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by Roberto Zoia

Three Ideas to Improve Your Reading

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For several years, as part of my end-of-year review, I take a look at my reading1 and make plans for the year to come. I’ve written down some ideas from my process that you may find useful. Of course, most of the advice is not originally mine: I learned about these ideas by reading about how some giants –call them virtual mentors if you like– do their learning.

1. Have a list of the books you want to read this year

Compiling a list of the books you want to read during the year has several benefits. Taking the time to build a reading list is a signal to yourself of the importance you give to reading and more in general to gaining knowledge.

As soon as you start adding books to your list, you’ll soon realize that the number of books you can read in a year is finite. You will need to prune your list, which at least in my case is a painful process. But it’s absolutely necessary. Not only will it help you make the best use of your time. Sending books to a not-this-year list will also force you to think and gain clarity about what topics you really care about.

The list will also help you avoid falling to the song of the sirens and pick the latest and shiny book you learned about some days ago. When you finish reading a book, you just look at your curated list of books and decide what’s next. Of course this doesn’t mean that your list must be cast in iron. But it should be a clear guide of where are you investing your time (and money).

While in the process of deciding what to read, book recommendations can be of great help. There are a lot of sources for this, you’ll find some ideas at the end of this article.

2. Have a system in place so you read every day

One of the best tactics I’ve found is Shane Parrish’s advice of reading 25 pages every day. If you are reading just for the pleasure of reading, keeping track of the pages you read every day may seem anticlimatic to you. But if you read to gain knowledge, and like most humans are bound to time constraints, then reading 25 pages per day will help you achieve a reasonable pace and read on average three books every two months].

It also helps to block a specific time on for reading in your calendar2. Best if it’s at the same time of the day. This will help you build the habit of reading3, it will help you focus faster on what you are reading. If for whatever reason you break your reading chain and miss reading some days, try to restart your routine as soon as posible.

Few things are as rewarding as making friends with the eminent dead. Reading isn’t something to be done once a week to check a box; it’s something to do every day. —Shane Parrish

3. Connecting the dots

We live in an age where finding information is not a problem. Connecting ideas and coming up with new ones, however, does not happen just by collecting information. Although for 2019 I’ve set a reading goal that is challenging for me, if I have to sacrifice the number of books I read to gain deeper understanding of a topic, so be it. That’s one of the reasons of why I’m not into fast reading techniques, or use executive summaries of books.

Learning how to take better notes, and anything that helps you grow a “second brain” is something you should always be interested in.

In my case, in my reading process I make heavy use of highlights and notes. After finishing a book, I reread the notes and highlights and incorporate them into my knowledge system. This is process is time consuming, but is totally worth it.

4. (Bonus) Where to find books

There are lots of resouces that can help you find good titles to read. Depending on the topics you are interested in, you may find the following list useful.

  • The book review section of The Gates Notes, Bill Gates’ personal page. Bill Gates is a long time avid reader, and writes reviews of the books he finds interesting.
  • Brainpickings. Maria Popova started Brainpickings this living monument to intellectual hunger for cross-disciplinary curiosity and self-directed learning in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friend.
  • Taylor Pearson’s newsletter. Taylor is author of The End of Jobs, and writes about innovation, productivity, and the blockchain. Once a month he sends an email titled_Favorite Books, Articles, and Quotes_to his subscribers. You can also check his book notes.
  • Farnam’s Street Blog, by Shane Parrish.
  • Ryan Holliday’s Reading List and Favorite Read List for every year. Ryan is a writer and media strategist, author of several bestsellers about marketing, culture, and the human condition.
  • Derek Sivers notes to more than 250 books.

You don’t have to agree with me about the importance of reading. People may have different priorities and motivation. However, we live in an age where self-learning becomes more relevant every day. As less people read books, reading becomes a real competitive advantage. It’s a very effective way of standing on the shoulders of giants.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash.

  1. The results for 2018 are mixed. On one hand, I read some very good books, three of which stand out: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval N. Harari; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson; and Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. On the other hand, because I didn’t stick to my reading routine, I read less books than the previous year. Non-fiction reading gets a space in my calendar. It’s a more conscious reading. Novels, I read them on my spare time, like before going to sleep. ↩
  2. In my case, if something is not in my calendar, it has a 99% percent probability it won’t get done. ↩
  3. Resolutions or goals without habits to support them are most likely to fail in short time. The exception may be situations where emotions about the resolution are strong enough to amass enough will to cross the dip and begin forming an habit. ↩

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssonk

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I recently finished reading It doesn’t have to be crazy at work, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson1. Jason and David are the co-founders of Basecamp, a project manager/real-time collaboration tool.

I liked the book very much. The argument is what the title says: it doesn’t have to be crazy at work for a company to be profitable and successful. It doesn’t have to be crazy for you if you are the founder/owner, and if doesn’t have to be crazy for you if you are an employee. Your work should not be equal to your life, and you shouldn’t expect it from your employees.

For context, Basecamp was founded 19 years ago. They’ve been profitable from month one and continue to grow their customer base every year. Although they’ve been contacted in the past by several VC firms, the only external founding they’ve accepted was a minority, no-control stake from Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos in 2006 2. They are not a public company, and don’t want to be one. They don’t have a CFO, not even a full-time accountant. Basecamp is on Forbes’ list of America’s Best Small Companies 2017. According to Forbes, this 60 employee company has an annual revenue of $25M.

I specially like their view on employees’ benefits3.

(…) we look at benefits as a way to help people get away from work and lead healthier, more interesting lives. Benefits that actually benefit them, not the company. Although the company clearly benefits, too, from having healthier, more interesting, well-rested workers.

Not a single benefit is aimed at trapping people at the office. Not a single benefit that would make someone prefer to be at work rather than at home. Not a single benefit that puts work ahead of life. Instead, plenty of reasons to close the laptop at a reasonable time so that there’s time to learn, cook, work out, and live life with family and friends. (p. 117-118)

If you are curious, you can check the Basecamp Employee Handbook.

The point of the book is not to adopt each practice as-is. As the authors say, what’s a best practice for one company is not necessarily so for others. That’s not the point of the book. The real question floating in the pages is: what is your company for?

Of course: be profitable, make money. But how much profit is enough, really?

  1. DHH is also known as the creator of the Rails framework for Ruby. In fact, Basecamp was the first Ruby on Rails app ever. ↩
  2. cfr  ↩
  3. Some of the benefits for Basecamp employees are, according to the book: fully paid vacations for everyone in the company up to $5,000 a year. Three-day weekends all summer. 30-day sabbaticals every three years. $1,000 per year continuing-education stipend you can use to learn anything non-work related. One monthly massage at an actual SPA, outside the office. $100 monthly fitness allowance. ↩

Finally, you can download your Kindle highlights

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I do most of my reading either on my Kindle device or on the Kindle app on my laptop. Highlighting and adding notes is an essential part of my reading process. It somehow replaces the marking of paragraphs and jotting down of annotations some people do when reading a physical book.

The Kindle app for MacOs has always been consistently bad. Particularly annoying was the fact that in order to download your highlights and notes, you had to rely on applications like clippings.io because Amazon didn’t support either functionality.

It’s incredible that such a basic feature had not been implemented by Amazon until now. Amazon’s latest Kindle app version not only let’s you review your highlights and notes side by side with the book, but also let’s you download them.

Screenshot 2018-12-11 22.29.08

Without doubt, your are Facebook’s product

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Ted Kramer is the founder of Six4Three, a company that relied on Facebook granting access to their users’ friends data for their business model to work. His company has an ongoing lawsuit with Facebook because of a policy change in 2014 that cut Kramer’s app access to that information.

Sue Halpern, writing for The Newyorker about Facebook, comments on some of Facebook’s internal documents that Kramer turned over to the British Parliament and were made public shortly afterwards:

The two hundred and fifty pages of internal Facebook documents show, irrefutably, that the company did indeed whitelist a number of lucrative business partners, including Netflix, Lyft, and Airbnb, allowing them continued and unfettered access to the accounts of Facebook users and their friends after the company claimed that it had stopped the practice.

And did you know that if you are an Android user, Facebook recorded your text messages and your call logs?

The documents also reveal that, in 2015, a permissions update for Android devices, which users were required to accept, included a feature that continuously uploaded text messages and call logs to Facebook.

I don’t know how deep is Zuckerberg involved in all this. Most of the time, he denies the facts. The CEO of a company, however, cannot not claim ‘not to know’ such things as their flagship app collecting their user’s text messages, or big advertisers being granted privileged access to user’s data. A CEO is not judged by his ‘good intentions’, but by his actions.

Kill Process

Coincidentaly, some days ago I finished reading William Hertling‘s novel Kill Process, a fictionary story about Tomo, the world’s largest Social Media company. Although all characters are fictional, you can’t stop associating Tomo with Facebook.

Hertling goes deep to describe Tomo’s monetarization practices, which are all frighteningly plausible. Angie, Kill Process’ main character and one of Tomo’s first employees, no longer feels comfortable working for Tomo. She realizes that even if the company she works for has been severly questioned for their use and monetarization of user’s data, Tomo has a lock-in on their users:

Data ownership is a big deal. Users stay on Tomo, even when they hate us, because their friends are here. If they want to remain in contact with their friends, they’re stuck with us. Everyone is jointly locked in together.

I don’t think we are there yet. Facebook doesn’t have such a lock in on their users… yet. One thing is for sure, however: for Facebook you not only are the product, but a very lucrative one.

Update 2018-12-10: Another look at how creepy has Facebook become.

The Future of Education

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Seth Godin recently shared the audio version of Stop Stealing Dreams in Akimbo, his weekly podcast. Next, he dedicated a whole episode to answering questions, mostly about education, and then recorded a third podcast provocately titled “Getting in (to a famous college)”.

Maybe you are a parent and have kids that go to school. Maybe you are a teacher, or a student. For all of us, Education plays such a critical role in defining the future of society, that this topic should be relevant to everyone.

You may agree or not with Seth’s vision of education. That’s not the point. The point is to start a conversation, beginning with the question What is education for?

I hope you’ll find this content so thought-provoking as I do.

If you like, you can grab the PDF version of Stop Stealing Dreams, or watch it on video.

Zettelkasten, a method for note-taking

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Having a repository for the things you learn is more relevant than ever. Facts can be easily checked using the internet. However, the process of connecting ideas, and formulating relevant questions, comes from deep reading and reflection.

Last weekend I discovered a method for note-taking called Zettelkasten. This method was devised by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who used it as an aid in his research throughout his life1. For context, during his life Luhmann published more than 70 books and 400 scholarly articles on various subjects. Luhmann referred to his Zettelkästen as his zweites Gehirn, his second brain2.

Most of the things I’ve learned about Zettelkästen comes from the excellent zettelkasten.de website by Christian Tietze and Sascha Fast. At first, I thought about buying Sascha Fast’s book Die Zettelkasgtenmethode to learn the method. But alas, there’s no ebook version available. Having it shipped to Peru, aside of time issues, almost doubles the price of the book. So I resorted to reading enough of the articles on the website to gain a working knowledge of Zettelkasten.

A Repository for Knowledge

The basic idea behind Zettelkasten is to build a repository of the knowledge you gain through the years. The idea is similar to what Paul Jun, of Creative Mastery, writes about keeping a Commonplace Book, or Ryan Holiday’s notecard system. Zettelkasten adds the powerful idea of linking notes to create a web of interlinked knowledge.

I’ve been taking notes of what I read for years, first on index cards, then Filemaker, then Evernote and, more recently, using Bear. After a couple of days of appying some of the concepts of Zettelkasten, I’m really impressed in how my understanding of what I read has improved, and more important, the consistency of the system.

Instead of explaining the technique by itself, I’ll describe how I’ve incorporated it into my reading workflow.

I read most of my books on the Kindle, either using the physical device or the MacOs app on my laptop. While reading, I highlight paragraphs as I see fit, and add notes using the corresponding feature on the Kindle.

Later, on the Kindle app on my laptop, I process the highlighted paragraphs and notes. I copy each highlighted paragraph to Bear, using a separate note for each concept. (Zettelkasten refers to this as atomicity.) Each note is given a unique identifier and an appropriate title3.

Each note is also given tags for classification. Good tagging helps with accuracy when searching. The method’s recommendation is to use tags for objects, and not for subjects4. In the same note, I write down the ideas I had in mind when highlighting the paragraph, or any connection that comes to mind during this process.

Context notes are used as a map to a series of notes. A context note that outlines a more complex concept or broader subject, using links to other notes in the process. For example, while I’m reading a book, I build an outline of the things I find relevant, based on my highlights and notes of the book. Each of the outline’s items links to a separate note explaining the idea in more detail, and usually contains the highlighted text of the book.

While this process takes more time, it helps with understanding what you read at a different level, and making connection with other concepts and ideas. I’m interested in reading more books, but not if it goes against comprehension.

  1. I’m not writing to endorse Luhman’s sociology theories, because I don’t know anything about them. This article is about his note-taking method. ↩
  2. cfr Ein Zettelkasten war Lumens zweites Gehirn. ↩
  3. I’m using the recommended format in the Zettelkasten.de site of date-time to create a unique identifier. For example, 20181113131025 for a note created on 2018-11-13 at 13:10:25. (I actually use TextExpander to create the ID automatically.) The note title becomes then “20181113131025 Cultural assimilation in empires” instead of “Cultural assimilation in empires”. This ensures that each note is uniquely identified. ↩
  4. Check this article by Sacha Tietze for some insights on how to use tags effectively: The Difference Between Good Tags and Bad Tags. ↩

Featured image photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.