
How do you extract the most possible value from a book? - Jakkaps
Reading non-fiction, I&#x27;ve often found that I forget or don&#x27;t apply anything I read.<p>Apart from trying harder, do you have any strategies to extract the most possible value from a book?
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laurentl
I find that re-reading the books help. For instance, it wasn’t until my 3rd
read of _The Goal_ that I felt as if I completely understood the underlying
themes.

As others mentioned, being able to relate to the content of the book helps
immensely. For instance when reading _The Innovator’s Dilemma_ I kept finding
parallels to my previous industry and company. This struck me so much that I
can list most of the content of the book simply by thinking back to those
insights.

As a last note, non-fiction books are seldom gripping. Reading a few pages
before going to sleep doesn’t cut it for me, words zip past my eyeballs
without hitting the brain. I need to actively focus on the content, much more
so than when reading fiction. I try to force myself to pause and actively
think about the content every few paragraphs: does it make sense? Can I follow
the logic of the argument? Does it resonate with my experience? It’s the only
way for me to actually get anything lasting out of the book.

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HNLurker2
You can try Reedy for fiction. You can easily read because the words move by
themselves (200 WPM is great)

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shoo
Read books with ideas you can apply, and use the ideas in practice. Don't read
books that you cannot directly apply to something, that's consuming input
without producing output. (I quite enjoy reading, and happily read books that
I cannot apply, but this is not "efficient"...)

Value extracted, and even the best way to extract value from a book, will be
heavily context dependent. E.g, here's a wildly contrived example: If you are
trapped in a hut in a snowstorm you may be able to extract considerable value
from a trashy novel or physics textbook in your backpack by tearing it apart
to use as kindling.

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xtagon
Everyone's different, but something that helps me is deliberately testing
myself after reading a passage or chapter that taught me something I didn't
already know. Literally take your eye gaze away from the page and try to
recall, summarize, and answer a question about what you just read.

It's one of those things that sounds too simple to be effective, but it works
for me.

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mbrock
I like to kind of live with books rather than read them linearly. So I might
go and read a chapter from a book. I consider them resources. That’s why I
deeply appreciate a good table of contents; they were better in the past.

Check out “How to Read a Book”, too. It presents book reading in quite a
different way than you might be used to. The book as an object that you
investigate almost like a strange beetle or a transistor radio—to learn how it
works.

Most nonfiction books “do something” in the way that a program does something.
There’s a main purpose and a lot of subroutines and maybe some boilerplate and
repetition. It’s not as linear as you might think either. And they’re embedded
in a web of references. It’s very interesting to think about how you actually
use a book in your life...

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brudgers
Entertainment and/or fulfillment is most of the value in most books. Whether
or not a book contains directly actionable information is mostly dependent on
what you are trying to do. For example, a book about Kubernetes is only
directly actionable when working with Kubernetes. At random, a human being is
unlikely to use Kubernetes. So a book on Kubernetes usually doesn't contain
any actionable information.

Suppose you read a book on Kubernetes today. You don't use Kubernetes. So you
read it just because you are curious. That's the value of most books. If three
years from now you start using Kubernetes then the book suddenly becomes
directly actionable.

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nlawalker
Try _longer_. Don't read a book with the assumption that you will derive value
from it in the amount of time it takes to simply read all of the words start
to finish. You will need to try examples, re-read sections, skip around, ask
questions of others, find other sources, etc.

Sometimes it would be nice if life was more like an RPG - reading a book means
a few hours ticks by and then you get +1 to your skill of choice - but
unfortunately it's not that easy :)

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arleny
The common strategies that you'll find people do are:

\- take notes in margins

\- phrase what you read in your own words

\- think critically about what you read

But for me, I extract the most value when I discuss what I read with others.
Not only does it provide more motivation for reading but I also find myself
with a lot more insight after a conversation with a friend about what we just
read.

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HNLurker2
>think critically about what you read

Avoid cognitive ease by reading it tilted 30 degrees.

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Rainymood
Try to take a single element from that book and implement it in real life.

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jonsen
Obligatory ref.:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book)

