- Right, so I've got a confession to make.
I do read around about a thousand books a year,
but I don't finish a thousand books a year.
I only finished somewhere between 70 and 100.
Now, at this point, if you haven't clicked away
from the video you're probably thinking, "That is cheating.
Oh my God, that's so unfair, it does not count
as reading a book if you don't finish a book.
This is super super click bait, I'm gonna unsubscribe."
And if you're thinking that and you are still here,
then you're probably falling into the trap
that society has programmed us
over, basically, our whole lives.
Which is that A, books are the sacred hallow objects,
and B, there is some, like, status, some social status,
some prestige associated with, like, finishing a book,
like reading it cover to cover.
If we're seen to be reading more than other people,
especially difficult books
that we probably don't even enjoy,
we have this feeling that we're
somehow better than those people
who've been reading the same 50 shades book
for the past three months.
In other words, the number of books we read
is purely a vanity metric that we use
to impress other people.
In this video, I'd like to propose a new way
of approaching reading.
This is the four step method that I use
to read a thousand books a year,
and it's genuinely changed my life.
Step one, fill the funnel.
If we wanna read more books then we need to have loads
and loads of books coming into the top of our funnel.
This means that we wanna have a tonne of books
that we're checking out, and only later are we deciding
if it's a book that we actually want to read properly.
My favourite way of doing this is to use book summaries,
and my personal recommendation for this is Shortform.
On Shortform, they've got summaries
of thousands of popular nonfiction books,
including New York Times bestsellers
and books that universities recommend.
Each summary condenses all of the key ideas
into this really clear structure so that you can
quickly find the main insights from the book.
So, if I'm deciding whether or not to actually
properly read a book, I will go on Shortform.
And if they have the book available in Shortform,
which they normally do, then I'll read the one page summary,
which is unsurprisingly a one page summary
of the whole book.
And if I like what I read,
then that book goes further down the funnel
and I'll decide if I wanna read the book properly.
And if not, then it just gets scrapped immediately.
And hey, I've taken away the key ideas from it already,
having read the summary.
If you wanna sign up to Shortform,
free trial link the video description.
They're not sponsoring this video.
They're not paying me to say this,
but it is an affiliate links.
If you sign up, I get a little bit of kickback.
But if a book's not on Shortform,
you can just Google the title of the book and type summary.
And someone, somewhere on the internet
will have written a summary of the book
and then you can use that to decide
whether you actually want to read the book properly.
So, that's all well and good,
but how do you actually find book recommendations
in the first place?
I recommend three resources.
Number one, Goodreads, number two, Twitter,
and number three podcasts.
Although Goodreads is a bit more
than a book recommendation site,
it's a great way to get book recommendations based
on what you've already read, what your friends are reading,
and what the general Goodreads community thinks
about a particular book.
And the benefit of good reads, as well,
is that it turns reading into, sort of, a game.
And you can, like, log which books you're reading
and which books you've read and just makes it, kind of, fun.
And it's really cool tracking all of the books
that you've ever read in your life.
If that sounds fun, then I'll put a link
to my Goodreads profile in the video description.
Fun fact, I'm actually one of the top 10
most followed people in the UK on Goodreads.
I would like to ascend to the rankings,
so please follow me on Goodreads
to see all the book recommendations
and all my highlights and stuff from books that I'm reading.
Anyway, whenever I get a book recommendation,
I generally just buy it there and then on Amazon,
either on Kindle or on Audible.
Or if I'm not in a place to buy it there and then,
I will add it to my Todoist books to read thing,
and then I'll buy it on Audible or on Kindle
somewhere further down the line.
At point there's no obligation
to actually read any of these books.
We're just, kind of, deciding to fill our funnel
with as many books as we possibly can,
and then I'll decide if I actually wanna read it.
And that brings us on to step two.
Step two, make it effortless.
The idea here is that we don't want reading to be a chore.
If we can seamlessly integrate reading
into our daily routine, we're gonna improve our chances
of actually reading the books.
Now, if there's only one piece of advice I could give here,
it would be to get into audio books and Audible.
I've said so many times, is genuinely the single app
I would subscribe to if I could only subscribe to one thing.
They're not even sponsoring this video,
that is how much I fricking love Audible.
I am plugging it in a video
that they're not even sponsoring.
I'll stick a link in the video description,
go and check it out.
But I genuinely... Audible, it just makes it so, so,
so easy to listen to books.
And it, like, ever since I started using Audible,
I think in 2017, I basically doubled the amount of books
I've been actually able to read.
So, Audible is my go-to if I'm driving or walking around,
or if I'm at the gym.
But if I'm at home and I'm on the toilet,
and I don't really want to get my AirPods out
because it's a little bit gross in there,
then what I normally do is,
either I will scroll through Twitter aimlessly
and get book recommendations that way occasionally,
or if I'm feeling really productive,
then I'll actually go on the Shortform app on my phone
and read summaries on Shortform because they have
a nice mobile app as well.
By reading the more detailed chapter summaries
on Shortform, you're basically reading the book
at 10 X speed, there's zero fluff,
so practically every sentence is insightful
and applicable to our life.
So Audible and Shortform make it super easy
to, again, make it effortless to read,
as effortless to read as possible.
But if I wanna actually read a book properly,
then I will just buy it on Kindle.
I really need to become like a ambassador
for Audible and Kindle because, and again,
they're not sponsoring the video,
but, like genuinely, I think the Kindle is probably one
of the most life-changing pieces of tech that I own.
I've been reading everything on Kindle
since like 2008, 2009.
I have my Kindle on my bedside table
and that means I always get about half an hour
to read before bed.
I'll always pick it up, I'll have the light
on the dimmest setting while the bedroom lights are closed.
And then it's great because I don't waste any time
before sleeping because I'm always reading.
And then when I start to feel my eyes starting to close,
I'll just drop the Kindle and I'll fall asleep,
and this is absolutely game-changing.
And also the nice thing about Kindle is every book
that you buy on Kindle itself,
you can also read on the Kindle app on my iPhone.
And so if I'm out and about,
or if I'm in a waiting room or on a train or something,
then and if I don't have my physical Kindle on me,
then I'll just use the Kindle app on my iPhone
to read books that way.
And that just makes it super, super easy to read.
Step three, the blog post mindset.
Now, when we're at school, the general vibe
is that A, we need to power through every book
that we start reading, even if we're not enjoying it,
and that B, it is a crime, it is a crime against humanity
to quit reading a book because then you're a quitter
and you're a failure in life.
But obviously this is terrible,
and the way that I approach it is the blog post mindset,
which is really that I treat books
like I treat blog posts.
They're not sacred, they're not hallowed,
There's nothing special about a book just
because it happens to be in book format.
I will treat it like a blog post,
i.e. I'll feel completely okay
with stopping reading the book,
even if I'm halfway through or 10% of the way through.
- There's a lot of nonsense in books out there, too.
So, I don't read any more to complete books,
I read to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity.
- And I really like this point that Nirval makes,
whereby the point of reading is not to signal
or anything like that, the point is literally
to just satisfy our own intellectual curiosity.
And so if, for example,
I find that chapter three of the book is more interesting
or chapter eight is more interesting,
or if, for example,
I find that I've gotten the bulk of the value
from the book from the first three chapters,
it actually totally okay for me to stop reading the book.
I'm only reading for myself and for my good reads profile.
I'm not reading to try and impress other people
or to try and seem smarter because I've just happened
to have read more books.
And even within the sections of the book,
even when there is like really valuable information,
I find that I don't need to read all of it.
And I have a more, kind of, skim based approach to reading.
Like, often when we're reading,
the book will bash us over the head with examples
to explain just one idea.
So if you've already got the main idea,
you can just blitz through that section
and you can slow down again when you come across a new idea,
an interesting thought,
or just some other piece of gold dust
that you don't want to miss.
There's a bunch of techniques around speed reading.
I've done a video that will be linked
somewhere over there,
where we talk about things like reducing sub vocalisation
and using the finger technique
and using the ruler technique,
all these ways of making it faster, getting through books.
But the point is, again, we wanna...
It's more of a mindset shift that it's actually totally okay
to skim and to skip paragraphs and to skip chunks.
There is no like added value.
There's no like social status or prestige associated
with reading every single word cover to cover.
And in the same way, like, if I read a book summary,
whether it's on Shortform or on Blinkist,
or just a random blog post that some dude's written
on Medium that I found through Google.
I don't see that as being any different
to reading the actual book
because they've summarised the main idea.
If I enjoy the summary enough to think,
"Oh, this is a book I'd want to read,"
then I will actually get the book on Audible or Kindle
and read it properly.
Step four, go deep.
At some point, eventually once we've done all this,
once we've got this like big, like, tonnes and tonnes of books
into our filter, and we do things like summaries
and skimming and stuff,
we will come across books that actually really resonate
with us and that we really wanna read more of.
And so I come across these, maybe one or two books
every week.
And the tip at that point is that it's not really
about them thinking, "Okay, I wanna blitz through this book
as quickly as possible and I'm wanna try and move on
to the next one so I can make a click bait title."
The tip at that point is to really go deep on the stuff
that we actually care about.
The first way to do this and, kind of, the gold standard,
the one that I try and aspire to when I'm reading a book
that particularly resonates with me,
is to take notes on the stuff that I'm reading.
Good note taking can take many different forms
and it's gonna differ from person to person,
but it's a really important skill,
especially if we're looking for a better way
to organise our ideas or to keep a record
of the most important lessons we've learned
or to think critically about
how we can apply the information to our own lives.
As Mortimer Adler writes in How to Read a Book,
in the case of good books, the point is not to see
how many of them you can get through,
but rather how many can get through to you.
My process for taking notes has evolved over the years.
The most low friction way I do this is,
I literally have a folder on my Apple Notes
called Book Notes.
And I would just jot down a few bullet points as I'm reading
or as I'm listening to a book.
And then, for some of the books,
the ones that really resonate with me,
where I make the time to write a proper summary.
I have a nice notion template that asks me
to summarise the book in a few sentences,
to share my top three highlights.
And that pulls in all of the other, kind of, highlights
and stuff I've made on Kindle through Readwise, again,
more information in that video over there,
because I'm not gonna talk about it in this one.
The other way I found recently is that if, for example,
I'm reading a book, but I'm only reading the summary
on Shortform, then again,
they've got these, like, interactive exercise bits.
And on the times where I actually engage
with the exercise and type stuff out,
I find it often get a lot more value from the book
because now I'm actually answering the thoughtful questions
that they've put together and seeing how I can actually
apply the principles I've learned in the book
to my own life.
Finally, if there's a book that I genuinely, really enjoy,
that really resonates with me,
that I feel would be interesting to learn more about
and to share with you guys,
and then I'll turn it into a video
for my book club series on this channel.
And again, the playlist for that will be linked
somewhere over here or over here.
If you liked this video and if you're interested
in my process for how I remember everything I read,
check out this video over here,
which is my magical insight logging framework,
which teaches you everything you need to know
to remember absolutely everything you read.
Thank you so much for watching,
do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already,
and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye bye.