Member-only story
How to Remember What You Read with Readwise
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
— Carl Sagan
Have you ever read a book that inspired you to take action, only to have your motivation fizzle out a few days later? Or maybe you tried to explain a concept you recently read about only to discover that you can’t recall more than a few vague ideas.
For the number of hours it takes to read a book, you’d hope to earn a better return on your investment. But books are, without a doubt, still one of the best tools for learning how to do something or for understanding a new concept. They’re also incredible at transferring knowledge through space and time.
So why is it so difficult to remember what you read?
How to Remember What You Read
Perhaps books aren’t to blame, but rather, it’s how we read that makes learning inefficient. Reading for understanding is inherently flawed because it’s based on the faulty assumption that we learn by transmission-absorbing knowledge by reading words on a page. But if you really want to understand something, you can’t stop there. You must actively engage with it.
If you want to optimize for understanding, you need to see reading for what it really is: only the first step in a larger process. To get the most out of books, you need a system for transforming what you read into meaningful action and lasting insight. What you need is a reading workflow.
Reading Workflow
Like the books you choose to read, your reading workflow will ultimately be unique to you, but it can effectively be broken down into three steps:
