The Art of Reading (or 'collecting knowledge')

[QandC]

I've never been a good reader. Hypocritocally I've written 2 books (in Swedish and Korean thank god). My dad has always been on my ass about reading. He loves fiction with wisdom, as he calls it. I've always had trouble with fiction though. As soon as I feel it can't really be connected to reality, I dismiss it.

whatever, I love non-fiction. The writings of others; their thoughts and philosophy; insights and wonders. You know the type of litterature I'm talking about.

the internet is also amazing, especially YouTube. And here's where I ask you guys, do you have any technique to use when gathering information and turning it into practical knowledge? My strategy has always been 'cold reading' as I call it. I find a book, an article, video or podcast.. and I skip my way through the intro part, and I just intuitively feel which part I need. This leaves me jumping in books. I can't remember the last time I read a book through and through. It's always been jumping from chapter to chapter - fetching sentences and main keywords/purpose/saying.

Its worked for me so far, but at the same time I fear that my laziness to read a book in chronological order causes me to miss a whole lot.

What's your art of reading?

[The Renaissance Man]

Your way of reading may actually be a positive, and not a negative. It's a way of doing what's called order control, where you receive information based on what you're curious about, instead of how the author laid it down. It should result in higher understanding and retention because it's more relevant for you in that moment, as opposed to reading passages you're not interested about just because they're there.

Despite knowing this, I still read linearly lol. For non-fiction I almost always take notes in Obsidian (it's like Notion), unless there's not much to learn, in which case I just skim through the book.

8 hours ago, QandC said:

do you have any technique to use when gathering information and turning it into practical knowledge?

But what I end up with is a lot of fragmented knowledge from various sources, that's integrated in my mind, but not explicitly. I'm currently working on a more purposeful integration of all the knowledge of a topic. And also, in turning that into a series of practices to test and cyclically improve upon.

My technique (but take it as an idea, I'm still testing it out, manipulating your own behavior is a motherfucker) would therefore be to proactively ensure integration of information, and then concretization, or putting it into practice, optimizing the practice, integrating the feedback, and so on. Proactively is the key word here. It's not that I'm unaware of this, but in practice I don't do it enough, so I'm trying to change that.

[Human Mint]

Interest plus discipline. Is the thirst for deeply understanding a thing that makes me read through when I don't feel like reading.

Plus, there are moments in my life where I read more. In other moments I read nothing.