This week I found three book resources.
First, Cal Newport talks about his high volume reading practice. Second, Alex and Tiago talked about Alex's reading and note taking practice. Third, If Books Could Kill talked about the bad science in Freakonomics, which is on my bookshelf.
Cal Newport
Cal talks about reading 5 books in 4 weeks and his process for doing that. Most of it comes down to being intentional about his reading. One thing that stuck out to me was his statement that screens mostly just pull you away from high quality liesure activities like reading. Another good one would be the times I played chess with my kids this week. We bonded and built memories instead of sitting watching TV together.
While you may remember some family movie night, TV with the family multiple days a week likely won't create positive memories. Sure you may look back and realize how little time you spent interacting, but that's not a great memory.
Alex and Books
Alex talked about his note taking strategy, but what really stuck out to me is his newsletter and writing production schedule. I've mostly been reading fiction lately and been struggling to get through any non-fiction books. Maybe a better way to force non-fiction reading is to committ to sharing a single item I've learned each week here?
I tried for a long time to do YouTube videos, and while some people really liked them, overall they performed poorly. I've even heard huge YouTubers like Ali Abdaal say that book videos are not done for business reasons, because no one watches them.
That's not to say that everything should be done for "business" reasons, but if I want to continue to earn from my thoughts...I need to earn something.
Bad Books
If Books Could Kill is about debunking some of the popular books that were actually terrible. I listened to the episode on Freakonomics while doing my first ice -20C run, so no notes were taken.
Overall, it seems like the book made sweeping generalizations that we were supoosed to trust based on the credentials of some scientist. Even though the math was proven wrong before the book was published, and a bunch of the studios were proven wrong...years before the book was published...Freakonomics is often looked at as a great book.
From this I wonder how do I start to evaluate the real quality of what I'm reading. I don't have time to look into the studies of each books or to dig into every quote. Maybe more "random" reading would help (I'll talk about random reading next week) so that you have a better breadth of experience to draw on?
Maybe we just need to stop reading any book that was sold in an airport as they are more likely to contained watered down "popular" science.