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Comment by Numberwang | Hacker News Reader

Didnt someone do a summary of that book in like a single page somewhere? As in, there were good ideas but it could be summed up to a short paper. I can't find the link now.

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I found that you could do the same for many business books, and had made a site to provide summaries of the books. What sparked me to do it was reading "The No Asshole Rule", which was so devoid of actual content that it could be summed up by its title. It was full of anecdotes and statistics that ended up drawing the wrong conclusion.

So I think this is true, but it is not necessarily a terrible thing. It is one thing to memorize a summary of a book. It is another to engage with and apply the ideas in the summary. The goal of a book is to hopefully give you enough time and space to do that.

Unfortunately, most of the books I've read just have the extra material as filler, and don't lead to much engagement. It was just anecdotes like "the nurses in hospital X reported that their bosses were 30% assholes, and in hospital Y they were 96% assholes, so it's no wonder hospital X saved 49% more patients!" and other non-sequiturs like that.

Whats the site?

There’s a good site that does this called Blinkist. https://www.blinkist.com/en/about/

You’ll need a subscription or trial to Blinkist if you want to view anything other than their daily freebie.

This was years ago, and there wasn't much interest so I took it down.

Would check with Derek Sivers: https://sivers.org/book/DeepWork

I think the point of reading the book is you will see the ideas in the summary, but may not believe they are true. The book is there to convince you through data, logical arguments, and stories that the ideas are true. In addition, repetition is one of the most valuable techniques for actually remembering things.

I read the summaries by Sivers before reading a book and after reading a book, many times. Of course, sometimes I skip the book.

Three sentences: https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/business/d... I think the author himself has a one page blog post summarizing it as well.

I agree with him about the smartphone cancer that has crept into all our lives though I imagine there will be much worse distractions in the near future like deep learning phones that can tell us everything going on in a room the moment we enter it (since everybody else also has the same device). Permanent HUD like a James Cameron scifi

> deep learning phones that can tell us everything going on in a room

What information would be on this HUD? Do you mean real-time voice analysis?

It was from slides in a deep learning CMU course with examples such as walking into a restaurant with group seating where staff immediately knows your name and preferences/allergies, and you immediately have information on what topic each table is talking about and in what languages (which are automatically translated) what seats are free to sit at, which order is currently being cooked, ect. The idea was a scenario where each room you walk into your device can tell you everything there is to know.

> I think the author himself has a one page blog post summarizing it as well.

Link please.

If you do a search across his blog there's various articles touching on different parts. Here's one such:

http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/11/21/knowledge-workers-are-...

Actually, I made something of the sort that you're asking for [1]. Thank you for checking it out, and I would love to hear some healthy criticism!

[1] https://skorbenko.github.io/books/books/flow.html

Sure, and Woody Allen summarized War and Peace in one line: It involves Russia.

Yeah the book is good but I found it to be insanely padded and bloated.

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