The Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books

How to distill ideas to accelerate your learning, from Tiago Forte

May 26, 2021

Article appeared on Fortelabs - by Tiago Forte

In 2016, I read 57 books. I read like I was running out of time.

It felt like an achievement, yet by the end of the year, I could scarcely recall even one useful idea from each book.

That moment was a turning point. I realized very little of the information I was consuming was sticking.

Credits: Alfons Morales

Taking notes on the books I read was a great start, but it wasn’t enough. It did me no good to leave those notes sitting in a software program like a musty filing cabinet in the basement, never to see the light of day again.

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 to slow down, carefully choose a much smaller number of books, and save my notes from those books in a system of knowledge management – which I call my “Second Brain.” I decided I would rather deeply absorb the wisdom of a small handful of books than speed-read my way through dozens.

The 14 book summaries I’ve created since then have changed the trajectory of my business and my work. They have attracted more than 125,000 page-views over the last year and, as part of my Praxis membership, support a six-figure annual subscription business:

Creating a book summary requires a surprising amount of creativity. Because the truth is, these are much more than summaries. They are actually reinterpretations. By choosing certain points over others and deciding how they’ll be presented, I am interpreting the book through my own personal lens.

Instead of apologizing for this, I encourage you to embrace it. Like any retelling, your summary is biased, but it can be biased helpfully. It can be biased toward usefulness, toward relevance, and toward actionability.

Blog posts are not miniature books. When you change the length, the whole nature of the text changes.

A book might build up slowly using stories before getting to the punchline, while a blog post demands that you lead with the main argument. A book might include personal anecdotes from the author, whereas blog post summaries have to be more direct and utilitarian. Books keep revisiting the same points again and again from different angles, whereas a blog post only needs to address each point once.

Authors have to write for the largest possible audience – for the widest range of educational levels, cultural contexts, and common knowledge. They have to assume that their readers know little or nothing about the topic, which is why so many books feel like “a book that should have been a blog post.” The economics of the publishing industry demand mainstream success.

But you are not similarly constrained. You have a particular audience, and you know that audience. You know what they tend to miss, what they need, and what they desire in their heart of hearts. You can therefore afford to be FAR more discerning and opinionated.

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In fact, I think you owe it to your readers to be opinionated. They rely on you to tell them what matters about the book – which points are the most original and important. They depend on you to climb the mountain and come back with the most precious gems. You have done the hard work, and now you are paving the way for others to follow in your footsteps.

This isn’t an easy process. Each summary requires 10-20 hours of intellectual labor. But looking back at the last few years, these hours have been some of the most valuable I’ve spent toward building an audience of loyal readers, and ultimately creating the content and courses that fuel my business.

In this article, I will share with you the profound benefits I’ve experienced from summarizing books, what I’ve learned from the experience, and the process I’ve developed to do it as efficiently as possible. Submit your email address below and I’ll send you the full notes as seen in this guide right away.

Thanks for reading! 🙏

If you feel like talking, connecting or just want to see what I’m up to, we’re on italianswho.design and you can contact us on info@italianswho.design

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