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Ruin the Ending.
When I start a book, I almost always go straight to Wikipedia (or Amazon or a friend) and ruin the ending. Who cares? Your aim as a reader is to understand WHY something happened, the what is secondary.
You ought to ruin the ending—or find out the basic assertions of the book—because it frees you up to focus on your two most important tasks: What does it mean?, Do you agree with it?
Your energy needs to be spent on figuring out if he’s right and how you can benefit from it. Plus, if you already know what happens, you can identify all the foreshadowing and the clues the first read through.
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After you finish…
Go Back Through
I have the same schedule with every book I read. After a mandatory 1–2 week waiting period after finishing, I go back through the book with a stack of 4×6 index cards. On these cards, I write out—by hand—all the passages I have noted as being important.
It might seem s...
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152 reads
Read the Reviews
Find out what the people who have already read it felt was important. From Amazon to the New York Times, read the reviews so you can deduce the cultural significance of the work—and from what it meant to others. Also, by being warned of the major themes, you can anticipate them coming and then ac...
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176 reads
Look It Up
If you’re reading to lead, you’re going to come across concepts or words you’re not familiar with. Don’t pretend you understand. Look it up. I like to use Definr or I use my phone to look stuff up on Wikipedia. With Military History, for instance, a sense of the battlefield is often necessary. Wi...
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157 reads
How To Digest Books. (CLASSIC'S)
IT’S NOT ENOUGH THAT YOU READ A LOT. TO DO GREAT THINGS, YOU HAVE TO READ TO LEAD.”
Reading to lead or learn requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it is—lifting the subjects with the most tension and weight.
For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects you’re not f...
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294 reads
The book itself…
READ THE INTRO/PROLOGUE/NOTES/FORWARD.
I know, I know. It infuriates me too when what looks like a 200-page book turns out to have 80 pages of translator’s introduction, but that stuff is important.
Every time I’ve skipped through it, I’ve had to go back and start over. Read the intro...
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168 reads
My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immedi...
SENECA.
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163 reads
Mark Passages
I love Post-It Flags. I mark every passage that interests me, that makes me think, or that is important to the book. When I don’t have them, I just fold the bottom corner of the page. If there is something I need to look up, I fold the top corner of the page and return to it later.
I car...
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136 reads
Apply and Use
You highlight the passages for a reason. Why type the quotes if you aren’t going to memorize and use them?
Drop them in conversation. Allude to them in papers, in emails, in letters, and in your daily life.
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147 reads
Break out of the School Mindset
The way you learn to read in the classroom is corrupted by the necessity of testing. Tests often have very little to do with proving that you know or care about the material but more about proving that you spent the time reading it.
Forget everything but the message and how to apply it to ...
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251 reads
We haven’t time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that he ran into a storm or somewhere outside the world we know—when every day we’re running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew....
SENECA.
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260 reads
CURATED FROM
IDEAS CURATED BY
Books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.
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Other curated ideas on this topic:
Switch places with the reader
As a content producer, the idea is that your text will serve those who read it, not yourself. So before you start writing, look at the topic you are going to write about from the point of view of your target audience. Ask yourself:
- What experience does this text create...
The career portfolio
Whereas a career path tends to be a singular pursuit (climb the ladder in one direction and focus on what is straight ahead), a career portfolio is a never-ending source of discovery and fulfillment. It represents your vast and diverse professional journey, including the various ...
Master the Art of Reading
To master the art of reading and become an expert reader, you must begin thinking about reading beyond the basics of what you learned in school, and instead, start to see it for the extraordinarily complex, multi-dimensional skill that it is.
There’s no bet...
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