It’s never been about how much you know. It’s always been about knowing how much you don’t know. You can only cook with the ingredients you have.
Your identity is reflected in your daily choices, and if you observe most people, they aren’t trying to do anything by their own desire. They may search for new information, but it’s not to make changes in their life, it’s to feel as if they are making progress by hoarding information to sound smart or look different without actually doing anything different.
You don’t read to find information than can already be found. You read to explore the unknown and pursue your curiosity. You read to discover things you didn’t know before and didn’t even think about searching with google and chatGPT. You read to expand your mind to places you didn’t know were there.
You read to slowly reprogram who you are by exposing yourself to new ideas that can’t be intentionally searched by an identity that didn’t even think to search for them.
Your Mind doesn’t change with a few key points from a book summary or an AI generated summary. It changes when new ideas (actionable or not) that fill in missing pieces, challenges old beliefs, or give you a new angle to view a situation from.
The Obsession over actionable steps and bullet points summaries is just another manifestation of cheap dopamine and distraction.
The Purpose of Knowledge is action, not knowledge.
Consumption
Smart People Read in 2 layers
Consumption - they soak in the information to the point of overwhelm and struggling to understand. Digestion - they study deeper, write to systematically reflect on what they learn, and attempt to connect the dots together through action
Whenever you reach a point where you lack understanding or you wanna dive deeper you can type in AI.
Some Reading Tips in General
If it doesn’t interest you, you probably won’t learn anything, so you can drop it.
You are not in the race of finish the book, in fact, the slower is better. Take a year or two to finish if you need to.
You can read multiple books at a time. You’d be surprised how many connections you make between them.
Digestion
Filly digesting a book’s ideas takes much longer than reading it over a weekend. Some ideas even take years to make sense of.
Most people remember very little of what they read because they don’t see how it applies to their life. They can’t integrate the lessons in a way where they don’t need to remember every sentence of the book because it reflects in their daily actions. “You don’t need to memorize lines if it’s a deep part of who you are.”
Reminder: The purpose of reading is behavior change through identity change.
When you spot the connections that lead the book’s lessons clicking in your head, that’s when positive behavior change happens.
Using knowledge for action, not knowledge
Most people don’t need more motivation , they need more clarity. You already have goals and ambitions, but you never pursue them because point A (Where you are) and point B (where you want to be) need a bridge of smaller goals and actions you can take to trek between the two. Without the clarity bridge, anxiety and overwhelm start to seep in.
Synthesize the ideas with writing to reflect on what you learn.
Choose a concept Select the topic you want to understand
Teach it Explain the concept in simple language, as if you
Identify gaps when you struggle to explain something clearly, identify the areas where your understanding is weak.
Review and simplify Go back to the source material, relearn the concepts, and then try to explaining them again in even simpler terms.