6. Surround the Topic

It doesn't take long to figure out if something is worth reading. Skilled writing and high-quality ideas stick out.

As a result, most people should probably start more books than they do. This doesn't mean you need to read each book page by page. You can skim the table of contents, chapter ...

As soon as you finish a book, you can challenge yourself to summarize the entire text in just three sentences. This constraint is just a game, of course, but it forces me to consider what was really important about the book.

Some questions you can consider when summarizing a book include:

One way to imagine a book is like a knowledge tree with a few fundamental concepts forming the trunk and the details forming the branches. You can learn more and improve reading comprehension by “linking branches” and integrating your current book with other knowledge trees.

I'd like to finish by returning to an idea I mentioned near the beginning of this article: read great books twice. The philosopher Karl Popper explained the benefits nicely, “Anything worth reading is not only worth reading twice but worth reading again and again. If a book is worthwhile, then yo...

One way to improve reading comprehension is to choose books you can immediately apply. Putting the ideas you read into action is one of the best ways to secure them in your mind. Practice is a very effective form of learning.

Choosing a book that you can use also provides a strong incentive...