Now I look at the cover, back, chapter list, flip through the chapters a few times looking for high-level things that pop out, do it again, then look through the index for things that have lots of references. Then I can start reading the book, and I have a better idea of what I'm in for. Plus it's much easier to be engaged when you aren't so religious about the 'right' way to use a book.
That kind of thing has let me learn stuff I would otherwise feel too intimidated or unsure about.
It’s not about memorization. It’s about repetition. Even things that cannot be memorized, like randomly generated puzzles, are solved by this. Through practice and life experience you learn what mindless things to practice and which to avoid.
Things that do not directly accomplish a goal but require intense learning are things best avoided. For example I have spent my career as a JavaScript developer avoiding the large stupid frameworks. This has harmed my career mobility but has allowed me to focus on skills most JavaScript developers cannot do: accessibility, performance, security, A/B testing, test automation, and really just about absolutely everything possible aside from some giant stupid framework API. There are pros/cons to not spending time with stupid. You are far less likely to be hired to do stupid beginner things, like put text on screen and pretend you are engineering, but once you get past that you are suddenly qualified for things that pay much more. This pattern applies to everything even unrelated lines of work.
Anyway, she took her lecture notes in shorthand. Shorthand is very fast, so she took down every word. She would go home and transcribe those by hand to regular English. Then she would type it out on her typewriter for a final copy.
She said by the time she did all that, she was done studying.
Reading traditional “narrative” books, articles, for information is extremely inefficient and almost entirely a waste of time. I have read hundreds of books in my life, and yet if you asked me to give a dozen facts from one I read a few months ago (for example, a biography of Rockefeller)…I can’t do it. I could tell you the rough outlines of his life, but I’ve forgotten the details. I put maybe twenty hours into reading this book and my return on that time seems to be minimal at best.
What’s the alternative? I’m a big believer in SRS/Anki and have found it to work almost flawlessly. And so I think a better alternative to reading for information may be to make a list of discrete facts from a book and put those into an SRS system.
Side note: I’m distinguishing reading for information from reading for enjoyment. I assume most people don’t read business nonfiction books for enjoyment and mostly just want to learn the information inside.
The value of Anki is clear, but I wonder how many hours it takes to create that list. Maybe that is time when I could be reading another book on the same topic, for example. Or I am rationalizing because I find it annoying to enter things in Anki (even a csv file) :)
The compromise I found is: if you own a lot of physical books, underlining (normally or with small vertical lines on the side) makes it easy to go back and remember the important facts. I also write my reaction to some sentences on the margin.
All of this helps me remember better, and it makes it easier to get back to it later to get the main points. It seems to work well enough for now.
While certainly not optimal from a speed perspective, it's no doubt extremely effective, and may even be efficient in the long-term.
I was always good at math as a kid so I never had to try, but I took time off between high school and college and it left me severely out of my weight class when college math started.
The Math 100 book started on chapter 6, as 1-5 was for remedial Math 99, so while I was struggling to cope with Math 100 stuff I was also working my way through the remedial chapters so I could catch up with my class. Took me 6 weeks of going to school and/or going to work, then going to Taco Bell and sitting down with a diet soda and doing math for 2-3 hours almost every day to catch up, but I managed to pull it off by doing every single math problem in the book.
I was doing ok in Abstract Algebra, but really wanted to bump up from a B to an A. So I spent the last few weeks slowly reading every chapter and doing almost every exercise. By the end of the semester I felt much more comfortable and got the top score on the final.
Only took me 20 years to figure it out, but reading the textbook and doing the exercises are effective ways to learn (duh).
- Take notes[1] and document the fundamentals (for review), trivia, detritus, step-by-step procedures, and problems+resolutions for issues I encountered. I try not to keep this in my head, anymore. I have too many complex systems to manage at work. The days where I could keep everything in my head are long gone.
- When I'm taking notes, I try to write them out conversationally as if I were explaining it to a technically-adept person for the first time. Why? Because I'm technically-adept and often when I refer back to something I did a year ago, I want to remember and get back on track as quickly as possible. This approach will also help when I eventually point an LLM at them.
- I'm a visual person, so screenshots and photos and videos and whatever other visual information, as much as possible.
1. https://obsidian.md with the Omnisearch plug-in.
The hack is that you can log more hours per day than everyone else to go faster. There's not a super secret to learning things. Study, deliberate practice, and doing the thing.
1, I have the belief that I can understand the material. This is the most important part because if you do not believe you can understand the material then you will always fail to understand the material. If you do not have this, figure out why and address that first.
2, I will suck on a mint, since I was told as a child that sucking on a mint dilates the blood vessels in your head and gets more oxygen to your brain, more brain blood, more brain power, right? Honestly, though, it's more helpful for cram sessions and tests for some reason. If you're casually learning you can skip this.
3, Revisit the material a day or two later, especially if you had difficulty with it. This showed its hand in college maths a lot. I would fight for half an hour on a difficult problem at first, then come back two days later and try a similar problem and kill it in 5 minutes. Something about it being harder to carve a new line into a rock than to retrace it after the fact.
Doing this solidifies confidence in the new thing that you have learned.
4, After I have read and revisited the material, I will tell what I have learned to an imaginary child me as though I am teaching them what I have learned. If you can't teach it, you don't understand it.
Seems to work pretty well.