EGD News #141 — How I get the most out of books
Sent on July 1st, 2022.
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I read over 50 books last year. I’ve already read some 32 books this year, and we are in the middle of June. I love to learn new things and apply the learnings from those books to my work.
Here’s how I get the most out of the books I read. You can watch the video below or read the piece below it.
Kindle
I usually read books on the Kindle. It’s so easy to buy a book on Amazon and then have it instantly delivered to my Kindle.
But that’s not the only benefit. As I’m reading books on my Kindle, I tend to highlight interesting phrases or paragraphs that I feel are worth saving for later processing.
What I do is I swipe the area, which I then add as a highlight. I also try to add a note for each highlight so that I can remember the context of what I might have been thinking here as I included the highlight. It helps to give more reasoning why this highlight was important.
Readwise to Roam Research
I have two tools for capturing and processing my book highlights. I use Readwise to transfer the highlights from Kindle.com’s highlights page, which then moves them to Roam Research.
Both are premium tools, but I would say that they are definitely worth the price, as everything has become relatively automated.
You see, Readwise is hooked up to my Roam Research, and when I enter Roam Research, I can see all the new highlights that have been synced into Roam during the night. I read a book last night and added these highlights, and now they are in my Roam Research.
Literature Notes
To process my notes for future use, I’ve adopted a system called the Zettlekasten method. There are pieces on the internet and many videos on Youtube about the Zettlekasten method, so I won’t go into too much detail on the system.
To keep it short, the Zettlekasten method consists of two kinds of documents:
Once I’ve started accumulating highlights from a book, I create a Literature Note where I distill the notes down to the essential ones. I also try to develop new thoughts based on the highlights.
These thoughts I store as Permanent Notes.
Permanent Notes
Based on the new things that I’ve learned from the book, I create Permanent Notes. These should be thoughts that came from reading the book. I don’t care if I’m copying verbatim what the book said, as long as I can distill a new insight or actionable thought.
In Roam Research, I label Literature Notes with the Red book in front, and I give the name of the Literature note to be the name of the original piece.
The Permanent Notes I label with a green book in front, then give a four-digit numbering, where the first number represents the category, the second number the sub category, the third a topic, and the fourth is a unique ID number for the topic. I then add the thought to the name of the permanent note.
This is the system I use. Here are some links that might come in handy:
(Photo by Perfecto Capucine)
Get my book, “Long Term Game: How to build a video games company” from Amazon. Available on Kindle, audiobook, and paperback. Check it out
Ask Me Anything #9 — Investing questions
This is the ninth Ask Me Anything episode, where I answer questions on how I look at investing. I had a session with a team from one VC firm and they were asking me questions. And then I also picked up another interesting question about angel investing.
I answer these questions:
- Given your angel investing journey, what are the kind of investment frameworks/ mental models that you apply while evaluating founders/teams?
- What are the key attributes of founders/teams that get you excited or conversely red flags that give you pause in a deal?
- As you see companies from seed to scale, what are the operational challenges that you often see founders struggle with?
- What have been the top three lessons you’ve learned from running an angel syndicate?
If you have a question you’d like me to answer, you can head on over here to fill them out.
Listen to the full episode by going here.
Quote that I’ve been thinking about
Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history.
— Kelly Hayes
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Hope you have a great weekend!
New articles that are worth the read will be shared again in August! I’m at the cabin now and minimizing the amount that I look at on Twitter and LinkedIn. I hope to share more interesting pieces when I’m back in the city 🙂
I hope you have a great weekend!
Joakim
