How to Read More in 2022
Hi friends,
I’ll be honest. I have never been a consistent reader.
I like to think of myself as a learned person that reads books to enrich myself. But if I look back at the last decade, I probably read 3-4 books a year at most. Why is that?
When I do, I mostly read non-fiction books to learn new things about design, business, leadership, philosophy. Stuff that has the potential to spark new ideas and add to my life. I read some fiction (mostly sci-fi), but only occasionally.
So I set out to solve this problem. It seems to be working. Maybe this might be helpful for others looking to read more this year.
Start with why
If you read a lot about self-improvement (as I do), you’ll hear this a lot. Start with the reason you want to do something. Make sure it’s actually something you care about. This will help keep your motivation going and help with the how part.
In 2022 I want to read more books.
Why?
I want to leverage new ideas to grow more and do more.
What’s not working right now?
I’ve had this motivation since I can remember. It’s why I have tons of unread books lying around that I might get to “someday”. So what isn’t working? Why am I not living up to my ideal?
I think it’s because I don’t have a good way of actually achieving the purpose I outlined above.
I’ve identified that I mostly read to learn. The input part is easy. Get books and read them. It’s the output part (leveraging new ideas) that I haven’t figured out.
It’s well known that you learn better when you take notes as you read and review them later. The thought of sitting down and taking notes while reading seems a bit high school and has never appealed to me. So I never do it.
Because I don’t do that, my recall of what I actually read is rather poor. I have the nagging feeling while I read that it’s all slipping through my brain like a sieve.
I see a book. I want to read it. My brain says, “What’s the point? You’re going to spend hours reading this book and forget it all by next Tuesday. Don’t even bother. Also, your breath stinks.”
That’s what blocks me from reading.
A new system
I’ve learned through running a business that good systems are critical to streamlining workflows and upholding consistency. This is also well supported in the science of forming habits.
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
James Clear, Atomic Habits
So I’ve set up a system that solves the issue of capturing the learnings from reading by using 3 things:
Kindle
A Kindle makes reading frictionless. It is one of the best purchases I’ve ever made and a great example of how one well-designed product can actually change your life.
You can have access to thousands of books via one device, and you can easily jump between them. It also makes buying books incredibly easy (good for Amazon, but good for me too).
One of personal finance guru Ramit Sethi’s “Money Rules” is that any book he finds even remotely interesting, he’ll buy. His reasoning is that if he even gets one useful insight from it, it will have been worth the $10-20.
I now loosely follow that rule. With some restraint. I am not a financial guru, after all.
This makes the incoming flow of interesting ideas much bigger. The Kindle supports that behavior and gives me almost instant access to the new material.
The killer feature on the Kindle is the highlighting. I can now highlight interesting passages so easily and it all gets synced to the cloud. Gone is the feeling that my learnings are slipping away. I know everything I found interesting from a book is being captured somewhere.
I have the 2021 Kindle Paperwhite. There are some other useful features that I think have helped to encourage me. The percentage complete indicator on books gives me motivation to keep going, and the screen light with adjustable color temperature makes it easy on the eyes.
I’ve also noticed that my brain seems to frame reading on a screen as “fun” and reading from a paper book as “work”. So it actually feels like more fun to read from a Kindle.
Notion and Readwise
Amazon does let you access your Kindle highlights through their website. But it’s not exactly practical to go there every time you want to look something up.
Enter Notion and Readwise.
Notion has become my second brain. It’s a note-taking app with database capabilities and so much more. It’s a bit much to explain here, but essentially it is now the central repository for all my notes and ideas. I’m writing this newsletter in Notion right now.
Readwise takes in your Kindle highlights, and then emails you a daily digest of them. This really helps with recall and reinforcement. It can also sync to Notion. When you set it up, Readwise will create a database in your Notion workspace. For every book you read and highlight, it creates an entry in that database that stores all your highlights.
I now get both daily reinforcement of my learnings and easy, searchable access to all my highlights!
I’ve now been reading daily for almost a month, even if it’s only for 20 minutes before bed. That nagging feeling of knowledge slipping away is gone.
If you’re interested in how to do this yourself, I’ve put the video that I watched to learn how to set it up at the end of this post.
What I’m currently reading
It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (44% complete)
by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Written by the founders of Basecamp. This is a book about building a stable, profitable company that makes good products where employees are happy to work. I don’t necessarily agree with everything, such as their complete aversion to goal-setting, but overall good principles to build a sustainable business around.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (40% complete)
by Eric Jorgenson
Having worked in Silicon Valley for the last 10 years, I’m a bit ashamed to admit I had never heard of Naval Ravikant. He’s was the CEO of AngelList and in recent years has developed a knack for putting out nuggets of philosophical wisdom. This book is a compilation of that wisdom and it is so dense with good advice on wealth, life, and happiness. The best thing? It’s available as a free e-book.
Show Your Work (53% complete)
by Austin Kleon
For the longest time, I believed that creative work speaks for itself. But in recent years I’ve learned that you have to share your work and articulate it’s value to be known. Show Your Work makes a case for doing so in a generous, authentic way that doesn’t feel sleazy.
Cradle to Cradle (3% complete)
by William McDonough and Michael Braungart
Just starting this one. Picking this up was a result of my conversation with my RIT seminar last week. This book was widely discussed while I was in college, but I haven’t actually read it so I’m going to. The authors discuss the impact of our current consumer culture and apply principles from nature to propose a better way.
That’s it for this week!
Anson
P.s. here’s the video that taught me how to do the Notion/Readwise magic: