“Take a simple idea and take it seriously” – Charlie Munger, American Businessman, Investor, Font of Wisdom
What does it look like to take a simple idea seriously? You can read about it. You can read more about it. But to really take an idea seriously, you have to engage with it. Take it apart and put the pieces back together.
Summarization is one way to do this – maybe that’s why teachers assign book reports.
Summarization is a useful part of the learning process. It also has residual benefits – a summary is a creative work to be shared. Once written, your summary can introduce others to the idea you’ve found worth taking seriously. Book summaries signal “These are ideas I’m deeply interested in. Here’s my proof of work from efforts to understand them.” They can be a starting point to meeting and connecting with others on the internet.
Examples of people I’ve met to through their book summaries:
There’s a problem with summarization though: It’s hard.
Where do you start? You read something, you open a new google doc, you stare at the blinking cursor on a blank page…then what?
That’s why I enjoyed finding Tiago Forte’s Guide to Summarization Playlist on YouTube. It’s a simple, repeatable process to consume, engage, and create around your readings.
Summarization: a simple idea to take seriously.
Yes, this is a summary about summarization. Meta.
The Problem With Writing
Writing isn’t one thing. Tiago explains writing is actually a series of steps:
- Figure out main points
- Figure out supporting points
- Put main points in sequence
- Rearrange the sequence
- Which words to use and change?
Writing is hard when we try to do all these steps at once. Tiago’s summarization method breaks these steps into discrete processes.
Tiago’s Summarization Method
- Highlight While Reading
- Sync Highlights
- Review Highlights (progressive summarization)
- Outline
- Draft Summary
Highlight While Reading
Tiago reads e-books on Kindle, highlighting while he reads. The advantage of this, as we’ll see in the next step, is the ability to sync these digital highlights with an external notetaking system.
What should you highlight? Highlight main ideas. highlight subheadings. But mostly: highlight things you find surprising. In theory, you are engaging with ideas to be transformed. If your reading is unsurprising, it is unlikely to be transformative.
Sync Highlights
Kindle allows you to export highlights manually, you can also use a service like Readwise (link) to automatically sync your highlights. Sync them to where? In theory, you’ll have an external notebook to save your reading highlights. Tiago calls this Building a Second Brain. He wrote a book about it.
My personal process is similar, though I read more blogs and essays than books. I save and highlight blogs/articles in a read-it-later app called Matter, which syncs those highlights via Readwise to Evernote. These three services have monthly fees…I think of that as the worthwhile cost of taking reading seriously.
Review Highlights (Progressive Summarization)
After the highlights are synced, and maybe a week after finishing the book, Tiago will go back to review his highlights. In a first past, he bolds the main ideas that stand out to him. In a later second pass, he marks up the most important bolded ideas with a yellow highlighter.
The result is 3 layers of progressive summarization:
- Raw highlights
- Highlights in Bold
- Bolded Highlights highlighted in Yellow
Similar to the original act of highlighting, focus on, “What is the main point?” and “What surprises you?” as guiding ideas. Tiago emphasizes having a quick, light touch while making these passes through highlights. Don’t get too bogged down anywhere. Keep your momentum up and get into a flow.
Outline
Once the highlights are processed, Tiago organizes them into an outline. Frequently the order of ideas in a book doesn’t align with the best way to summarize them, so this is the process of taking highlights and putting them under headers. Outlining is mostly the process of rearranging your highlighted highlights into a summary structure, though you might add some color of your own at this point as well.
Like with Progressive Summarization, this process should be playful and have a quick, light touch.
Draft Summary
Remember how writing is hard, staring at a blank page, trying to do several processes at once? Congratulations, you don’t have that problem anymore. You’ve taken your favorite highlights from the book, reviewed them multiple times, structured them into an outline, and now all you need to do is add some words as connective tissue to turn your outline into a summary draft.
Tiago recommends doing this in a Google Doc, because it’s easiest to share for feedback once you complete your draft.
Use your outline as a scaffolding. Focus on one section at a time. Cross items off your outline as you include them in your summary. As with your Progressive Summarization and Outlining, approach your summary draft with a quick, light, playful touch. Don’t let your quest for “perfect” prevent you from progress. Get stuff on the page. Let it be messy. Consistently remind yourself, “this is just the first pass,”. If you get stuck, add [placeholder] and move on to the next section. If you need to do something outside writing (find a picture, find a link), make a note in your draft and keep writing. Stay in your writing flow.
Some computer shortcuts:
When switching between your highlights (perhaps in EverNote) and your outline (perhaps in another Evernote) or your outline (in EverNote) and your draft (in Google Docs), it can be helpful to have them as separate windows on the same screen. I use multiple monitors for work, and I still find it best to have the programs side-by-side on the same monitor because my eyes don’t have to travel as far between the two programs.
In Windows, you can use WIN+Left Arrow or WIN+Right Arrow to put the programs side-by-side on the same monitor.
Evernote Shortcuts:
- BOLD: CTRL+B
- HIGHLIGHT: CTRL+SHIFT+H
STRIKETHROUGH: CTRL+T
Conclusion
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times,” – Bruce Lee, Martial Artist, Actor, Professional Kicker
I don’t know if Charlie Munger ever met Bruce Lee, but they agree on taking a simple ideas very seriously.
Summarization is a technique to slow down, to engage with what we read. It helps us process ideas and put them in order in our minds. The AI revolution is coming to automagically summarize things for us, but there’s something lost in this process – the actual thinking. Moving the pieces around is important.
This is me taking summarization seriously. It is a meta-skill that applies to all domains of learning, not just reading. I don’t think you’ll get it just by reading this. So while this summary is sort of for you, it’s more for me. My favorite part of Tiago’s videos is that he doesn’t just describe the process, he records himself performing it on a book he’d just finished. There is a lot of tacit knowledge to be gleaned just watching him filter through and rearrange his highlights, listening to him talk through his thought process as he goes.
I encourage you to take summarization seriously. Watch the videos. Take notes. Write your own summary – I’d love to read your take.
| Tiago Forte’s Guide to Summarizing Books |