BOOKS: How to READ BETTER : The Szpinner

Become a better reader
Daniel Pink, Best selling author

First, torture your books. Crack the spine. Underline. Write in the margins. Books are not precious objects. They are tools for thinking. The more you engage, the more you remember.

Second, become a quitter. If a book is not working for you, stop. It is not your responsibility to push through. It is the author’s responsibility to keep you engaged. A useful rule of thumb: 100 minus your age equals the number of pages you should give a book before walking away.

Third, build a second brain. Keep your highlights and notes in one place. Notion, Google Docs, or whatever system you trust. Export your Kindle highlights. Capture your margin notes. Later, those ideas become reusable raw material.

Fourth, become a T-shaped reader. Go deep in your field. But also read widely outside it. Psychology, art, history, poetry, even comics.

Fifth, be a quitter. If the book is not keeping your attention, abandon it. No one should force themselves to finish a book that they are not enjoying. When to quit rule: subtract your age from 100. Quit at the resulting page number.

Finally, don’t stress. Reading should be a pleasure, not a burden. A source of enlightenment and wonder, not a fountain of anxiety and pressure. There’s so much out there to read. You can’t read it all. You can’t read a fraction of it. Celebrate what you have read, not what you haven’t.

Depth without breadth narrows you. Breadth without depth thins you. The goal is both.

If you do these four things, you will not just read more. You will remember more.