Reading Time: 2 minutes

I read quite a few books every year. You certainly know of people that read many more than I do, but I do alright. That said, I’m always looking to refine my process and in the past few weeks I met two people that were substantially more prolific readers that I tried to take some lessons from — but they are complete opposites of one another in terms of their reading styles.

Bill White

The first was Bill White, a pastor in California at the City Church of Long Beach. My wife and I stayed at his house for a few days, and the number of books he had around the house was staggering. Literally every room had a bookcase in it, and all of them were packed with books.

I’ve long wanted to have more books on hand at the house (despite the fact that 2/3 of my reading is from digital books), and it was very inspiring. Going all-paper seems really compelling, and Bill’s vast knowledge supports the value in that. I got a lot of reading done while we were out there.

Chris Gardner

More recently, I had lunch with Chris Gardner who has focused his life on building a legacy of giving. Like Bill, he’s very well-read and one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. As of May, he had already read 95 books for the year! In his case, they’re all on Kindle — he listens to the Audible while he reads, and it clearly works. Not only has he read 95 books, I chatted with him about a few of them and it was very clear that he did a deep read of every one of them.

He makes great use of the Readwise app (which I’ve mentioned before on here) and has a great system in place.

Two amazing men, two voracious readers, and two very different approaches. I think the lesson here is that you don’t need to follow what someone else is doing and just dig in on your own. It’s similar to Seth Godin’s story of Stephen King’s pencil, found here, which essentially is this:

When Stephen King attends a writer’s conference, as he often does, someone invariably asks him “What kind of pencil do you use to write your books?” The answer, of course, is completely irrelevant.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t get tips from those that go before you, as I frequently get ideas from others on how to streamline my process — just don’t forget to make it your own process.

In my case, those encounters along with some other conversations have lead to a few tweaks in my reading processes:

• For paper books, I’ll now start scanning my highlights with Readwise rather than trying to type them in. The Readwise mobile app has a great feature that lets you take a photo of a paper book, and then highlight the words as if they were digital. It’s pretty slick!
• Readwise has some neat AI tools in there to let you ask it questions about your highlights, which becomes more useful the more highlights you load in there. Being able to ask about specific things that you’ve read in the past is pretty awesome.

Bill and Chris both have amazing processes to be able to consume what they do, and while I won’t be copying either of them directly, I’m thankful for their inspiration and the little adjustments they’ve helped me to make.

What does your reading process look like?

Reading Time: < 1 minute

We’re flooded with more and more information every day, and it doesn’t seem that it’ll be slowing down. However, similar to food, taking time to properly digest is key.

On an episode of the “Armchair Expert” podcast, Yuval Noah Harari shared some thoughts on this. He made this comparsion:

• In the past, food was scarce and you had to get what you could. Now food is abundant for many people, and you need to learn to control it.
• Similarly, information used to be scarce and now it’s abundant, and we need to learn to control it as well.

During the show, Harari gives this example:

“With food, it’s obvious if you just eat all the time and you don’t give your stomach time to digest, it’s not a good idea. Same with your mind. If we just sit for hours putting more in, we don’t give the mind any time to digest. So we need information fasts that we don’t consume any new information.”

So how do you digest information? I suspect it’s different for everyone.

Some will journal or blog (like I’m doing right now).

Some will take long walks to think about things.

Some simply mix their inputs with different sources, like reading a mix of fiction and non-fiction to help give the brain some breaks.

How do you like to digest your information?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

While I read quite a few books in any given year, I almost never reread old books. It’s a tricky idea, as I can see the value in rereading books that impacted me, but I also have a “want to read” list that I will never finish (currently at 192 books and growing).

However, two things have me leaning toward adding some old books back into the mix:

• When Moira Vetter joined me on the Stacking Knowledge podcast last year, we discussed her tattered copy of “The Art of War“. She’s read it many times and plans to reread it many more.
• In reading “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant“, he convincingly advocates for the same thing, saying:

These days, I find myself rereading as much (or more) as I do reading. A tweet from @illacertus said, “I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.” I think there’s a lot to that idea. It’s really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people. Then, you can really absorb those.

So, I think I’m going to give it a shot.

Which books? How often?

This leads to a few big questions. How many books will be in this list? What books are they? How often should I reread them?

My general thought for now is to reread them every three years or so and see how it goes. If I do one per quarter, that would mean I could keep 12 books in rotation among all of the new books that I’m reading. I’m still working on my list, but here are the initial 12 that are likely to make the cut.

Building a StoryBrand, by Donald Miller
This book impacts so much of what we do at GreenMellen. The lessons are fairly simple, but it’s good to be reminded of the full process.

Essentialism, by Greg McKeown
I think this part of the book sums it up well:

Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.

I Never Thought of It That Way, by Monica Guzman
Being able to understand alternative points of view was important when I read this book a few years ago, and I feel the importance of that has skyrocketed since then. There are a lot of good tips and reminders in here.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack, by Charlie Munger
This book is packed with wisdom from one of the smartest men who ever lived.

Seeking Wisdom, by Peter Bevelin
This book sums up one of my life goals (gaining wisdom, which has no clear target), but reading it helps bring me closer to that goal. It features tons of great insights from people like Somerset Maugham, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Warren Buffett and many others.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, by Eric Jorgenson
Many life lessons from a very successful man who most would say is a great human.

The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker
As GreenMellen is hosting more and more events, the ability to hold truly great events is something we’re striving for, and this book gives a lot of great advice. This line sums it up well:

Because so much gathering advice comes from experts in food and decor rather than from facilitators, that advice almost invariably focuses on preparing things instead of preparing people.

The Business of Expertise, by David C. Baker
I love most everything that David C. Baker (and his cohost on 2Bobs, Blair Enns) puts out, but this is at the top of the list. The book seeks to “elevate the impact of advisors who well insight as entrepreneurs“.

The Human Brand, by Chris Malone and Susan T. Fiske
This book shares how companies can perform better when they treat humans as humans.

The Personal MBA, by Josh Kaufman
The sheer volume of business lessons in this book is fantastic, and they are approached with quotes and anecdotes that make them easy to digest.

Thinking In Bets, by Annie Duke
Annie’s approach to thinking has shaped me quite a lot in recent years, and this is my favorite book of hers. She kicks it off by defending the Seattle Seahawks’ decision to pass the ball at the end of Super Bowl XLIX — many have called it a bad decision, whereas she says it was a good decision that merely had a bad outcome. The difference between those is huge, and understanding that has changed how I see the world.

Unreasonable Hospitality, by Will Guidara
This book is likely to make any list like this one, and it’s fantastic. The title alone tells you what you’ll learn from it, including things like this:

It may not be possible to do everything perfectly, but it is possible to do many things perfectly. That’s the very definition of excellence: getting as many details right as you can.

How about you?

Do you ever reread books? If so, which ones are on your list?

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I’m a big fan of tools that can help generate summaries for me, such as Blinkist or Shortform, but I also recognize that those can create problems. Summaries are shortcuts, and shortcuts by nature omit information.

I had another recent situation where this came up; my research was mostly helpful for me, but the summaries that I provided were still of some value to others.

In this case, it was for a recent event that we held. It required paid registration, so we know the exact people that signed up and were attending the event. There were about 30 people coming, and I only knew 5 of them, so I thought it’d be helpful to try to memorize most of their names before the event (using Anki and some other techniques).

Photos

To do that, I collected photos of everyone from their LinkedIn profiles. I spent a bit of time looking each person up, reading about what they did, and then putting their photo in a folder for later use. I put those photos in Anki, but also shared the folder with the other event organizers so that they could work on them if they wanted as well.

I did the research and got a bit more out of it, but since the main goal was simply to match names to faces, we all essentially accomplished the same thing.

The balance between research and summaries will always be a tricky one, and I enjoy working to find that balance.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

When we think of a “genius”, we generally think of someone who is very smart, and that’s often true. However, there have been many geniuses throughout history that weren’t smart in the conventional sense, but more than made up for it in other ways. A great example of that was Thomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors of all time who was famously bad at math.

Another solid example is Leonardo da Vinci. While he is best known as an artist, he also had incredible knowledge about subjects such as anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography and many other areas. Much of that fed into his work as an artist, but he was an overall brilliant man.

That said, he wasn’t a “genius” in the traditional sense at all. From Walter Isaacson’s book about him:

Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.

In the cases of da Vinci and Edison, their lack of native genius was made up for by curiosity. For example, da Vinci’s curiosity about anatomy led to amazing details in his sculptures, such as this tiny muscle in the forearm that contracts only when lifting the pinky finger, seen here in his “Moses” sculpture.

I’m certainly not advocating for you to give up on math or other skills, but curiosity can sure take you a long way if you dig deep into it.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

It’s something I’ve not really thought about before, but the ability to hold memories is essentially impossible without forgetting. From a great post on Medium, Hallel shares some interesting thoughts on how forgetting helps with memory.

In short, they say:

“Your brain forgets unimportant details and retains what you present to it as important.”

Remembering what color shirt the bank teller was wearing last week is of no value, so your brain does a good job for forgetting it for you.

Further, they quite Oliver Hardt who says:

“What is memory without forgetting? It’s impossible. To have proper memory function, you have to have forgetting.”

Never forgetting is a problem

There are a few rare people in the world that can remember literally every detail of their lives. It’s an amazing gift, but it’s also a curse. They can put themselves back into any moment from their lives, but that means that they can’t shake any horrible memories that they’d like to suppress (such as the death of a loved one). This article from the BBC in 2016 digs into that quite a bit more.

How to remember

While forgetting can be a good thing, we’ve all faced many times where we forgot something that we specifically wanted to remember. There are no perfect solutions, but there are two things that can help.

The first is to set up memory palaces (or use similar memory techniques) to put things into your brain in a way that you’re more likely to remember. This takes some work, but can be a great way to get your brain to remember things that might have otherwise slipped out.

On top of that you can layer tools like Anki to resurface old memories at the right time. I’ve been using it daily for years and it’s an amazing (and simple) bit of technology that really makes a difference.

In the end, both of those systems require that you are intentional about wanting to remember something, which is the key to all of those. Your brain is going to forget things, by design, so you need to do a bit of intentional work to keep the right stuff in there.