There are many benefits to reading more books, but perhaps my favorite is this: A good book can give you a new way to interpret your past experiences.
Of course, your notes don’t have to be digital to be “searchable.” For example, you can use Post-It Notes to tag certain pages for future reference. As another option, Ryan Holiday suggests storing each note on an index card and categorizing them by the topic or book.
The core idea is the same: Keeping searchable notes is essential for returning to ideas easily. An idea is only useful if you can find it when you need it.
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.
Additionally, revisiting great books is helpful because the problems you deal with change over time. Sure, when you read a book twice maybe you’ll catch some stuff you missed the first time around, but it’s more likely that new passages and ideas will be relevant to you. It’s only natural for different sentences to leap out at you depending on the point you are at in life.
You read the same book, but you never read it the same way. As Charles Chu noted, “I always return home "to the" same few authors. And, no matter how many times I return, I always find they have something new to say.”
Of course, even if you didn’t get something new out of each reading, it would still be worthwhile to revisit great books because ideas need to be repeated to be remembered. The writer David Cain says, “When we only learn something once, we don’t really learn it—at least not well enough for it to change us much. It may inspire momentarily, but then becomes quickly overrun by the decades of habits and conditioning that preceded it.” Returning to great ideas cements them in your mind.
Nassim Taleb sums things up with a rule for all readers: “A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.”
For example:
- While reading The Tell-Tale Brain by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, I discovered that one of his key points connected to a previous idea I learned from social work researcher Brené Brown.
- In my notes for The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F*ck, I noted how Mark Manson’s idea of “killing yourself” overlaps with Paul Graham’s essay on keeping your identity small.
- As I read Mastery by George Leonard, I realized that while this book was about the process of improvement, it also shed some light on the connection between genetics and performance.
Where to Go From Here,
Knowledge compounds over time.
In Chapter 1 of Atomic Habits, I wrote: “Learning one new idea won’t make you a genius, but a commitment to lifelong learning can be transformative.”
One book will rarely change your life, even if it does deliver a lightbulb moment of insight. The key is to get a little wiser each day.
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