i love to read on average i'd say i read about one book per week and one of the main reasons why i love to read is because i want to live a better healthier and more productive life and having read over 100 books in the last three or so years i've discovered that most of the information that i actually consume from books i forget and i really only remember a fraction of that information and then only a smaller fraction of that i put into practice but across the board if you look at relatively successful people
a lot of them swear by the fact that books really had a big impact in their success so what am i missing what do i remember so little of what i read and then apply even less of that information now plenty of scientific studies have shown that remembering information often is highly correlated with how much you interact with that information so one of the main reasons why we forget things that we read is just because we don't really interact with it properly however the more interaction you have with information the better you're going to remember
one common example that many people know from studying is that if you hand write notes you're more likely to remember it than you if you type it out because handwriting is more of an interactive experience and so in order to help ensure that i'm not wasting all my time reading all these books and then learning very little practical information i've started using a system that increases my interaction with books exponentially and i've noticed a definite increase in the amount of information that i remember as well as the information that i then go and actually utilize
in my day-to-day life i'm gonna share that system that i've been using with you in today's video so this system that i use utilizes three steps the first step is highlighting the second step is collating and the third step is expanding i used to do none of these three steps or maybe maybe the first step a little bit but definitely i found using all three steps yields the best results when it comes to remembering and applying information and full disclosure i got this system basically from ali abdull one of his newest videos so if you
haven't seen that feel free to go and check it out i basically just use this system and then modified it slightly to suit me better and if you're interested in seeing that video i'll leave a link in the description so step number one highlighting so this step is basically one step above just reading and consuming the book and then putting it down if you're just reading a book like that you're not really interacting with the content in the book other than just taking it in but when you start to highlight things you're actually beginning to
really engage with the content more than just consuming it now of course there's many different ways or methods in terms of highlighting or things that you might like to highlight but for me i just highlight things that really resonate with me or things that i want to take note of or apply in my own life so i highlight using various methods depending on how i'm reading my book if i'm on my kindle i'll just use the highlight feature to select lines or passages that really mean something to me this is also really handy as all
the highlights you take on a kindle can be synced to your goodreads account which makes it easy to access all your highlights in one place if i'm in a physical book i usually underline and take note of the page number with a comment in the back section of the book and then if i'm listening to an audio book i try to just take quick notes on my notes app on my iphone however the issue with highlighting is that although you're beginning to actually engage with the content more you're still likely to just forget it because
once you've highlighted it and thought about it for a few minutes or even a few seconds you'll just forget it again which brings us to the second step which is collating so in step two we begin to collate those highlights and bits of information that we've taken and put them into one central location and for me that is notion now i've been using notion for a little while now if you're not familiar with it it's kind of like a note tagging app that has a lot more features and flexibility if you're interested in finding out
more about notion let me know and i might make some more videos on in the future but in the meantime there's heaps of notion videos all across youtube so just searching in the youtube search and you'll definitely find some great videos on it alright so here we are inside notion and this is my book notes page and inside the booknotes page i've got a database so again if you want more information on databases within notion just feel free to youtube search for it or i might put some uh videos out in the future on notion
but basically kind of just think about it like an excel spreadsheet where you can input any information that you want so all you have to do if you want to put in a new book note just go new and then i have a template that i actually got from ali abdul once again so i choose fiction or non-fiction so most of the books that i read are non-fiction so we just select nonfiction [Music] and then it populates with a bunch of different things that i can take notes on in relation to the book including impressions
how i discovered the book who should read it how the book changed me my top three quotes and then summary notes and this is kind of the main section in which i put all of my highlights so as an example we've got this book here the science of self-discipline this one i'm reading at the moment i haven't finished reading it yet so i'm taking some notes on it but i've entered the title the author the category some genres so i can make it more searchable in the future and then i've got my rating the date
i've finished obviously haven't finished it yet so i've put any date in there and then i've got my note status it's currently reading so then all i do in this step is just collate all of my highlights into this page on the book so i'll scroll down to the bottom to submarine notes and as you can see i've already got some highlights that i've copied and pasted into notion and all i need to do to get these notes in because i've been reading this book on kindle i'll go to my goodreads account and as you
can see i'm reading it here and it's got my notes and highlights synced which is super handy and then here you go i've got them all ready to go and so all i need to do is just select copy and then paste it in to notion and you can select turn into a quote and there you go you've got your highlight straight into notion and again you can just do the exact same thing with any notes that you might have taken down anywhere else like in the notes app for example or if you've had written
notes you could just type them straight into motion just like that so now i have all my notes into one location and i can easily move into the next step which is expanding so the final step is fairly self-explanatory and it basically just involves expanding on those highlights and notes that i've already taken further i rewrite highlights in my own words or i might just take some notes about how it applies to some situation in my day-to-day life i kind of think of it as basically a similar thing as to when you're studying for an
exam at school or uni you'll be reading through the textbook but you'll write your own notes in your own words to help you remember better so once again if we jump back into notion and go down to a book that i've already collated some highlights into which is the formula for building great volunteer teams good book i recommend so once again i've entered in all my information and i haven't done this part yet but i've started taking some notes as you can see i've started expanding on my highlights and pretty much like like i said
it's very similar to how you probably study you're just taking some notes on your own thoughts and putting into your own words and then sort of elaborating a bit more in terms of your own personal experience and your own life and then in addition to expanding on these highlights i'll also i'll show you an example so i read this autobiography of gandhi and i'll just fill out these other sections in the page so the book in three sentences helps me to summarize and sort of get a sense and feel of what the book was about
impressions so just how i feel about it just my overall sort of impression of what i thought of the book i've got some information on how i discovered it and then who i'd recommended it to basically goes under who should read it how the book changed me so i'll just talk about some points about how the book influenced me and maybe think differently or whatever that might be and then top three quotes which again in this particular book i don't have top three quotes and so when you have all that information expansion on the book
what you think of it as well as your highlights and notes it's a really cool way of collating and collecting all the information and your thoughts on all the different books you've read over time so this is the part where you're really starting to engage with the content that you've read rather than just passively consuming it which means you're much more likely to remember and apply it to your real life and one of the things i love so much about this is the fact that you can really start to synthesize the ideas from the book
that you're currently reading with other ideas that you already have or other ideas you've read in other books i love it when you can come up with kind of fresh or almost original ideas by combining two different ideas from separate books into the one thing and even just the process of relating ideas from one book to other ideas that you already hold helps you to really integrate it into your memory and your way of thinking and another big benefit of doing it this way is that you've got then a searchable database of information that you
can use in the future for all sorts of things you could use it just for helping you to remember content that you've read or you can use it in things like study or content creation or just for personal enjoyment so there you have it that's my system of taking notes and remembering things that i've read if you're interested in more videos on reading and books then i've got a whole playlist on reading so be sure to check that out i've got quite a few videos out on topics related to reading and i hope you found
today's video useful if you did leave me a like and if you're interested in more similar videos on similar sorts of topics then feel free to subscribe other than that thanks for watching guys and i'll see you very soon in the next video [Music] you
