famous person didn’t have an answer. At least, not a good one.

My father turned to me and, while pointing at the TV, said,“Son, you need to have the knowledge to prevent moments like this.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” I asked in return.

My father went to his bookshelf, took a book out and showed it to me saying, “Books, son, books. All the knowledge in the world is here and if you apply it, it will give you wisdom.”

That “other day” was more than 10 years ago, but that conversation really clicked in my head a year and a half ago when I started my book reading system.

__________

This system is divided into five sections that are crucial for building a great book reading habit.

We will talk about the way habits form and how they have a three-part structure. We will answer the age-old question concerning motivation and system – Which one gets us the results?

You will see my system and why I use tracking, measuring and red/green colours in Excel sheets. At the end, we will talk about consistency and quantity and why quantity almost doesn’t matter and the way you need to think about reading – not as something you do but as something you are.

1. How Habits Form

According to Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habit, every single habit consists of 3 parts, which are, cue, routine, and reward. If you want to make reading a habit, you have to create a system which would have these 3 elements.

Cue
A cue is a trigger which sends a signal to our brain to start a certain task or operation. This cue can be internal or external.
An example of an internal cue: When you watch a game with your favourite football team playing and they have a penalty in the last minute, do you find yourself with your hand in your mouth for the entirety of the penal kick, biting your nails?
Your nervousness is an internal cue for a certain action, in this case, biting your nails.

External cues are triggered by our environment or other people. For example, when you are sitting in the car, it triggers you to either turn on the radio or the engine immediately. After enough repetitions, you do these activities automatically without even realising it.

My cue happens when I open my laptop because the e-book I’m reading is never closed. So when I open my laptop, the book just pops up, making it difficult for me to ignore.

Routine

When the cue triggers your brain, the activity that you do afterward is called a routine.

In the examples above, a routine would be biting your nails or turning on the engine. The routine doesn’t have to involve only a single action. There can be multiple activities tied into the same routine.

The routine with my book reading habit is just that – reading the book.

Reward

A reward is something positive you get from performing the routine which signals to the brain that you have taken action. If the reward is strong enough, the brain is primed to remember it for future uses.

My reward is the tracking system and the colour green (as explained later in the Part 3).

What does this mean for our reading habit?

It means that you should find a place and time to read and be consistent with it to form a reading habit.

2. Willpower vs. System

When I started my habit, I didn’t even realize how important the system is and how little willpower counts in the grand scheme of things.

Scientists have recently discovered that willpower is like a muscle and that it depletes with use. So the more you use it, the more it gets tired.

And if you have to use it excessively, it will deplete faster and it will be harder for you to follow through. That’s why you can’t avoid a cookie as a late night snack. To prevent this, we devise a system.

We only use our willpower to create a system and this system carries us later on.

A system is not only about the internal state, but also about the external state a.k.a. the environment. The environment plays a huge role in our behaviour so we need to be aware of that when we want to build a new habit.

If you want to read every single day, but your TV is on 24/7, then it will be much harder for you to actually read. Too many distractions nearby cause us to split our focus and lose more of our willpower.

If you want to adhere to your system, make it as a simple as possible to actually do it. Turn off the TV- even better, hide the remote control. Turn off the Wi-Fi, shut down all noise and keep your book within reach.

If the book is even 20 feet away from you, the task will be 10 times harder because you will need way more activation energy. That’s why you try to reach the remote control while sitting down, even though it is almost impossible. You would rather stretch in your chair as much as possible, assume weird positions and try to extend your arm as far as it can go than actually stand up and get the remote control.

That is what I am talking about. Keep the book near at hand and it will be easier for you to read.

To show you what a system actually looks like in real life, I will insert my book reading system which helped me read 47 books in a year.

2.1 My Reading System

Using all the above-mentioned information and research, and keeping the constant struggle of willpower vs. system in mind, I have managed to develop a simple, yet an effective system which helped me build my book-reading habit.

The book-reading system is a simple Excel sheet which consists of 4 rows.

Row A – Total: This is all about the goal I have for that day. In this case, my goal is to read a minimum of 20 pages of a book each and every single day.

Row B- Day: This is where I track how many days I’ve maintained my habit. I can clearly see which day of the habit it is today and it also helps me put my book- reading habit in perspective. It is a common misunderstanding that it takes 21 days of repetition to form a habit. It takes around 66 days to form a habit. And this row helps me see how much it will take me form the habit and how far I’ve come.

Row C- Done: This is about noting how many pages I read that day. If the number is 20 or more pages a day, the cell immediately turns green. If it’s 19 or less, it turns red. This way I have a visual overview of my habit and as a famous comedian once said “Get a calendar and write X on every single day you came up with a new joke. After a few days, you will get a chain. And when you get a chain, you will do everything you can not to break the chain.” So this is also a part of my reward system where I put the number, the cell goes green, and I acknowledge to myself that for that day, I did what I had to and it’s time to stop the activity.

Row D – Date:  This is the current date and it gives me a calendar-based overview of my book-reading habit. Nobody lives in a vacuum and this row gives you the much-needed external perspective for your habit.

That is how my system looks graphically, but there is something hiding behind the surface and that is the reward system of the tracker.

3. Tracking and Measuring

What gets tracked, gets done. What gets measured, improves. As you can see in my system, I track and measure my reading on a daily basis.

When I created this tracker, I deliberately used an Excel sheet to keep it as simple as possible. I store the file on my desktop, right in the middle so there is no way I can miss the file if I use my laptop that day. That prevents me from not opening the file and adding up the numbers each and every single day.

Keep the tracker as simple as possible, and if it takes you more than 20 seconds to fill it, it is too complicated. It shouldn’t be another task that you need to do, but a helpful tool that provides the necessary data and a shot of dopamine as a reward when the green colour fills the cell.

So that is why you need to track your activity; but why do you need to measure it? For recognition and efficiency.

And to do that, we need to explore two ways we can measure almost any activity: 1) Time spent and 2)task done.

3.1 Time Spent

An average person reads 200 words-per-minute. An average page has around 250-300 words per page which means that it takes you 3 minutes for 2 pages of a book. If you read 30 minutes a day, that means you will read 20 pages in that time.

But this math is wrong. And it is wrong because you didn’t add up all the distractions in these 30 minutes.

What about the noise from the TV in the background which keeps distracting you, or the kids playing around the house, or the times when your mind wanders while you are reading?

Would you read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations as fast as you read Fifty Shades of Grey?

When measuring time spent for reading, make sure that you add up extra time depending on the distractions around you.

3.2 Task Done

Fixed measuring means when you measure a percentage or a pre-decided number related to a certain activity. For book-reading, that is the number of pages that you read every day.

If you want to develop a habit of keeping your house clean, then the activity could be to “vacuum one room every single day“. That would be a way to measure a certain activity.

This way of measuring defines the activity you need to do and prevents you from ending the day until the task is done. If you stop at 10 pages a day, it means that your task for the day is not done.

This is the go-to way for measuring my performance for the reading habit and it works great.

But why only 20 pages? Why not more?

The age-old dilemma of consistency vs. quantity

4. Consistency vs. Quantity

So why only 20 pages a day? Why not 50, 70 or a 100 a day? I will answer this by giving you another example.

Let’s say you want to start vacuuming your house every single day and for that, you dedicate 5 hours each day. But one day come home from work, you are tired, cranky and just want to rest, but all the while the daunting task of spending 5 more hours cleaning the house is still niggling at the back of your mind. So you just give up because you don’t have 5 hours and even if you could manage to find 5 hours, it would just be too much.

Start with something small and you can later on work your way up. I chose 20 pages a day because it’s not too big of a task. It takes me around 40-60 min to read that much and no matter how busy I am, I will always find that much time to read those pages.

If I wanted to read 50 pages a day, it would take me more than 2 hours a day to do it, which is simply too long, causing me to skip it altogether.

That is why consistency is the key, especially in the beginning. You are forming a habit and it will feel a bit weird and awkward. But after a month or two, it will feel natural to take a book and start reading. Then, and only then, should you increase your daily routine if you want to.

I’ve stayed at 20 pages per day minimum and in a year it has accumulated to 47 books. If I had started with 50 pages a day, I wouldn’t have lasted more than 10 days and would have probably dropped the habit altogether.

There are days when I read just the required 20 pages a day, but also days when I sit down and just read for hours and hours, finishing 600-page books in 4 days. But if that was the norm, it would crush my habit right at the start.

Remember, every day that you read accumulates and at the end, you will have enormous results. But they come from small steps, not giant leaps.

But there is an effective way to cut that time in half.

5. I am vs. I do

When you look at your book-reading habit, is it something you do or something you are?

That is a critical piece which makes an enormous difference in the habit-building process. Because if you say “I am a bookworm” instead of just “I read books“, your entire mindset about books shifts.

When you are something, it is a part of your character and personality. It is deeply ingrained in you, a part of who you are and you can’t imagine your day without it.

When you do something, it is not a part of your personality or character, but simply a task that you are doing at a specific time.

You should think of yourself as Abhishek, 25, IT engineer, bookworm, and not Abhishek, 25, IT engineer, habits: enjoys reading books.

The effects of this kind of framing are widespread. Listen to how people represent themselves. They don’t write books, they are authors; they don’t do laps in the pool, they are swimmers; they don’t work in banks, they are bankers.

You can use the same effects in establishing your book reading habit. Ingrain it as a part of your personality and it will be easier to pick it up.

In this in-depth guide, we saw what lies behind building a successful book-reading habit.

We now understand how habits form and that they consist of cues, routines, and rewards.

The answer to the age-old question of motivation vs. a system was answered in the second part of the guide – we use motivation only to build a system and then, the system takes over.

I have shown you what my system looks like, what I use, how I track and measure it, and ultimately the dopamine shot I get when I don’t break the chain and mark the cell green.

To get there, you start small and focus on just showing up every single day – quantity doesn’t matter – at least not at this stage. And you saw the proof of that when a simple 20 pages a day accumulated into 47 books read in one year.

And at the end, you saw how to think about reading not as something you do, but as something you are. When it’s a part of your personality, you do it like your life depend on it.

I believe you can and will use this guide in establishing your reading system and that you will find yourself happy at the end of the year with many books under your belt.

All that is left is to implement it – one small step at a time.

What do you think of Bruno’s system to develop a habit of reading books? Do you have your own system?
Share with us in the comments.