A lot of people read, watch tv, browse online, huge amounts of info a day. They remember maybe 1% of it for a week, then that’s mostly gone. They read a how-to article on something very useful; they don’t do the exercises, they think “hmm, that’s cool, good thing I learnt that.” It’s faulty thinking. It’s a feel-good movement. It’s basically; they read something, they feel good that they “learnt” such a useful skill, then they do nothing with it and it’s gone into the void.
To really absorb useful things you read each day, you should have a commonplace. A book that holds things you wish to remember. Don’t force yourself every time you read an article or see a news report to write something down about it. But whenever something contains useful information, actionable information;write it down. Act on it. Memorize it using memory techniques.
Pure information gathering is useless. Pure memorization of that information is useless. Gathering esoteric information, being minimalistic and selfish with your information gathering, memorizing that information, and then acting like crazy on it is the only way to successfully use what you read every day.
Concurred. I too have long argued that it’s much more valuable to remember and apply just 1 thing from a book (or podcast or article or whatever) than to read 500 things in 3 different books and apply nothing.
I totally agree! Jim Rohn originally inspired me to keep track of all the massive daily input/insights we get from books, movies, interactions, … First I started out writing into a regular journal but I transitioned into building a big “growth mindmap”, collecting all the data and insights into simple branches and categories.
For example, subbranches like:
Routines → Meditate, Read min. 1 Page, Memorize min. 1 Info, Journal, … (with check - mark buttons)
Rumburak, I haven’t heard of Jim Rohn before. You’ve given me some ideas however. For example, usually using mindmaps on paper doesn’t really work for me, since I run out of space in places, and in others have way too much. Reading what you wrote though gave me the idea of just having equal spacing and “linking” to a page that stores extra information about a sub-branch(ie: → pg 78).
Glad to hear you found SGM useful as well. It’s in my humble opinion the best actionable self-development blog out there. Just one article from it can change your life completely if you actually apply it to its full extent.
Bateman
PS. This was really just a quick forum thread, I read or heard something that got me thinking deeply, and 3-4 minutes later I finished the post. Not premeditated at all.
Right, I had the same experience with paper. I’m using Mindjet MindManager - probably not the best software out there but I got so used to it already. Basically, I store almost all information in one big map, embedding Excell sheets, Word files, alerts, tags, folder- & hyperlinks, etc. in individual branches.
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Before, I toyed with Evernote and OneNote but it turned out to be messy for my personal taste - In a mind map all info is extremely compact, easy to find, sort, and each bit of info is quickly accessible.
For passwords and projects I got separate maps, but are linked to from the main map.
Cheers, I will read through that in a bit.
The fasting articles are very intriguing! That would safe me a ton of time with eating, cooking, getting an empty stomach for meditation & exercise, … New info already filed in Commonplace
Onenote is vastly superior to Evernote. They’re technically very similar, but they are also worlds apart. There’s just something about the ease of Onenote. The books, sections and pages. So organized, so beautifully organized. You can write with anything, and anywhere on the page. Insert screenshots, entire blog posts, anything you want. And really; so organized. It’s like that image you posted, to an even greater level of detail; on the final level(ie: meditate- 2 min) you can write a huge amount of information about that topic.
Now that’s what I like to hear. Not ‘oh it’s cool, great post Bateman’, then forget about it a minute later, but storing it, having access to it, reviewing it, and applying it.
Sorry for digging out this old post, but I’m wondering if anyone has a good system in place for reading retention with eReaders.
It feels painfully slow to browse through an ebook to create a summary and it’s hard to get the information to a commonplace as I can’t copy paste it. Also I find it somehow hard to engage in a conversation with the author by adding notes and questions as this does not feel naturally to me on a tablet.
Do you prefer real books, or what’s your take on this from a memory retention point of view?
I definitely prefer paper books. Linux has a couple of programs that allow highlighting PDFs but I haven’t put them to use yet. On Kindle, you can highlight notes and then export them, but it’s restrictive.
