How to Actually Read a Book
The Amplified Impact Podcast
September 20th, 2023
Today I’m diving into something close to my heart: reading.
Books were my childhood escape, but I realized I was consuming knowledge without applying it, leading to an unfulfilling life.
So, here are four steps to read better:
1. Read Actively: Skip multitasking and immerse yourself in reading. It’s uncomfortable but worthwhile.
2. Connect the Dots: Writing helps solidify your thoughts. Journal, blog, or tweet your reflections.
3. Integrate: Implement what you learn. Reading without action is wasted time.
4. Repeat: Reread books to uncover new insights as you evolve.
Remember, it’s about quality, not quantity.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“The goal should never be to read more for the sake of reading more. The goal should be to read better.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
Books have always had this very special place in my heart. Growing up, they were a way for me to, I don’t know, escape and live in my imagination. And because I don’t know if I was, like, a really awkward, weird kid, I probably was because I’m a weird adult. I had a lot of hard I had a very difficult time making friends as a child. I was, like, very introverted. I just didn’t put myself out there, didn’t go out of my way to make friends. It just was so scary that I would retreat into the world of fiction, into world of reading books and falling in love with the characters and the world. And I think that gave birth to my love of storytelling in a very real way.
Anthony Vicino:
And that served me well throughout my life. But there came a point where I realized that I was reading way too much. I was reading well over 100 books per year. One year, I read, like, 130 books, and I was just consuming so much knowledge. Like, I talk about here is that I was collecting the dots, but I wasn’t doing anything with that information. I wasn’t really applying it. And the result was I was probably the most well informed, homeless 28 year old that you’ve ever met in your life. I could recite all sorts of random, meaningless stories and ideas from books that I had read.
Anthony Vicino:
But if you looked at the quality of my life at that moment, being dead, flat broke, no relationship to speak of, and no home besides my 1980s Ford O’connelline, I wasn’t applying what I was consuming. And it took me a long time to realize that I was really just performing mental masturbation when I was reading. Like, the feeling of being productive and learning and growing. I really wasn’t doing anything with the information. I was just collecting. I was hoarding it like a dragon, but I was never spending it. I was never spending the information. I was never using it in a meaningful way to actually go and create something.
Anthony Vicino:
And therefore, it was just wasted time in a lot of cases. Now, it’s not to say that reading isn’t important. I think it’s very damn important. But the goal should never be to read more for the sake of reading more. The goal should be to read better. And so I want to share with you just four simple steps that you can follow when you’re reading to read better, so that you’re not just falling into the same trap that I was, which is like consume, consume, consume, but you’re actually learning, you’re growing, you’re implementing, and you’re actually seeing meaningful changes take place in your life. And when you do that, then books can be incredibly powerful. Now, the first step in this four step process is to read.
Anthony Vicino:
But I want to make a clarification here, so a lot of people, they come and they ask, okay, so is it all right if I listen to the audiobook or do I actually have to read the book? Is it okay if I read on Kindle? And my stance is that listening is a passive activity. You can listen while you’re going for a walk, while you’re doing the dishes, while you’re vacuuming the living room or driving to work. And on the surface, this seems like a win because you’re multitasking, you’re both able to do this thing and you’re getting the information into your brain. But if we accept that the quality of our results depends on the quality of our focus and multitasking is nothing more than that dilution of our focus, then the obvious extension of that is that the quality of our learning via audio is diluted. And I think this is true because I know a lot of people who listen to audiobooks and they can recite the stories and they have the vague idea overarching of what was happening in it, but they don’t have like a really deep, fundamental understanding of the material. And so I believe that one of the things that makes reading so powerful, actually putting the words through your eyeballs to get them into your brain, is that it is very difficult. It’s a very hard, time consuming, it’s cumbersome, it’s slow, it’s uncomfortable. But I think that is a feature, not a bug.
Anthony Vicino:
I think it’s because you have to wrestle with the information. You have to stay focused when reading the actual book, that the information goes deeper into your neurons, it settles deeper. And I think that’s so damn important when it comes to reading better, that is massively important, is that we’re getting deep comprehension. Now, if you just want to immerse yourself in information in the topic, then a podcast and an audiobook, those can be great. But if you want really deep understanding of a topic, I think reading is the way to go. Now, you could also layer these together. There’s a lot of research that suggests that reading while listening to the audiobook simultaneously helps retention. And so that can be a great avenue.
Anthony Vicino:
But I think if you want to take your education, your learning to the next level, if you want to be serious about it, it is not something that you do while doing something else. It is something that requires your full intention and focus. And the reason I think so many people like the audiobook is because they don’t need to give it their full attention. Again, you don’t give something your full attention, you don’t get the full results. So step two, once we’ve read, we consumed, we get the information into our brain. We need to connect the dots that we’ve been collecting. And my favorite technique for this is just it’s writing. I talk about this all the time.
Anthony Vicino:
Writing is thought made physical because your chaotic mind is like, swirling constantly with thousands and tens of thousands of thoughts every single day. But if you never take the moment, if you never take the time to extract those thoughts and to funnel them out through your fingers or pen tips onto the paper, it’s very hard to really ever come to a deep understanding of a topic. Like, I don’t know what I think on something until I’ve written about it. And now, again, writing is hard. Writing sucks, it’s uncomfortable, I get that. But again, the difficulty is part of the beauty. That’s what makes it so valuable. So you could journal, you could create a blog, you could make social media posts.
Anthony Vicino:
A lot of times when I’m doing videos like this or a podcast like this, it’s based off of something that I wrote about previous. In a lot of cases these days I’m using Twitter as like my live journal, my live blog as things I’m thinking about. I’m putting them there and I’m unpacking them in real time. So if you’re ever interested, come follow me on Twitter at Anthony Vasino. You can see all my writing there, but find the avenue that works for you, but make sure that you take time and actively reflect on the information that you’re consuming. Step three in this reading better process is to integrate. And this is the most important step because without this, you are literally just mentally masturbating. Without execution, your ideas are worthless.
Anthony Vicino:
So it does not matter if you read the best book in the world and if you had the greatest ideas and you journaled about it and it was wonderful. If you don’t implement what you learn, if you don’t integrate it into your life, your life will remain unchanged. And that is so damn important that it bears repeating. If you don’t implement the information that you’re acquiring, your life will remain unchanged. And again, that is the very definition of wasted time. Then to consume the book, to learn something, but never do anything with it, to not change your behavior and therefore change your results, is the ultimate time waste. Don’t do that. Integrate what you’re learning.
Anthony Vicino:
It doesn’t have to be the whole book, it just should be a singular idea from it and then iterate on it. Now, this leads us to step four, which is to repeat the process from the beginning. I think there’s magic in rereading a book because the words are the same, but you are not. It’s this idea that you can’t step into the same river twice, right? So if you followed those previous first three steps, then you’ve reflected and you’ve integrated. You are no longer the same person that you were when you read the book for the first time. And so you’re going to see things in a different light, you’re going to have a different context, you’re going to take new things away from it. And I think if you complete that cycle enough times, you keep rereading that book, you keep reading, reflecting, integrating and repeating it again until you get to the point where you go, okay, I know this book like the back of my hand. I’ve extracted everything that I can from it.
Anthony Vicino:
Then you can move on and start rereading a different book, right? But I think that is the way that you get truly deep comprehension of a topic is to go very, very deep and reread a bunch. So I did a video recently on the YouTube channel at Anthony Vasino where I broke down the twelve books that I think you should reread every single year. The books, at least, that I reread that have been very, very influential for me. So if you’re interested, go check that out. Otherwise I will catch you all you beautiful people back around these parts tomorrow. But until then, say happy refocus, my friends.
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