How to actually remember the useful things from the books you’ve read
So there I am reading Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, one of the classic books on crafting habits and I’m sure we’ve all been in that situation that as we go through a good book there are particular points that really strike it home and you can see are really important lessons to bear in mind in the subject matter your learning.
But as you go further into the book those wicked points get forgotten, you know those epiphanies are in the book somewhere but you just can’t remember anymore where they are to your frustration and what makes it worse is that you can vaguely remember it was something that you have to bear in mind but you can no longer remember it or recall exactly where it was in the book and so the whole point of reading the book becomes null and void!
I really wanted to be able to read a book and retain the important lessons from it, and yet all the books I read, I just couldn’t retain the practical lessons that I had read about.
And that was really frustrating as a lot of the books I read were to do with practical implementation and making you a better person. So if I couldn’t remember the important lessons, it made reading the books pointless.
So I was tired of reading books and forgetting all the important points that I had learnt from them.
And on a more internal level forgetting those points made me feel that I had just wasted my precious life spending hours reading a book and not gleaning anything from it. So then I went on a journey to find a way to glean the key points from books and summarise them in a way that they highlighted the most important elements of the book.
I came across a video that explained the best way to remember the information you read was to mind map it as you read it.
So I downloaded a fancy mindmap app and kept on open besides me whenever I read a book. Whenever I came across an interesting point I would write it in the book.
But I found when I came back to reading mindmaps, they were boring and they didn’t help remember the epiphany points. They were like a mind map of all the points as opposed to the epiphany points.
Then I realised that instead of documenting every point, just focus on the points that were the epiphany points, and these will be your main epiphany lessons to take away with you whenever you’re reading a book.