Reading Books is a Bad Way to Learn

I read a lot, so it feels strange to say this, but reading books is a poor way to actually learn something. Exposure to ideas is not the same as living them.

In this one I lay out how I think about learning, and why a book only earns its keep once you already have a framework to hang it on. Read without that, and you finish the book having met the ideas but changed nothing.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

So, what I want to talk about today is this idea of learning things. And I want you by the end of this short talk to come away realizing that you probably and I mean this nicely, suck at learning things. Um and this has nothing to do with intelligence. It has nothing to do with your talents and gifts. And and you know what? I'm sure you have learned things really well in the past. I'm not really talking about those things. I'm just talking about your approach to learning in general is lacking, right? I'm sure that throughout your life there have been things that you've been passionate about and you've studied and you've spent the time doing. I'm sure that there have been things like that. Maybe you know how to play an instrument. Maybe you're very knowledgeable about XYZ subject. Maybe you're you're an expert on a certain language, uh, right? Who knows? I'm sure you are. And what happened is you got really into something, you were engaged, you found it fun, and you spent a lot of time learning it and you had a reason to learn it, right? Maybe you were living in a foreign country and you needed to learn a language to get by. Maybe you wanted to impress someone in high school, so you learned an instrument, guitar, something like that, right? There was a reason for it, and you spent time on it and you got good at it, and then you came away with this new competence, this new skill, and you told yourself you were a good learner. Right. Yes, we all have the capacity to learn things. That's amazing. My question is: if I told you that, let's like use Stoicism, for example, if I give you a Stoicism book and you read it and you thought that it was really, really, really good, and it was dense and 300 pages, and you really took your time, you read it properly, and then I asked you in a year from a year later from you reading the book, tell me about this principle. Like how how does it work? How does it relate to your life? What are the details around it? You m you would probably not know it, or if you did know it, I'd go, okay, cool. Now tell me about this principle on this other page. And you might, you might not know it, and I'd say, okay, cool, now tell me about this other principle on this other page. And sooner or later you discover that your understanding and comprehension of that book was a lot less than you realized. So think of it like this: Imagine a stoicism book that has 500 useful bits of information in there. When you read the book, what's getting flagged up in your RAS, your reticular activation system, which is like a fancy Tony Robbins word for the things that have value in your environment. For example, if you're really hungry and a plate and a plate of food comes by you, your RAS reticular activation system will zone in on this because it has value. Likewise, if you want to say stay very safe and someone walks into the room with a weapon, your reticular activation system will zone in on this because it has value to you. You you want to remain safe, you want to recognize threat, and so your RAS will zone in on it. Well, likewise, when you're reading a book, you're reading it because you want information to change your life. So your reticular activation system is finding the bits of information that are the most useful to you and the most and and not just the most useful, the easiest to implement based on your current situation and personality. And so you'll zone in on those and flag them as red, as as as significant, as important, and then you'll try to implement them to varying degrees of success. Some you'll implement, some you won't. And perhaps there are three to five bits out of those 500 bits that you've implemented, integrated, and now you read the next book. So reading books does change your life. It does improve your life, it does transform you three to five bits at a time. But my question is, what if a book has got 500 bits? Are you just going to neglect the other 495 bits of information because of some arbitrary reason, like I want to read a new book? Well, my approach to reading is that yes, you should approach books like blog posts, in the sense that if so if you want to skim certain sections, do it. If you want to highlight certain sections, do it, right? Like don't make books some kind of romantic sacred thing, um because ultimately they are just tools and you should use them as you see fit. But likewise, I do think that in the same way that you can view books like blog articles, you can also view books actually like sacred, magnificent Bibles that deserve to be understood and devoured and integrated fully, and all five hundred bits need to be implemented as part of who you are. And in which case, if that happens, if you discover a book like that, do you really know what to do? Like, do you actually know what to do with such a book? Or do you just reread it? Because rereading, highlighting, and taking notes, studies have found that that is actually not an efficient way to study. A much better scientifically proven way to study and learn is active recall and space repetition. Those are the big ones. Active recall means using brain power, using cognitive effort to try and recall things that you've learned, even if it causes frustration and difficulty. Like imagine like uh a kid who's trying to sing a nursery rhyme or something, and the parent is giving all the lyrics every time the child forgets, right? It's like the child gets stuck a little bit, the parent comes in. Now this is this is the answer. If the parent really cared about the child learning the nursery rhyme, they'd let the child get a little bit frustrated and try to remember, even if the child failed a little bit before coming in and helping them. It's that it's in that trying to remember that things get encoded into your memory. So, where does this relate back to stoicism? Well, it's quite simple. When you read a book, a stoicism book, or one of my blog posts on stoicism, it's very easy to look at it, go, oh yeah, that's a cool idea. Maybe I'll try doing that today, and then you just move on and wait for the next newsletter. Maybe this very podcast that you're listening to now is like that too, where you kind of go, oh yeah, and that's an interesting idea. But how will you actually implement it? And what you need to do is active recall and spaced repetition. So what that means is you as much as you can have to give yourself a break from the content. And then later on, whether that be in a day, two days, a week, a month, ideally all of those time frames, hence the spaced repetition, you try to remember and you don't allow yourself the easy, quick look back at your notes. So you can tell a friend, hey, there's something I want to tell you about. This is really cool. I discovered this the other day, and you spend two to three minutes teaching them about some principle. Like you can teach them about the learning methods that you're learning about here. If you learn a stoic principle, you can have a break from it, then try your best to explain that to a friend, or journal about it, or talk to a wall about it, or just think about it and don't give yourself the answer. Then you go back to your notes, then you go back to the book or the source or the podcast, and then you see how you did, and then you grade yourself between like one and ten. And if you, you know, if you score seven out of ten, then cool, you don't need to do it again, or maybe you do it again a week or two later. This may seem like a a long-winded way to learn, but I would say that the idea of finding a book that has 500 bits of information that you think are useful when you read them, and then just like forgetting all of those is much worse than the little bit of effort that this takes. And maybe there aren't 500 bits. Maybe you read a book and there are just like a hundred things you want to remember from that book. Make a spreadsheet, make a list of those things. Make some notes underneath them. That can be your active recall area where you just think of the prompt. Okay, this topic, okay. How was Stoicism founded? Hmm. All right, uh, how was Stoicism founded? I can't really remember, but I'm gonna try and remember and just think about it and think of all the details now for like a few minutes, and then I'm gonna go back and look at my notes. Oh, I missed this, I missed this, I missed this, I missed this, but I remembered that, that, that. All right, next time I'm gonna try and remember those things I missed. And that's how it works. So I'd encourage you to just take this perspective of deep learning and to view books as, you know, two things. Like books can be like blog articles, which you skim, you look at, you throw away. But then also books can be genuinely this gold mine of wisdom, in which case you want to have the tools and processes to be able to excavate that those gems. So thanks for listening, and I'll see you soon, fate permitting.