Itâs not about how many books you read â itâs about how much your life changes.
More than anything else in life, Iâm a writer.
Iâm also a to-be doctor.
However, when people ask me what I do â thatâs not the first thing that comes to my mind. The first thing that comes to my mind is that Iâm a writer.
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And as a writer, reading is my primary fuel.
To that end, Iâve iterated my reading process a lot over the years to be able to maximize what I gain from reading.
In this article, I want to discuss tiny tweaks to your reading process that will skyrocket the benefits you gain from reading. Note that these changes are small â but their power is immense.
And hence, Iâll try to take a deep dive into why every small tweak is so powerful. The article will be long but powerful, I promise.
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Letâs dive in.
1: Make Notecards
The notecard system is a system used by writers like and others. So naturally, I gave it a go as well. And thatâs when I realized that making notecards while reading is something non-writers should do as well.
Making notecards is a simple process of jotting down insights you find while reading on a piece of a notecard. Example:
This is why you should do it:
Reading is a process of introducing new ideas to your conscious mind. However, 95% of your life runs from your subconscious. Hence, if you actually want these insights to change your life, you have to let the insights sink into your subconscious.
Think of your mind like a deep water body.
When you read a book without pausing at all, the insights will just float on the surface waters. Theyâll stay there for a while â but soon enough, theyâll be washed to the shore. Theyâll be forgotten.
However, if you somehow add weight to these insights, they will sink into your subconscious mind â where theyâll actually become a part of you and bring actual change to your way of living.
Let me take a quick detour to help you really understand this point.
As a student, Iâve learned a lot of memory techniques to be able to learn facts from my huge medical syllabus. One memory technique that completely change my life was a simple formula by Kevin Horseley:
Long-term memory (LTM) + Short term memory (STM) = Medium term memory (MTM)
His idea was that if, while studying, you somehow attach new facts (that are in your short-term memory) to whatâs already in your long-term memory, you can commit these facts to your medium-term memory.
As an example, he said that you can try to remember a sequence of words in a list by imagining them sequentially in your house â room by room â in the sequence they are located after entering your house.
Because you already remember the sequence of the rooms in your house, youâll be better able to remember the sequence of the words as well.
Of course, itâs much more complex and harder than it sounds, but itâs a skill thatâs developed over time. And the principle is airtight.
Itâs as if, youâre sending information already present in your memory to your conscious mind, and using it to recruit new info to your subconscious mind.
The same thing can be done with notecards.
When reading, if you find a good insight, you shouldnât just appreciate it and continue reading.
You should stop. You should somehow see how that insight relates to your life. You should find a memory in your life when this insight might have actually helped you.
When you write a notecard, youâre physically forcing yourself to pause at an insight and write it down on a piece of paper. This act of pausing â consequently gives that insight enough time to get meatier and heavier.
And then, it can sink into your subconscious mind.
Writing notecards is just a method that ensures youâll pause when you must pause.
How to do it:
Now that you understand why you should do it, letâs discuss a few key things to remember to make the most of this process.
Use actual physical notecards. Yes, I understand that the world is getting digital. But âpen and paperâ are still more powerful than digital notetaking in some cases. Physically writing down an insight gives it more weight than typing it down.
You can buy notecards online for a few dollars. Write down insights you find interesting and store them in a box on your desk if possible.
Connect it to your own life memories and experiences. This will ensure that the insights get attached to your own life and consequently, sink into your subconscious mind and actually becomes a part of your life.
Occasionally open your box and review your notecards.
Note: There are many more aspects to the notecard system. Donât focus on perfecting the system at the beginning. Just start and keep iterating according to the needs of your own life â and youâll develop a system that’s perfect for you. I have a system as well â let me know if you want me to write about it in detail and I will.
2: Setting Timer-Focussed Goals
When people say that theyâre planning to read 100 books in a year, it makes me nauseous.
I tried to do that a few years ago as well. But now I know better. So I do better.
You see when you set goals like these â
âIâll read 52 books in a year.â
Or âI have to finish this book in 4 days.â
Or âI have to read 20 books before sleeping.â
Youâre compromising the process of reading. Setting goals like these will make you more concerned with finishing a book than actually learning from it.
For instance, letâs say you set a goal to read 20 pages in a day. And then one day, you didn’t get to read the entire day. Only before your bedtime do you get some time to read.
In such a case, youâll be racing against the clock. Youâll read fast. Youâll not stop and pause when you should have (the importance of what we discussed in point #1). This makes the entire point of reading moot.
Yes, youâll finish your 20 pages. But did you learn anything meaningful?
Consider this as well. Letâs say youâre aiming to finish a particular this week â but what if that book provides a shit ton of insights that must be wired into your life. And that takes time. But youâre so concerned with finishing the book and starting a new one that you skip the aspect of reading that actually mattersâ âmaking changes to your lifeâ.
Letâs take another example. If your goal is to read 52 books in a year, what happens when youâre halfway through a shitty book? Will you be able to abandon it?
You wonât. Because â again â youâre concerned with finishing the book because thatâs what youâre trying to achieve. Hence, youâll waste even more of your time reading a book you know is not worth the time.
Naval Ravikant â one of the smartest people of our age says that he abandons books very easily. Once he realized that heâs not going to learn from a book, heâll stop reading it.
Beginner readers arenât able to do that â because theyâre concerned with finishing a book. Not learning from it.
What to do instead and why:
Instead of setting goals focussed on the quantity of reading: such as â52 books in a yearâ, or â20 pages in a dayâ, set timer-focused goals like â âIâll read for 30 minutes every day.â
This is a minor tweak â but extraordinarily powerful.
What this means is â youâll read for 30 minutes a day â by setting an actual timer. In that time, you may read one page. Or a hundred pages. It doesnât matter. What matters is the quality of the reading. Every single of those 30 minutes will be focussed.
Youâll actually read to learn. Youâll read fast when you can read fast. But youâll slow down when you need to. And youâll even pause and take the time to write notecards. Youâll pause and see how the insight plays in your life.
This simple tweak allows the process of reading to change your life. It takes off the pressure of finishing a book and focuses solely on learning from the book. The mindset change is absolutely beautiful.
How to do it:
Set a daily timer-focused goal youâll spend reading. Be realistic. It can be as little as 15 minutes.
Set an actual timer. This ensures that youâll not be distracted.
When you pause to introspect about an insight or to write a notecard about it, you donât have to pause the timer! This introspection is actually what reading is about â and hence, it should be a part of your reading time. Even if you read four sentences in a minute, and then spend the next 14 minutes thinking about an extraordinary insight you found â thatâs fair game. In fact, thatâs exactly what I want you to do.
Please realize that itâs not about how many books you read â itâs about how much your life changes. My philosophy, when it comes to reading, ensures that my life will change significantly more than someone who reads a hundred books in a year even if I read only ten. Who wins in such a case? I do. And you will too. If you do the same.
3: Create Your Own Categorization of Books
When we think about categories of books, we think of âfictionâ, ânon-fictionâ, âautobiographiesâ, etc.
However, you have to understand these book categories donât actually exist. Itâs not as if these categories pre-existed and humans wrote books accordingly. Nope. Humans wrote what they wanted to â and then due to the huge number of books â we âcreatedâ categories so that we can sort them and better understand the world of books.
To that end, you must categorize books for yourself in the context of how any particular book helps you. This teaches you to figure out how you want to look at books. For instance, hereâs how I categorize the books I read (so far):
- Character-changing books: These are the books that change âWHOâ I am
These are books that help me change as a person at the deepest level. For instance, before I read the book, âCanât Hurt Meâ by David Goggins, I was the kind of person who liked to seek comfort when things got rough. This book changed my identity. It resonated with something deep within me and made me a badass who was tougher than anything life can throw at him.
I created this category because Iâve realized that if you want to change your life, you cannot do it without changing your character. For instance, a not-so-ambitious person can read a million books on productivity â but theyâll not help him â because he doesnât actually want to be productive.
To put it in another way, a book on productivity can teach productivity only to someone who wants to be productive. Not to someone who doesnât want to be productive.
Some other examples of character-changing books are:
Einsteinâs biography by Walter Isaacson. This book shares stories from Einstein and is indirectly helping me nurture my curiosity to explore the world.
Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday. This book helped me become someone who likes to be in complete control of his body and mind.
The Obstacle is The Way by Ryan Holiday. This book skyrocketed my optimism.
If you think about it, none of these books share strategies about said character traits. For instance, in Discipline is Destiny, Ryan does not actually share tools for more discipline. He only shares stories about peopleâs insane discipline. These stories connect with you on a very deep level and make you change within.
Character-changing books are what I seek when I know I have to change as a person. Just reading these books alone can change your life.
- âHow-toâ books: These books change how you do something â but thereâs a catch
These are books that teach me how to do something. Examples would be Atomic Habits, Ultralearning, Getting Things Done, etc.
But hereâs the thing about these books.
Unlike âCharacter-changing booksâ these books will not change your life just by reading them. In fact, these books will be worthless to you if:
If they arenât a fit for your character.
If you donât complement them with actual action.
For instance, I read the book Getting Things Done by David Allen a while ago â but it didnât do anything for me â primarily for the above two reasons.
By character, Iâm not an obsessively productive person. I donât want my whole life to be systemized â as David suggested.
And because thatâs not my character, I didnât take any related action suggested in the book.
Another example: I also read the book âThe Art and Business of Online Writingâ by Nicolas Cole. Great stuff! But then again, it didnât help me much because I donât think of myself as an online writer obsessed with building a business. I think of myself as a deep thinker who uses writing as his most powerful tool.
On the other hand, if these âHow-toâ books match your character â and you take action, they can change your life.
For instance, a year ago, I read Ultralearning by Scott Young â and it changed my life â for the same two reasons mentioned above.
Iâm a true lifelong learner. An obsession with learning runs in my blood.
And I took every piece of advice mentioned in the book and used it to master my huge medical syllabus. I continue to use the principles in other fields as well.
I choose what âhow-toâ books to read keeping in mind these principles.
3. Exploration books
These are books that help me explore a new subject in depth.
For instance, these days Iâm exploring the neurotransmitter Dopamine â what it does, how it works, and how to use hack it to my advantage in real life.
Now, we all read books about new topics every now and then. But hereâs what Iâm doing differently this time. Iâm not reading only a single book on the topic. But Iâm reading multiple books (5+) on the same topic.
In the case of Dopamine, I finished my first book on it a while ago â âDopamine Nationâ. Then, I explored more books on dopamine and as of now, Iâm reading âThe Molecule of More.â After this, Iâm going to read âThe Dopamine Mind in Human Evolution & History.â
This way, Iâm gathering a thorough understanding of a new subject through multiple perspectives.
Doing this is actually stretching my perspective in life â and I can sense it. For instance, these days I can vaguely sense when my dopamine spikes and when Iâm low on dopamine. I also have a far better understanding as to how I should reframe my self-talk â and how that relates to dopamine.
The understanding is not extraordinary â but itâs something. I know if I continue to dive deeper, Iâll stretch my perspective even further.
I use Exploration books specifically to learn new subjects and know more about how our beautiful world works.
4. Others
All the other books that donât fit into the above three categories are in this category for now.
As a reader, Iâm continuously asking myself what each book means to me and how it helps me elevate my life. If I find that there needs to be another category of books, Iâll create another category. And then, Iâll figure out how to approach that category in a meaningful way â the way I have found specific ways to approach the above three categories.
As I said before â categories donât actually exist. Itâs just a way for our minds to comprehend the world a bit more easily. Iâm asking you to categorize books for yourself because it forces you to enquire about your relationship with books and reading in general.
This inquiry leads to a better understanding and consequently allows you to approach reading much more intentionally than before.
Note that you donât have to achieve this in a day or a year. In fact, the perfect approach cannot be invented. The goal here is to simply be more intentional and keep iterating to be a more mindful reader.
The goal is simply to allow more and more books to change your life more and more significantly.
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A Quick Recap
Boy that was long! But I had to cover the topic in detail. Every point had significance â and explaining it properly was essential if I was to persuade you to make these tweaks. I hope I did that.
Hereâs a quick recap of the article:
Make notecards while reading. This makes sure that you pause when youâre supposed to while reading â and also helps certain insights gain enough weight for them to successfully sink into your subconscious mind.
Donât set reading goals in terms of the number of books or pages. Instead, decide to read every day for a specific amount of time and focus on actual learning instead of just finishing the book.
Categorize books by inquiring about your relationship with books. By categorizing, you allow yourself to figure out what kind of books help you in which unique waysâ and also tells you how to approach a specific book to maximize your learnings.
Contributed by Akshad Singi
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