Newsletter No. 5

CJ Chilvers and I emailed back and forth briefly. I have been reading CJ’s newsletter for many years. I find newsletters to be an engaging medium, partly because the subscriber has made a tacit choice in subscribing, and partly because the writer knows their’s audience’s intention and wants to make it count.

CJ send me a link to Mike Crittenden’s blog post about writing 5x more but 5x less. This advice was poignant. I tend to write on and on, tackling evermore large topics. Nothing wrong in writing longer text. However, unelss you write full-time, you produce long articles infrequently. Writing infrequently prevents formation of the habit of writing and sharing.

Austin Kleon further makes this point in his book Show Your Work. Writing longer means you show less work.

Another benefit of writing shorter — the brevity invariably leave gaps in the idea. These gaps are essential in growing ideas. Itay Talgam makes this case in his book The Ignorant Maestro and also in this very popular TED Talk on Leadership.

With this I posted five articles last week. This is a new habit for me and one I am hoping to stick with all year.

2021 In Review

Here I got into what worked and what didn’t last year. 2021 was a challenging but illuminating year.

Books I Read in December

I list the books I read in December. I had 10 days off from work which allowed me to finish six books, one of which was 530 pages excluding index and notes!

My Reading Habit

I have started reading more and this post explains how I am trying to do this. I am hoping this is a habit that will grow and morph this year. Just last week I finished two books but I lost harmony between reading and understanding.

Fleeting Notes

I go into the first step of understanding when I read books. Understanding gives meaning. Or else reading regresses into watching mindless TV.

Literature Notes

This is the second step of understanding. Writing Literature Notes is like re-reading the important parts of the book well enough to be able to explain it to someone!

I am traveling for work next week. This will be a good chance to practice reading in a very distracting and noisy environment of airport gates and airplanes. If I can be successful in reading on a plane, I will treat myself to a pair of noise-cancelling headphones!

Literature Notes

I talked about Fleeting Notes earlier.

Next step is Literature Notes.

This is like a book report but not exactly.

Literature notes are brief paragraphs on the ideas that caught my attention as I read a non-fiction book. I’ve already captured these ideas in Fleeting Notes. Now is the time to understand them.

I open up the notepad with fleeting notes, and the book, and start writing literature notes. The key here is I must write in my own words.

Sometimes I supplement my literature notes with a scan of the text from the book showing it in quotations. This is an easy reference for complex ideas. I can always grab the book from the shelf. I use the scan text feature on my iPhone.

The idea here is for me to revisit all relevant ideas from the book in one place and in my own words. This is understanding. Learning comes from understanding, not the other way around.

I grant it, this is more work on top of reading. Cal Newport is right — he claims on his podcast that this method requires a lot of time. To me, writing literature notes on a non-fiction book feels like completion. If I just read a book and put it on the shelf, I feel that I am leaving something incomplete in the process of reading.

Literature Notes is neither about speed or efficiency. I am probably not going to turn these notes into academic papers or published books like Niklas Luhmann did and many others do. Literature Notes to me is about depth. It is putting down roots into ideas and cultivating them.

More on this topic in book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

Fleeting Notes

If I am going to devote a lot of time reading a book, I want to remember what caught my attention. This is my way to honoring the attention I give, by capturing ideas in the book that provide an attachment-point for my attention.

Attention comes from the latin word Tenere which means to stretch and make tense (via Matt Crawford The World Beyond Your Head).

So I take notes as I read.

• I read with a notepad and pencil by my side
• I mark the books with a pencil — underline or double vertical lines in the margin
• This is key — I don’t mark sections that don’t interest me and only mark those ideas make my eyes go wide. My job is not to write a book summary, but to distill those ideas that provide a robust-enough attachment point.
• I note the page number on a note pad and the name of the idea, just a few words
• Sometimes I will quickly jot down a connecting thought or story that surfaced so I can explore it later

Once I finish reading, I will use the Fleeting Notes as a prompt to write Literature Notes, more on this another day.

I find this incredibly helpful when I pick up the book after a few days break — a quick refresher of the ideas that caught my eye.

Writing by hand is found to increase retention in a study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer in 2014.

How do you read non-fiction?

More on this topic in book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens