How to Retain More of Every Book You Read?
Good books can give you a new way to interpret your past experiences. With their help, you can learn new lessons from old moments.
However, this is true if you internalize and remember insights from the books you read. James Clear in his article proposes some of the best reading comprehension strategies he’s found. Here we highlight the extracts:
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Quit more books
You don’t need to read each book page-by-page. You can skim the table of contents, chapter titles, and subheadings to understand whether the book is good for you or not. Pick an interesting section and dive in for a few pages. Quit books quickly without guilt or shame if they are not good for you. Start more books and read the great ones twice.
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Choose books that can be used instantly
Practice is a very effective form of learning. You can improve reading comprehension by choosing books you can immediately apply. Putting the ideas you read into action is one of the best ways to secure them in your mind.
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Do not forget to create searchable notes
Always keep notes on what you read. It doesn’t need to be a big production or a complicated system. Just do something to emphasize the important points and passages, store your notes in a searchable format.
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Combine Knowledge Trees
One way to imagine a book is like a knowledge tree with a few fundamental concepts forming the trunk and the details forming the branches. You can learn more and improve reading comprehension by “linking branches” and integrating your current book with other knowledge trees.
Such connections help you remember what you read by “hooking” new information onto concepts and ideas you already understand.
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Create a Short Summary
When you finish a book, summarize the entire text in a couple of sentences. This constraint is just a game, of course, but it will force you to consider what was really important about the book.
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Surround the topic
If you only read one book on a topic and use that as the basis for your beliefs for an entire category of life, well, how sound are those beliefs?
Reading a book takes effort, but too often, people use one book or one article as the basis for an entire belief system. One way to attack this problem is to read a variety of books on the same topic.
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Read it once again
Ideas need to be repeated to be remembered. Revisiting great books is helpful because the problems you deal with change over time. You read the same book, but you never see it the same way.
What do you think about these tips? Perhaps you have your own suggestions.