I realized if I wanted to benefit from my reading, I needed to engage with the books I read on a much deeper level. I needed to make something out of them. Otherwise, I would continue to passively consume information with no lasting memory of what I learned.
I decided I would rather deeply absorb the wisdom of a small handful of books than speed-read my way through dozens.
Let’s dive into each of the benefits of summarizing books, in roughly the order they appear:
Allows me to absorb the book’s lessons on a much deeper level
Creates building blocks for my own thinking and creating
Improves my writing through imitation
Builds my audience of email subscribers
Connects me with influential people
Expands my visibility and credibility in online communities
I follow five steps to go from reading a book to publishing a summary blog post:
Read and highlight
Export highlights
Progressively summarize
Outline
Write
Do’s:
Do highlight chapter titles and section headings – this ensures your exported notes will preserve the structure of the book.
Do highlight lists and summaries already found within the book – this is valuable summarizing work the author has already done for you.
Do highlight “popular highlights” (a feature of some ebook services such as Kindle which shows you phrases that many other people have highlighted) – these are phrases that other readers have already told you are helpful in their understanding of the text.
Don’ts:
Don’t highlight entire paragraphs or pages – this will create a lot of work later on to figure out what is actually valuable in those large chunks of text.
Don’t highlight entire stories or long examples – they are usually too long, and you can always go back and find them if you need them.
Don’t highlight ideas or explanations that you already know, agree with, or could have guessed – focus on what is novel, surprising, and counterintuitive.
Watch on YouTube: How to Create an Outline with Digital Notes
The outline should be hierarchical, which reflects the hierarchical structure that your final summary will follow:
Main point
Supporting point
Supporting point
Supporting point
Main point
Supporting point
Supporting point
Supporting point
Main point
Etc.
This structure allows your eye to skip quickly from one main point to another to see if they make sense and are in the right order. And if you want to zoom in on any main point, you only have to move your eyes down and to the right.
Outlining is the only step that I strongly recommend you sit down and complete in one sitting. We’ve postponed it for as long as possible, but at this stage it is necessary to load all the main points into your head all at once. Only then can you compare and contrast and interconnect them into one structure in your mind. To avoid having to do that more than once, it’s a good idea to create the outline in one sitting.