The Fastest Way to Learn Anything From a Book
A simple technique for 10x understanding
TL;DR — Read the book, summarize each section, and rewrite the book based on your summaries.
This is basically a modified Feynman Technique. It’s quite simple, and only requires three steps, which I’ll go into more detail below:
- Read the book like a normal person
- Take notes, record anything interesting that sticks out to you
- Write your own version of that book, based on your notes
The beauty of this technique is that you’ll never forget what you read. For example, I distilled David Keith’s book The Case for Climate Engineering (which is actually about solar radiation management, not climate engineering as a whole) into a brief blog-post-like document that I can reference whenever I need. Total time spent (including reading): 4 hours
The act of reconstructing the original book based on your notes has two benefits:
- It forces you to read deeply and take better notes
- Rewriting the book allows you to identify gaps in your learning
Hopefully, I’ve convinced you by now. If not, then you can continue below to see how easy it actually is. Then you’ll have no choice to do it because it requires so little investment of your time, but gives at least 10x in returns.
Here are the three steps to the Modified Feynman Technique.
1. Read the book like a normal person
Your goal here isn’t full, deep, understanding. It’s to get a general feel of the book. To find out the general message, and to identify any important bits that stick out to you so you can go back to them later.
I wouldn’t say that reading the entire book straight through all at once is necessary. I find it more helpful to break it up in chunks.
The good thing is that the author usually already breaks up their book in chunks for you (how convenient!), usually in structures called “chapters” or “sections”
So for each chapter, read it once, normally. If something sticks out to you or seems important, make a note of it in the back of your head. The aim is not to write anything down. Only to get the general idea of the section.
2. Take notes
You know how to take notes.
Everyone has their own style of notetaking, so I’m not going to go into much detail here.
The key insight here is to go through each chapter and distill it down to its basic components.
It turns out, most books are composed of a bunch of fluff wrapped around a few good ideas.
It’s your job to trim the fat and isolate the good ideas.
3. Rewrite the book
Open a blank word document.
Or a blank sheet of paper, if you’re an old man.
Take a look at your notes. You’ve got a bunch of basic concepts written down, and your job is to weave them together into some coherent, easily-digestible form.
Now rewrite that entire book, based on your notes.
Pretend you’re writing a blog post, and you’re explaining the subject to some random dude on the internet who has no idea what “quantum entanglement” is.
Yes, it’s pretty much the Feynman Technique. Explain it to a child. Try to start with the most basic principles, and make sure you show all of the steps the author took to arrive at whatever point was made in that chapter.
The idea is to make the reader feel like they’re the author, and they’re discovering the concept by themselves. Make your readers feel smart.
Sometimes, you’ll be unable to fully explain how the author arrived at a conclusion, or you’ll have no idea where some random number came from. Congratulations! You’ve uncovered a gap in your understanding!
This is great because the tight feedback loop created by forcing yourself to basically write a book is what helps you understand concepts 10x faster and 10x better.