Your knowledge is only as powerful as your willingness to implement it (tweet this)
If you’re anything like me then you’re on a constant quest to learn more. You’re in search of that next inspirational blog post or book that can alter your outlook and take your personal or professional life to the next level.
However, anything you read is next to useless if you don’t put its teachings into action. That is the key step that most people tend to neglect. It is easy to read something truly inspirational, but if you don’t consciously seek to distil the wisdom and then apply it to your own life, the whole experience will have been for nought.
With the above in mind, in this post I want to reveal the process I have adopted to extract the maximum possible value from a book or blog post in an efficient manner. It can make a monumental difference and take you no more time (perhaps even less) than it would to read a book in the traditional manner.
Step 1: Skim, Booknote and Underline
The first thing you need to know about any book or blog post is that a lot of the content is superfluous for the purposes of taking action on what you read.
Take the first three paragraphs above as an example. It serves as a ‘hook’ — a device that describes what the post will be covering and draws you into reading on. However, it offers no practical advice — it is nothing more than an introduction. This blog post is 1,137 words in total and you now know that you can already disregard 175 of those words for the purposes of taking action on what you read. Understanding that you do not need a huge proportion of the content to take action is very freeing.
So rather than reading a book or blog post, take to skimming it. I’m not saying that you should not focus on the content — on the contrary, you should be totally focused on the task at hand. But you should be skimming with a view to extracting only the actionable nuggets of information that will really help you. Whenever you find anything, underline it with a pencil, fold the corner of the page over and move on. You should use a pencil rather than a pen or highlighter because you don’t want to worry about the nib drying out as you read through the book.
In reality (and this is especially the case with books) you can often discard a huge proportion of the content. I generally find that I underline around 10-20% of the actual content in a typical book — the rest is either entirely superfluous or merely serves to introduce or reiterate something I have already underlined.
To give you an idea of what I mean, here’s what I would underline from this post so far:
- The first thing you need to know about any book or blog post is that a lot of the content is superfluous for the purposes of taking action on what you read.
- So rather than reading a book or blog post, take to skimming it.
- Whenever you find anything, underline it with a pencil, fold the corner of the page over and move on.
The blog post up to this point has been 469 words of which I would have underlined just 64. Or in other words, I would have underlined less than 14% of the content and discarded the rest, and yet I would have extracted the key actionable passages.
Step 2: Make Notes
This step will allow you to essentially throw away the book or blog post and start distilling your underlining into a highly concentrated collection of actionable notes. I recommend that you use Evernote to store your notes — I have a ‘Notes’ notebook for this purpose.
The first thing you should do is go back through the book and take notes pertaining to those passages you have underlined. You shouldn’t just copy what you have underlined verbatim — the key is to compress the passage into its smallest possible form.
Take the following as an example:
So rather than reading a book or blog post, take to skimming it.
Becomes…
Don’t read content — skim instead.
13 words becomes 5. All of the superfluous information is stripped away, leaving just the actionable core. This will make an enormous difference when it comes to taking action on your notes.
If you are taking notes from a book then I recommend you make note of page numbers by each passage in case you get a little overzealous with your note-taking and need to go back to check the context of something you have written.
Please don’t attempt to shortcut this process by copying and pasting. By reading the underlined passages and compressing them into actionable nuggets you are getting a second pass at the content and are crystallising the concepts in your head — it is not a process you should look to short circuit.
Step 3: Take Action
By this point you should have a relatively short collection of concentrated notes. You can expect the word count to be in the region of 2-6% of the original content of books (the number will be higher for blog posts as they are far shorter than books and tend to be less wordy). Furthermore, the entire process to this point will have probably taken you less time than studiously reading the book through without taking any notes.
The final (and most important) step is to actually take action on what you have read and written. If you do not convert your notes into actionable steps then you will extract little value from the process. By this point you should be very familiar with the key actionable points contained within the notes you have taken — all you need to do is write down what your next action steps are and then actually take action.
We all have different ways of setting tasks and reminders so I do not intend to go into specifics here. The key thing to bear in mind is that you must have a reliable system into which you can place action reminders relating to the notes you have taken. If you do not have such a system then now is the time to create one (it can be as simple as a handwritten to do list).
I cannot understate the importance of this step — if you actually want to convert what you have read into a personal beneficial outcome then you must take action. Reading words is a passive activity; it is what you do with your newfound knowledge that makes all the difference.
So what are you waiting for? It’s time to take action — grab a book and get started!
Notes from this Post
To give you an idea of how the above process works I have broken it down below. First we have the key passages underlined:
- The first thing you need to know about any book or blog post is that a lot of the content is superfluous for the purposes of taking action on what you read.
- So rather than reading a book or blog post, take to skimming it.
- Whenever you find anything, underline it with a pencil, fold the corner of the page over and move on.
- I recommend that you use Evernote to store your notes — I have a “Notes” notebook for this purpose.
- The first thing you will want to do is go back through the book and take notes pertaining to your underlining. You shouldn’t just copy what you have underlined verbatim — the key is to compress the passage into its smallest possible form.
- If you are taking notes from a book then I recommend you make note of page numbers within your notes
- By this point you should be very familiar with the key actionable points contained within the notes you have taken — all you need to do is write down what your next action steps are and then actually take action.
16.35% of total words
And now the concentrated notes:
- Most content in books and blog posts is superfluous
- Don’t read content — skim instead
- Underline key passages with a pencil and bookmark the page
- Create a “Notes” folder in Evernote to store notes
- Take concentrated notes on underlined passages (include page number)
- Write down action steps and start taking action
4.49% of total words
And finally, the action steps:
- Follow note-taking process for the next book I read
- Take action on notes
- Analyse value of process and decide whether or not to implement on all reading