The Fastest Way to Learn Anything From a Book

A simple technique for 10x understanding

TL;DR — Read the book, summarize each section, and rewrite the book based on your summaries.

The beauty of this technique is that you’ll never forget what you read. For example, I distilled David Keith’s book The Case for Climate Engineering (which is actually about solar radiation management, not climate engineering as a whole) into a brief blog-post-like document that I can reference whenever I need. Total time spent (including reading): 4 hours

The act of reconstructing the original book based on your notes has two benefits:

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you by now. If not, then you can continue below to see how easy it actually is. Then you’ll have no choice to do it because it requires so little investment of your time, but gives at least 10x in returns.

Here are the three steps to the Modified Feynman Technique.

Your goal here isn’t full, deep, understanding. It’s to get a general feel of the book. To find out the general message, and to identify any important bits that stick out to you so you can go back to them later.

I wouldn’t say that reading the entire book straight through all at once is necessary. I find it more helpful to break it up in chunks.

The good thing is that the author usually already breaks up their book in chunks for you (how convenient!), usually in structures called “chapters” or “sections”

So for each chapter, read it once, normally. If something sticks out to you or seems important, make a note of it in the back of…

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