Thread by @juvoni

Just crossed 450 books read 📚

The result of Consistency, Focus, Patience, Persistence & deep reading over 10 yrs

The journey started w/ my desire to escape poverty by taking my education into my own hands

Each Decade adds a Column

🧵45 lessons on Becoming a (Better) Reader👇🏾

Reading is a core part of your intellectual feedback loop that feeds all parts of your ability to learn & express yourself

↪️Writing ⇄ Thinking ⇄ Reading ⇄ Doing ⇄ Speaking ⇄ Listening ↩

Each activity directly helps the next & indirectly helps any along the chain

1/45

Read is a human experience. You are someone who can be a reader if you accept it as natural as speaking.

Read to understand yourself, others & the world around you.

Reading is a skill than can be developed. Use tools to organize & amplify your reading.

2/45

Change your environment & surround yourself w/ books.

Create a system that works for your personality to support reading.

Start small, 1 pg, 5 pages, or start with audiobook & build-up to e-book or print. Join a book club for shared accountability & social motivation.

3/45

Explore and find what you love. Find books on what you love. Read what you love so that you can love to read. Share what you love to read, so others can find what they love.

4/45

Read Non-fiction for mental models & perspectives on how the world has worked, currently works, and how you can create new works within it.

Read Fiction for emotional models on how to feel deeper within yourself and in relation to others.

5/45

Problem Driven Reading makes the value of books more real, the forcing function to take action more sooner & the memorability greater through overcoming the emotional motivation needed to solve a problem.

6/45

Books with Quake Potential rock your belief window & view of the world. The epicenter gets you closer to the source of some truth.

Shakes let weak beliefs fall, strong ones remain & room for new supporting pillars to build a stronger foundation to house your thinking.

7/45

Lindy Effect is a theory that longer a non-perishable thing has been in existence, the more likely it is to be in existence.

Old Ideas & Books that are still relevant today, have a lower chance of becoming expired knowledge and are therefore more valuable in the present.

8/45

Read books whose ideas can stand the test of time, because you have limited time on this earth to spend on an idea that disappears faster than you.

9/45

Overly complex ideas are fragile, simple ideas are robust, foundational & multi-disciplinary ideas are anti-fragile & useful.

Anti-Fragile ideas are tested by time, get better through stress & are used to build new connections through time.

10/45

How useful is it to have a library of books you've already read taking up space that you no longer reference?

What you want is the opposite of that, an Anti-Library.

11/45

Stock up potential themes, lingering problems, curiosities & what you love to build an Anti-Library.

Your Book Pantry of Potential Learning.

In times of need, or times of wonder you'll be glad to have your anti-library.

12/45

Book Purgatory is where incoming book recommendations go to await judgment day on whether they are worthy of your time and attention to read.

13/45

Find good books to add via negativa, through reduction.

5-star reviews can be gamed & don't tell you why you shouldn't read the book.

Read passionate, constructive, and specific 3 & 4-star reviews to find out what the book lacks to see if what remains is worthwhile.

14/45

The medium you chose to read on:
Print, E-Book, or Audiobook
Can have a significant effect on how you interpret, absorb & enjoy the content:

Genre
Physical Energy/Attention Available
Publish Date & Popularity
Page Length
Senses
Portability
Notes & Highlightability.

15/45

Genre
Print: Technical/tactical content, great books, art, philosophical. Likely reference or reread

E-Book: Possible expiring knowledge, business, recently published, skimmable

Audiobooks: Narrative focused books: history, biographies/memories, fiction, spiritual books.

16/45

Portability
Print: Limited physical space to store. Damageable, heavy in bulk.
E-Book: Large digital storage available. Hard to share with multiple people if bought through official means.

Audiobook: Digital storage, but tend to be exclusive to a platform.

17/45

Length
Print: Ideal for medium-sized books 200-350 pg.
E-Book: Ideal for full range of length, but especially for very short or very long books.
Audiobook: Ideal for mid or long. Economics of sub <3hr audio may not be worth it using credits.

18/45

Energy
Print: Higher energy to maintain focus, physical presence can support an environmental reading habit.
E-Book: Balanced energy, low-friction skim & searchability.
Audiobook: Low energy/focus required, good for passive listening, or when hands/eyes are preoccupied.

19/45

Senses
Print: Physically interacting w/ a book creates stronger emotional resonance & spatial awareness for your reading.
E-Book: Light & focused reading, fonts & background w/ night-time readability.
Audiobook: Great audio performances stimulate your senses better.

20/45

Notes & Highlighting
Print: Can fold pages, write in margins, highlight, flag, or use paper notes
E-Book: Built-in highlighting w/ diff colors for more meaning, notes & exportability
Audiobook: High friction note-taking, audio clips & notes. Difficult to stop & take notes.

21/45

Elementary Reading is the process of getting through the book with the appropriate speed.

You can build awareness for different paces and reduce repeating words in your head, and use better eye scanning through pages.

22/45

Cultivate a Triathlon Reading Pace

Learning to see:
Flat planes of a book to speed up,
Wet hills to climb up slowly with care, as to not fall back to re-reading,
Rocky patches with varying shapes for a hop and skip & more dynamic reading speed for the changing terrain.

23/45

Inspectional Reading, is learning about how, what & who the book is written for so you can determine how to approach reading the book and if it is for you.

24/45

There are no such things as spoilers in non-fiction, so you can read the end of the book to help you get to the core ideas of the book quicker & skim, reading the front/back covers & review the table of contents as if you're planning a road trip.

25/45

Synoptic reading is surveying the territory around a subject, finding books that apply to the subject you want to get a wide perspective on. The collection of books become a tool for answering specific questions or finding new ones about a subject

26/45

With Synoptic Reading, you are both the Cartographer creating the map, and the Detective using the map to scan for clues across multiple subjects of interest.

27/45

Analytical Reading is investigating the words & mind of the author to get as close to a complete understanding of what the problem is, what the book is trying to communicate, and why it was said or structure in the way it was.

28/45

Outline & Organize the keywords, main ideas, & arguments to create a map of thoughts.

Identify what hasn't been said & use what you know as a form of associative learning to build a branch of knowledge.

29/45

Do the work to synthesize the author's words in your own words to show Proof of Understanding.

30/45

A book's ideas come into collision w/ your worldview. This can be perceived as an attack or an awkward hug from a friend.

If it doesn't feel right, but you interpret the intention as good, you can come to a better understanding w/ the author. Give feedback like a friend.

31/45

Reading multiple books in parallel is done more effectively by using location & time to utilize context-dependent memory, which enables you to read more over the year.

i.e: Read "A" in the morning.
"B" before bed.
"C" on weekends.
"D" in transit.
"E" in the living room.

32/45

Reading List Overview:

Backlog: Read within the year.
Up Next: Read within the next couple of months.
[Multiple Genre Lists]: Separate currently reading lists for categories to structurally ensure I'm reading broadly across genres.
Reference: Use to create something.

33/45

I use @goodreads as a digital bookshelf to keep a log of all the books I've read, dates, ratings, or reviews, custom shelves to also track year specific shelves, what medium I've read on & what my favorites are. Want to Read are books I own & to read.

34/45

I use @readwiseio which syncs your highlights from @AmazonKindle, iBooks and other highlighting services and helps you rediscover your highlights & notes and exports/sync them to popular note-taking apps like @NotionHQ and @evernote.

35/45

I use @RoamResearch a tool for thinking, for interconnected writing & sentence re-use with a feature called blocks. Page references break you from hierarchical to more graph structures & see references w/ backlinks.

Smarter writing happens in Roam.

36/45

Capture fleeting emotionally resonate notes in your notes app/paper.

On print, use post-it flags as a non-destructive & multi-meaning way(colors) to mark important sections of a book.

Store references & surprising highlights, but capture & share in your own words.

37/45

Notes
Building blocks for future content, legos.
Focus on one idea, like a blue lego, not a rainbow lego.
Notes can combine w/ multiple notes, blue + red lego.
Focused on a concept, rectangle, square lego.
Should be active statements, use these legos to make a house.

38/45

Book Summaries are like an inside joke a summary writer has w/ an author. Sometimes you're in on the joke, more likely if you've read the book or something similar, & most of the time you're not in on the joke and you laugh thinking you got it and forget the joke later.

39/45

Write Summaries to Think. Read Summaries to Refresh.

40/45

Always Be Reading.

Take short reading intermissions then start back your reading to prepare within the Play of Life. The show must go on.

41/45

Classics books are high signal. Written before the "blog-post as book" era, or got diluted in a game of telephone w/ students pretending to be master.

Before publisher/author/marketer incentivizes became shallow w/ fluff, upsell/brand builds.

42/45

Meditation, Writing & Listening has helped train my focus to read faster, more clearly & with more comprehension than any speed-reading course could ever do.

43/45

Some books are meant to be sat and soaked in. Immerse yourself over, many days, weeks, months.

Read books that are on your like clothing & worth re-reading.

44/45

No matter how much you read.
Life is meant to be experienced.

It can't be experienced at one time, so use the opportunity to learn from the experiences of the past, and contribute your own experience.

Play the longest infinite game in humanity: Learning & Sharing.

45/45