Why You Can’t Remember Anything You Read

Photo by Mikołaj on Unsplash

Let me ask you a question, how many times have you looked at your bookshelf and started at what you believe was a masterpiece that would change your life forever only to find yourself saying, “what the hell was this even about?”

This happens for two reasons.

1. As David Allen famously said, “your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.” Or in the context of this article, your brain is for finding information, not for storing it.
2. Remembering the key concepts from the books we read or the videos we watch requires engaging with the content in an active and efficient way.

Well, this article might have the solution to your problem by just following three steps.

1. How to read efficiently.
2. How to find the most relevant information.
3. How to store that information for later.

Let’s get started.

Don’t finish every book

If you’re reading fiction there’s nothing wrong with reading every single worth, you might miss out on the value if you don’t, but if you’re reading non-fiction there’s a more efficient way to find the information you need.

I’m going to let you in on a secret, the entire self-help and productivity niche is full of redundant information that just gets rephrased over and over again. Almost none of these authors came up with their ideas on their own, everyone is just borrowing from someone else. I’m not throwing shade, 90% of what I read comes from this genre, and the list of books I want to read gets at least one new entry every day, but I stand by this 110%.

There’s literally a book that encourages everyone to do this, it’s called Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon, and if you haven’t read it yet you should probably add it to your story graph list.

One of the most important lines of the book is, “every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas,” and the irony of the entire book is that Kleon blatantly tells you where he got every single concept he covers in the book. It’s in my top ten favorites, definitely check it out.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, everyone resonates with a different language and there are infinite ways to interpret someone else’s idea, but this realization can back up the argument that I made at the beginning of this section: if you’re reading non-fiction you’re probably wasting time rereading the same thing over and over again.

Here’s how I choose to read a new book I pick up.

1. Read the introduction and first two chapters of the book to get an idea of what I’m going into.
2. Read the first 2–5 pages of every chapter to decide if there’s anything that seems relevant or interesting to me. If there is, I’ll keep reading, if there’s not, I skip that chapter and move on to the next one.
3. As one of my favorite college professors taught me, I read the first and last sentences of every paragraph to find the most important sections of each chapter I choose.
4. After I’ve gone through the entire book, I go to the table of contents and look back on any sections I skipped. You can go back through it if you want, but honestly, I never do.

The point of this exercise isn’t to read faster, the point is to find the most relevant and original sections of the book so I can skip past all of the redundancy that every self-help and productivity author, unfortunately, has to use to meet their word count.

In the words of a wise mentor, take what you need and leave the rest.

Take Notes On Everything You Find

This section is going to make some mind of you mad, including my girlfriend, who couldn’t believe what I was doing the first time she caught me in the act, but start highlighting every piece of information that stands out and write your own interpretations and notes in your books.

I know, that seems sacrilegious, but there’s a strong argument for why this can be useful. Think about this, how likely are you to actually reopen that book, and even if you do, why force yourself to reread entire chapters just to find a few key concepts that you wanted for later?

There’s no proper or improper way to do this, but here’s what works for me.

1. I only highlight 1–3 sections of a paragraph, depending on the length.
2. Find a place to write those notes, whether that be on the blank pages most books have at the back, or in the margins of the page where you highlighted the idea. I choose to write mine on the same page as my highlight.
3. I treat these notes as a way to form my own interpretation so I have a better grasp of the concept and avoid regurgitating the information in the style of the author.
4. I like to link charts, graphs, or images that may be relevant to what I wrote by drawing an arrow or making a tiny note of it, this will be useful later.

So now we took what we needed from our book and we’ve made our highlights and notes, it’s time to actually store this information in a place that will actually force us to remember and use active recall.

It doesn’t do you any good to have a bunch of notes and highlights in a book that you’ll never reopen.

Export The Information

If you’re interested in an article like this you’ve probably heard Ali Abdaal or Tiago Forte talk about the idea of building a Second Brain, and while I love the concept, I think this can be too much work for the average person. That includes me, I’m at best a 7/10 on the intelligence scale.

If that kind of system works for you, keep doing what you’re doing, but I don’t believe you need some elaborate system using a dozen apps to store information.

I don’t need to tell you about the apps you can use, and it doesn’t really matter if you choose Notion, Obsidian, Readwise, or a stone tablet you found in the woods. The only thing that matters is whether or not your system works for you, so pick whichever platform you like.

I personally use Notion as my database for storing and expanding on all of my notes, and I use Readwise to see highlights I missed or get a jolt of inspiration through active recall when I check my feed.

Here’s my Notion workflow.

1. Before the transfer process starts, I open up my database of every book I want to read, books that I already own, what I’m currently reading, and books that I’ve finished. I select one of the pages and get to work.
2. I type out all of the chapters that I actually read as headings so I can organize my notes and summaries.
3. Then I go through and copy my highlights as quotes with page numbers under each chapter. I also take photos of the correlated images and place those under the chapter heading as needed.
4. Once all of that is done I add a section for each chapter titled “Brock’s Thoughts.” This section is where I write my full summary of the key concepts of that chapter in a way that makes sense to me, and unless I’m working on an article, Instagram post, or video, I rarely go back to look at the direct quotes once I have my own summary written.

Closing Statements

The funny thing is that a lot of my own summaries end up as the script for videos and articles or as one of my Instagram posts. I’m working on rebuilding my feed as we speak, link in the description if you want to get some daily highlights of my own.

If you found any value in this let me know in the comments and I’ll take a deep dive into these concepts later.

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