the seven levels along the journey

of trying to remember everything that we read.

Hey friends, welcome back to the channel.

If you knew him, my name is Ali.

I'm a doctor based in the UK and on this channel,

we explore the strategies and tools

that help us live healthier, happier, more productive lives.

And if you're anything like me

and you're interested in personal development,

lifelong learning, becoming a better thinker

and all that stuff you'll know that reading

is a very important part of this,

but if you're anything like me, you've read a lot of books,

but you've probably forgotten the vast majority

of the stuff that you've read and probably

haven't yet applied it to your life

in the way that you'd liked.

A few months ago, I realized

that this was a big issue for me.

And so I've been actively working to try and remedy it.

And so in this video, I'm gonna share what I think

are the seven levels along this path

of trying to remember more of the stuff that we read

and apply to our lives.

We start off our reading careers at level one, the Muggle.

This is basically where we read stuff,

but we're just reading it.

We're not highlighting it, we're not taking any notes.

We're not really engaging with the material

beyond just passively reading it.

And when we're muggles and trying to learn

about a new topic like entrepreneurship or whatever,

we'll end up just reading loads and loads and loads

and sort of hoping we're gonna passively absorb stuff

by diffusion, by osmosis, whatever,

but we're not like actively using any brain power

to engage with it.

This is fine if we're reading fiction, but for nonfiction,

and when I read nonfiction, I kind of wanna

get some insights from it.

I want to learn stuff.

I'm a dumb-ass and therefore, I just forget

everything that I read and therefore,

this isn't good for me.

And it's probably not just me

because there is a phenomenon in memory research

called the forgetting curve, which just shows

that over time, our memory for everything decays

unless we find a way to engage with it

or consolidate our memory of the thing.

At some point, we might realize

that our Muggle existence is pretty unfulfilling.

And so we'll come across level two of the journey,

which is The Squib.

And when you become a Squib at level two,

you're now reading stuff, but you are highlighting

or underlining the things

that particularly resonate with you.

This is easy enough to do if you read on a Kindle

or you can use one of these like old school things,

I don't even know what the court anymore,

because we haven't used this stuff.

And this is what I was doing since I first got a Kindle

in around 2008, 2009, all the way through to 2018.

When I discovered that actually

there were more levels along this path.

And this is fine because highlighting stuff is kinda nice.

And it's kind of fun to use

one of these old fashioned antique devices.

But the problem with highlighting stuff is

A, we actually don't remember the stuff that we highlight

and there is a mountain of evidence that shows

that highlighting or underlining

does nothing to actually improve our memory of the stuff.

And we also run into the issue

that we've got all these highlights,

but they're sort of hidden away inside our book

or inside our Kindle and we don't really have a reason

to go through them.

So that was me from 2008, all the way through to 2018.

Those were the dark days.

But then in September, 2018,

I reached level three, which we're calling Hufflepuff.

And level three, Hufflepuff is when you have

a systematic system for reviewing your highlights.

So in September, 2018, I discovered this amazing service

called Readwise.

Link in the video description.

And what Readwise does is that it automatically

connects to your Kindle account and it pulls in

all of the highlights you've ever highlighted

from all the books that you've read.

And what they do is that every day,

they send you an email with five random highlights.

So I started using read wise in September, 2018,

and I've been getting this email every day.

And for the first few months,

I was religiously reading this email and I found,

oh wow, this thing that I highlighted five years ago

is now very relevant to me today

and the Readwise email has surfaced it for me,

which was really awesome.

But over the last two years, I've kind of become

less and less religious about reading

my five daily things in the read wise email.

I still get it.

I still open it from time to time,

but it's a bit too passive for my liking.

And that is when we get to level four.

And we're calling level four Ravenclaw,

because I couldn't think of anything else.

And I deeply apologize for playing into the stereotype.

I didn't mean it. I'm work, trust me.

But level four is what I talked about in my video

about the magical Insight Logging Framework,

which will be linked to somewhere up here.

And basically this is a system whereby

you automatically pull in your highlights

into a central note taking app.

And so we can see here, I've got my Readwise database,

which has all the books and it shows

all the highlights I've made in each one.

So I can look at the books and we can see

I've got 126 highlights from "Tools of Titans",

all of which are gonna be in here.

And it also links very nicely to the location

and it opens it up in the Kindle web app

if that's what I wanna look at.

We also have articles over here.

So this is taking all of my highlights from Instapaper

and we even have Tweets.

So these are tweets that I've saved to Readwise

that are automatically coming into Notion.

And we have podcasts that this is podcast air quotes

that I've taken through the app Air to IO.

Again, a lot more details about the system

in my magical Insight Logging Framework video,

which will be linked up there.

And so this is level four.

This is where we've got a tool

that automatically pulls in our highlights.

And because I use Notion

for absolutely everything in my life, pretty much,

it's all very convenient when it's sitting there.

But level four is still a little bit problematic

because this is still very passive.

All we're doing at this point

is we're bringing in highlights and we're hoping

that our future selves will at some point

revisit the highlights just because we want to.

And again, I've been doing this for a few months now,

but I found that inevitably other things were coming up

and I was not finding the time or making the time

to actively review the highlights of the stuff

that I'd read in Notion.

And this is where we start to get into the fun territory,

because now we have level five, which is Dumbledore's Army.

And when you're at level five or a member of the DA,

you engage with books by taking quick notes

on the stuff that you've read.

Now I'm gonna show you how I do this in Notion.

So I've got this book notes database that has

all of the books that I read, fiction and nonfiction.

And for each of these categories, fiction and nonfiction,

I've created templates that I use

for my very quick book reviews.

And so if I've just read a nonfiction book,

I will put a nonfiction book template here.

So it asked me to give the title of the book.

I can select a genre so let's say productivity,

philosophy and magic.

Why not?

And I can say the date that I finished it,

let's say that was today.

And basically what this Notion template does is that

it creates these categories for me.

So firstly, the book in three sentences,

impressions, how i discovered it, who should read it,

how the book changed me and my top three

quotes from the book.

So this is actually very quick.

And this level, level five, is what I regret not doing

with everything that I've ever read.

Because if you can just summarize a book in three sentences,

that's like a really fantastic way

of actually engaging with the content.

And as someone like Richard Feynman would say,

it's a way of actively ensuring

that you actually understand the concepts in the book.

And so here are some notes that I took

on "Show Your Work" by Austin Kleon.

The book in three sentences,

share your thoughts and your process

and your work online for free.

You don't need to be an expert to share your work.

Beginners can easily help other beginners

and three by sharing your work online,

you'll attract an audience of people who care

about the same stuff as you do,

and this can change your life.

So that was kind of my three sentence summary of the book.

Then I've got impressions where I just

sort of write subjectively what I thought about the book.

I have who should read it.

Occasionally I have how I discovered the book,

if I remember how I discovered it,

and here's some notes on how the book changed me

and my top three quotes.

Now the point of this system is that

it does take a small amount of time to actually think about,

but it's not a large amount of time.

And like, I really wish that if I'd done this for every book

that I've ever read, I know I'll be like today,

I'd be infinitely more knowledgeable

about all this stuff than I am

just because I just never considered

engaging with this stuff.

So level five is I think a good sweet spot between

the amount of effort it takes to do this,

i.e it doesn't take that much effort,

but I think it also gives you a lot of value

when you can start summarizing books in three sentences.

And if we're doing it for fiction,

this is what the template looks like for that.

So we've got a section about what it's about,

how I discovered it, general thoughts and who would like it.

So again, all of these templates

are linked in the video description,

so you can check it out.

And if for some reason you don't yet have a Notion account,

you should follow the link in the video description

and get it for free.

Notion is an absolutely amazing app that I've been using

since early 2019 and I think it's fair to say

that it's probably changed my life.

I organize my entire life around it.

I organize my whole business.

I use it to take notes at medical school

and to prepare for a number of my medical exams,

used to track my workouts.

I use it to write book reviews.

I use it to script all my videos and to work with my team.

It's just got so many different use cases