How I Remember Everything I Read - Arshian - Ali Abdaal
dailymotion.com/arshian
How to guarantee you regret your life:https : //dai.ly/x93180y
My honest advice to a perfectionist:https : //dai.ly/x9319i4
My honest advice to someone who’s doing too much : https://dai.ly/x9319ty
My honest advice to someone who feels behind in life : https://dai.ly/x931a78
My honest advice to someone who wants financial freedom : https://dai.ly/x931ex2
If I Wanted to Be a Millionaire Before 30, I'd Do This : https://dai.ly/x931gzm
The Best Book I've Ever Read about Making Money : https://dai.ly/x931j9y
How to Go From $0 to $10,000 a Month in 4 Steps : https://dai.ly/x931kb6
How to Make $10,000 Month Writing Online : https://dai.ly/x931l42
How to 10x Your Income The 4 Ladders of Wealth : https://dai.ly/x931ldm
Why You Feel Lost in Life by Ali Abdaal : https://dai.ly/x933252
How to Figure Out What You Really Want in Life : https://dai.ly/x933hm8
How to Change your Life in a Year - 3 Simple Ideas : https://dai.ly/x933u78
dailymotion.com/arshian
How to guarantee you regret your life:https : //dai.ly/x93180y
My honest advice to a perfectionist:https : //dai.ly/x9319i4
My honest advice to someone who’s doing too much : https://dai.ly/x9319ty
My honest advice to someone who feels behind in life : https://dai.ly/x931a78
My honest advice to someone who wants financial freedom : https://dai.ly/x931ex2
If I Wanted to Be a Millionaire Before 30, I'd Do This : https://dai.ly/x931gzm
The Best Book I've Ever Read about Making Money : https://dai.ly/x931j9y
How to Go From $0 to $10,000 a Month in 4 Steps : https://dai.ly/x931kb6
How to Make $10,000 Month Writing Online : https://dai.ly/x931l42
How to 10x Your Income The 4 Ladders of Wealth : https://dai.ly/x931ldm
Why You Feel Lost in Life by Ali Abdaal : https://dai.ly/x933252
How to Figure Out What You Really Want in Life : https://dai.ly/x933hm8
How to Change your Life in a Year - 3 Simple Ideas : https://dai.ly/x933u78
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00In this video, I'm gonna take you through the seven levels
00:02along the journey
00:03of trying to remember everything that we read.
00:05Hey friends, welcome back to the channel.
00:07If you're new here, my name is Ali.
00:08I'm a doctor based in the UK,
00:09and on this channel, we explore the strategies and tools
00:11that help us live healthier, happier, more productive lives.
00:14And if you're anything like me
00:15and you're interested in personal development,
00:17lifelong learning, becoming a better thinker
00:19and all that stuff,
00:20you'll know that reading is a very important part of this.
00:22But if you're anything like me,
00:24you've read a lot of books,
00:25but you've probably forgotten the vast majority
00:27of the stuff that you've read
00:28and probably haven't applied it to your life
00:30in the way that you'd have liked.
00:31A few months ago,
00:32I realized that this was a big issue for me,
00:34and so I've been actively working to try and remedy it.
00:36And so in this video,
00:37I'm gonna share what I think are the seven levels
00:39along this path of trying to remember
00:41more of the stuff that we read and apply it to our lives.
00:43We start off our reading careers at level one, the muggle.
00:46This is basically where we read stuff,
00:47but we're just reading it.
00:49We're not highlighting it.
00:50We're not taking any notes.
00:50We're not really engaging with the material
00:52beyond just passively reading it.
00:54And when we're muggles
00:55and trying to learn about a new topic
00:57like entrepreneurship or whatever,
00:59we'll end up just reading loads and loads and loads
01:00and sort of hoping we're gonna passively absorb stuff
01:03by diffusion, by osmosis, whatever,
01:05but we're not like actively using any brain power
01:08to engage with it.
01:09This is fine if we're reading fiction,
01:10but for nonfiction, and when I read nonfiction,
01:12I kind of wanna get some insights from it.
01:14I wanna learn stuff.
01:14I'm a dumbass,
01:15and therefore I just forget everything that I read,
01:17and therefore this isn't good for me.
01:18And it's probably not just me
01:19because there is a phenomenon in memory research
01:21called the forgetting curve,
01:23which just shows that over time,
01:24our memory for everything decays
01:26unless we find a way to engage with it
01:27or consolidate our memory of the thing.
01:29At some point, we might realise
01:30that our muggle existence is pretty unfulfilling,
01:33and so we'll come across level two of the journey,
01:35which is the squib.
01:36And when you become a squib at level two,
01:38you're now reading stuff,
01:38but you are highlighting or underlining
01:40the things that particularly resonate with you.
01:42This is easy enough to do if you read on a Kindle
01:44or you can use one of these like old school things.
01:47I don't even know what they're called anymore
01:48because who even uses the stuff?
01:49And this is what I was doing
01:50since I first got a Kindle in around 2008, 2009,
01:53all the way through to 2018
01:55when I discovered that actually
01:56there were more levels along this path.
01:58And this is fine because highlighting stuff is kind of nice
02:00and it's kind of fun to use
02:01one of these old fashioned antique devices.
02:03But the problem with highlighting stuff is,
02:05A, we actually don't remember the stuff that we highlight,
02:08and there is a mountain of evidence
02:09that shows that highlighting or underlining
02:11does nothing to actually improve our memory of the stuff.
02:14And we also run into the issue
02:15that we've got all these highlights,
02:16but they're sort of hidden away inside our book
02:18or inside our Kindle,
02:18and we don't really have a reason to go through them.
02:20So that was me from 2008 all the way through to 2018.
02:23Those were the dark days.
02:25But then in September, 2018, I reached level three,
02:28which we're calling Hufflepuff.
02:29And level three Hufflepuff is when you have
02:31a systematic system for reviewing your highlights.
02:34So in September, 2018,
02:36I discovered this amazing service called Readwise,
02:38link in the video description.
02:39And what Readwise does is that it automatically connects
02:42to your Kindle account,
02:43and it pulls in all of the highlights you've ever highlighted
02:45from all the books that you've read.
02:47And what they do is that every day,
02:48they send you an email with five random highlights.
02:51So I started using Readwise in September, 2018,
02:53and I've been getting this email every day.
02:54And for the first few months,
02:56I was religiously reading this email,
02:58and I found, oh, wow,
02:59this thing that I highlighted five years ago
03:01is now very relevant to me today,
03:03and the Readwise email has surfaced it for me,
03:04which was really awesome.
03:05But over the last two years,
03:07I've kind of become less and less religious
03:09about reading my five daily things in the Readwise email.
03:12I still get it, I still open it from time to time,
03:14but it's a bit too passive for my liking.
03:16And that is when we get to level four.
03:18And we're calling level four Ravenclaw
03:19because I couldn't think of anything else,
03:21and I deeply apologise for playing into the stereotype.
03:23I didn't mean it, I'm woke, trust me.
03:25But level four is what I talked about in my video
03:26about the magical inside logging framework,
03:28which will be linked somewhere up here.
03:30And basically, this is a system
03:31whereby you automatically pull in your highlights
03:33into a central note-taking app.
03:35And so we can see here, I've got my Readwise database,
03:37which has all the books,
03:39and it shows all the highlights I've made in each one.
03:41So I can look at the books,
03:42and we can see I've got 126 highlights
03:44from Tools of Titans, all of which are gonna be in here.
03:47And it also links very nicely to the location,
03:49and it opens it up in the Kindle web app,
03:51if that's what I wanna look at.
03:52We also have articles over here.
03:53So this is taking all of my highlights from Instapaper.
03:56And we even have tweets.
03:58So these are tweets that I've saved to Readwise
03:59that are automatically coming into Notion.
04:01And we have podcasts.
04:02So this is podcast air quotes
04:04that I've taken through the app air.io.
04:05Again, a lot more details about the system
04:07in my magical inside logging framework video,
04:09which will be linked up there.
04:10And so this is level four.
04:11This is where we've got a tool
04:13that automatically pulls in our highlights.
04:14And because I use Notion
04:15for absolutely everything in my life, pretty much,
04:18it's all very convenient when it's sitting there.
04:20But level four is still a little bit problematic
04:22because this is still very passive.
04:23All we're doing at this point
04:25is we're bringing in highlights,
04:26and we're hoping that our future selves
04:28will at some point revisit the highlights
04:30just because we want to.
04:31And again, I've been doing this for a few months now,
04:33but I found that inevitably other things were coming up,
04:35and I was not finding the time or making the time
04:38to actively review the highlights of the stuff
04:40that I'd read in Notion.
04:41And this is where we start to get into the fun territory
04:43because now we have level five,
04:45which is Dumbledore's army.
04:46And when you're at level five or a member of the DA,
04:48you engage with books by taking quick notes
04:51on the stuff that you've read.
04:52Now, I'm gonna show you how I do this in Notion.
04:54So I've got this book notes database
04:56that has all of the books that I read,
04:58fiction and nonfiction.
04:59And for each of these categories, fiction and nonfiction,
05:02I've created templates that I use
05:03for my very quick book reviews.
05:06And so if I've just read a nonfiction book,
05:07I will put a nonfiction book template here.
05:10So it asks me to give the title of the book.
05:12I can select a genre.
05:14So let's say productivity, philosophy and magic, why not?
05:19And I can say the date that I finished it.
05:20Let's say that was today.
05:21And basically what this Notion template does
05:23is that it creates these categories for me.
05:25So firstly, the book in three sentences,
05:26impressions, how I discovered it, who should read it,
05:29how the book changed me,
05:30and my top three quotes from the book.
05:32So this is actually very quick.
05:33And this level, level five,
05:36is what I regret not doing
05:38with everything that I've ever read.
05:40Because if you can just summarize a book in three sentences,
05:43that's like a really fantastic way
05:45of actually engaging with the content.
05:46And as someone like Richard Feynman would say,
05:48it's a way of actively ensuring
05:50that you actually understand the concepts in the book.
05:52And so here are some notes that I took
05:53on Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.
05:55The book in three sentences,
05:56share your thoughts and your process
05:58and your work online for free.
05:59You don't need to be an expert to share your work.
06:01Beginners can easily help other beginners.
06:03And three, by sharing your work online,
06:04you'll attract an audience of people
06:06who care about the same stuff as you do,
06:07and this can change your life.
06:08So that was kind of my three sentence summary of the book.
06:12Then I've got impressions
06:13where I just sort of write subjectively
06:15what I thought about the book.
06:16I have who should read it.
06:18Occasionally, I have how I discovered the book,
06:20if I remember how I discovered it.
06:21And here are some notes on how the book changed me
06:23and my top three quotes.
06:24Now, the point of this system is that
06:27it does take a small amount of time to actually think about,
06:30but it's not a large amount of time.
06:31And like, I really wish that if I'd done this
06:33for every book that I've ever read,
06:35I know I'd, like today,
06:37I'd be infinitely more knowledgeable
06:38about all this stuff than I am,
06:40just because I just never considered
06:42engaging with the stuff.
06:43So level five is, I think, a good sweet spot
06:46between the amount of effort it takes to do this,
06:48i.e. it doesn't take that much effort,
06:50but I think it also gives you a lot of value
06:52where you can start summarising books in three sentences.
06:54And if we're doing it for fiction,
06:56this is what the template looks like for that.
06:57So we've got a section about what it's about,
07:00how I discovered it, general thoughts,
07:02and who would like it.
07:03So again, all of these templates
07:04are linked in the video description,
07:05so you can check it out.
07:06And if for some reason you don't yet have a Notion account,
07:08you should follow the link in the video description
07:10and get it for free.
07:11Notion is an absolutely amazing app
07:13that I've been using since early 2019.
07:15And it's fair to say that it's probably changed my life.
07:17I organise my entire life around it.
07:19I organise my whole business.
07:20I use it to take notes at medical school
07:22and to prepare for my medical exams.
07:24I use it to track my workouts.
07:25I use it to write book reviews.
07:26I use it to script all my videos and to work with my team.
07:29It's just got so many different use cases.
07:31And I've got tonnes of videos about Notion
07:32that'll be linked in the playlist over there.
07:34And best of all, it is completely free.
07:36You only pay if you're going for one of the team plans
07:38or if you need like additional bonus features.
07:40But most people can use Notion completely free of charge,
07:42basically for as long as you want.
07:44So hit the link in the video description
07:45if you haven't got a Notion account for whatever reason.
07:48And if you do,
07:49there'll be a link to my kind of book notes template-y thingy
07:51so you can duplicate that into your own Notion workspace.
07:54And then you can start taking notes from books,
07:56which will kind of get you to level five.
07:57But yeah, thanks Notion for sponsoring this video.
07:59Let's now move on to level six.
08:01And this is where we start to get really interesting
08:03because level six is the order of the phoenix.
08:05And the only difference between level five and level six
08:07is that in level six, you're still doing all of this stuff.
08:10You're still writing kind of book in three sentences,
08:12impressions, how it changed your life.
08:14But we also have a section for a summary
08:17and notes on the book itself.
08:19So what I'm trying to do with all of the books
08:22that have particularly resonated with me over the years,
08:24books that I would rate five stars
08:25or books that I think have changed my life,
08:27what I'm doing is I'm going through them again
08:29and I'm writing literature notes.
08:30I'm sort of creating my own mini summary of the book,
08:34but I'm focusing on the points
08:35that have particularly resonated with me
08:38or points that I found particularly interesting
08:39or insightful or surprising.
08:40And I think this is just a really great way
08:42of engaging with the book,
08:44but it does take absolutely ages.
08:46So for example, the other day,
08:47it was one o'clock in the morning
08:48and I was in bed and I couldn't sleep.
08:50So I got out my iPad Pro,
08:51I switched everything to dark mode
08:53and I had Kindle on one side of the screen
08:55and Notion on the other side of the screen.
08:56And I was taking literature notes from the E-Myth Revisited,
08:59which is a book about how to kind of build
09:01a small successful business.
09:03I first read, I think in July, 2019
09:05and that book completely blew my mind.
09:08And so I was revisiting it
09:09and relearning some of the lessons from it.
09:10And as I was doing that, I was taking my literature notes,
09:13I was sort of summarizing bits in my own notes.
09:15And although it took absolutely ages
09:17and I still haven't finished it,
09:18I'm still only halfway through the book,
09:19it's actually giving me a lot of new insights
09:22because it's so rare to find a book
09:23that's genuinely sort of actually life-changing.
09:26And so when you do like, or now when I do,
09:28I'm gonna make a point that I'm gonna write my own summary
09:31of this book so that I can really consolidate
09:33the points for me.
09:34There's a few things to keep in mind about this.
09:35So firstly, there's a very good book
09:37called How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Arends.
09:40And I've actually done my own summary of this.
09:41Yeah, here's a summary that I've done
09:42using the toggle feature in Notion
09:44where I've basically written like a whole load of stuff
09:46and even drawn my own diagrams and tables and things about,
09:49oh my goodness, there's quite a lot of stuff here.
09:51How many words is this?
09:52This summary plus some of the highlights is 6,851 words.
09:55So I've spent a very long time taking notes
09:57from this meta book called How to Take Smart Notes.
10:00But this is really good.
10:01And this book talks about
10:02the Zettelkasten method of note-taking,
10:05which is kind of what inspired this video.
10:08And sort of one level of this is as you're reading stuff,
10:10you're taking literature notes.
10:12But the idea of literature notes,
10:13like the summaries that we're making for ourselves,
10:15is that we want to avoid copying
10:16and pasting quotes from the book.
10:18We wanna actively try and rephrase things in our own words
10:21just to make sure that we understand the concepts.
10:22And the other benefit of taking your own book notes
10:24is that if you are interested in sharing your work online,
10:27you can actually publish your book notes.
10:28The first person I saw do this was Derek Sivers
10:30who I've been following since 2016
10:31and who featured in a deep dive on this channel,
10:33very kindly of him.
10:35And he's basically been taking these detailed notes
10:37on every book that he's read.
10:38And he's got like hundreds of these
10:40on his website at siver.rs.
10:41Again, that'll be linked in the video description.
10:43And also my new friend, Nat Eliasson,
10:45who again was featured on Deep Dive,
10:46has this amazing website.
10:48His blog generates six figures a year for him in revenue,
10:52maybe even more than that.
10:53And a big part of his most popular posts
10:56are his summaries, notes, and reviews
10:58from books that he's read.
11:00So this is kind of the level where I wanna get to
11:02where in the future on my website,
11:04alibdol.com forward slash book notes,
11:06you'll find all of these summaries of books.
11:09And I think this is just like an incredible resource.
11:10And if anyone's considering starting a personal blog
11:13or a website or a YouTube channel,
11:14taking notes from books is such a big value add
11:17because a lot of people don't have time to read
11:19or think they don't have time to read.
11:20And there are also so many good books out there
11:22that if you can act as the curator,
11:25someone like Nat or Derek or what I'm trying to do,
11:27if you can curate the best books,
11:29Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb, for example,
11:32he's got his notes on here.
11:33He's got a podcast episode about this.
11:34This is such good content.
11:35And this is the sort of stuff that really
11:37kind of helps you build your own brand
11:39as a sharer, as an educator.
11:41And it's just a pretty fun thing to do.
11:42So this is where I'm kind of aiming with level six.
11:46But then we come to level seven,
11:47which is Dumbledore himself.
11:48And this is where we're really going full ham
11:51on the Zettelkasten method of note-taking.
11:53This is sort of where I'm hoping to go eventually.
11:55I've only really done it for a handful of books,
11:57but every time I've done it,
11:59I found the exercise to be quite useful.
12:01And the idea behind this is that
12:02once we've taken our literature notes about the book,
12:05what we're gonna do is we're gonna turn them
12:07into permanent notes, as in the Zettelkasten method,
12:10or in evergreen notes as Andy Matysiak,
12:12who's this also kind of note-taking guru on the internet.
12:15That is sort of the vibe.
12:16I prefer the phrase evergreen notes
12:17because I think it sounds a bit better.
12:19And so for example, I have got this database on,
12:22again, on Notion of evergreen notes.
12:24And the idea behind evergreen notes is that
12:27they're notes on topics that you find interesting
12:29or that particularly resonate with you,
12:31but they are atomic notes in their own right.
12:34Like the note is self-contained
12:36and very heavily linked to the other notes
12:38you've got in your system.
12:39And the slip box, again,
12:40Sonke Ahrens talks about this in how to take smart notes.
12:43This is, I think Zettelkasten translates to slip box.
12:46It was like a method that this German called Luhmann
12:49used to use back in the day.
12:50And he churned out like loads and loads and loads
12:52of manuscripts and publications and books
12:54because he had the systematic way of taking notes
12:56from the stuff that he read.
12:58And so for example, what I've got is
13:00I've got these different sections, life, happiness,
13:01meaning, work, reading, luck, improvement,
13:03relationships, marriage, helping people,
13:04decision-making, money, lifestyle, writing,
13:05et cetera, et cetera.
13:06So like all of these are topics that I'm interested in.
13:09And as I read stuff in books, articles,
13:12podcasts, tweets, whatever,
13:14what I'm trying to do slowly, very slowly over time
13:17is turn these into evergreen notes
13:19and then having like this index for evergreen notes.
13:22So for example, the four important things in life,
13:25what's in this one?
13:26This is money, love relationships, mental health,
13:28wellbeing, happiness, and physical health.
13:30And I found this from a episode
13:32of the Samantha Ryan podcast that Naval was on.
13:35And so I turned it into an evergreen note.
13:37I linked to the source and Notion now has backlinks.
13:40And so for example, if I want,
13:42I can see what links to this page.
13:44So the idea of money leads to happiness links to this page.
13:47So that is related to the note.
13:49And we can see using the backlinks,
13:51how this all kind of relates together.
13:52This system, this kind of level seven Zettelkasten slip box,
13:55evergreen notes, double door note taking,
13:57whatever you wanna call the system.
13:58This is a little bit niche
14:00and I'm not entirely sold on the power of it yet.
14:03I can see from reading how to take smart notes
14:05and from reading the work of other people on the internet
14:07who have done this sort of thing.
14:08People say it's really useful.
14:11Like me personally,
14:12I'm very slowly starting to head in this direction,
14:14but I don't think I've given it enough time
14:16or stuck with it for long enough
14:18to actually be able to comment
14:19on whether it's actually helped me.
14:21It is kind of nice in a way
14:22because it helps you consolidate your thinking
14:25on all sorts of different subjects,
14:27especially if you have a lot of interests,
14:28it can be kind of hard to keep track
14:29of all the stuff that you've read,
14:30but this is one layer of abstraction
14:32above the things that you read,
14:34figuring out a way to consolidate the insights from them,
14:37for example.
14:37So coming full circle,
14:38if I were to give advice to my previous self,
14:40I would say that it's really, really useful
14:42to be at least at level five of the system.
14:45It is very, very easy to get to level five.
14:47Basically you get to level four
14:48by following the magical insight logging framework
14:50linked up here.
14:50And then for level five,
14:51all you have to do is,
14:53you can use my notion template if you want,
14:54but you don't have to.
14:55All you have to do is just write a summary of the book
14:57in three sentences,
14:59three, because it forces you to be concise
15:01and it doesn't take very long,
15:02and just write a few words
15:03about what you thought about the book.
15:04You know, this is the stuff that we used to do
15:06when we were in primary school.
15:07The teachers would say,
15:07write a book review of this book that you read.
15:10And again, like if I could give a single piece of advice
15:14to myself when I was like 12,
15:15I would say, look Ali mate,
15:16you need to just write summaries in three sentences
15:20of all the books that you've read
15:21and just write your thoughts on them
15:22because in 10 years time, in 20 years time,
15:24you're gonna be so incredibly grateful
15:26that you've got this treasure trove of knowledge
15:27inside a system other than your brain
15:29because you're a dumbass
15:30and you're gonna forget everything that you read otherwise.
15:32If you like this idea and you haven't yet seen the video
15:34about the Magical Insight Logging Framework,
15:36which is this automatic way of capturing highlights
15:38from books, articles, podcasts, and tweets,
15:40then click the video over here.
15:42That will be the video
15:42about the Magical Insight Logging Framework.
15:44Thank you so much for watching.
15:45Do check out my notion template in the video description
15:47and hopefully I'll see you in the next video.
15:49Bye bye.