How To Remember Everything You Read

The minute you realize your mind is a garden and not a storage vault is the same minute in which you stop being an information hoarder because you don't actually need to remember everything that you read.

Most people think that being informed is the same as being enlightened. They think reading more books makes you more knowledgeable. They think underlining everything that you read and highlighting everything and annotating everything. It all makes you smarter. And they more or less rewrite entire books and topics in the form of linear notes which they are forgetting as soon as they're writing their notes down.

This time last year, I wrote 70,000 words worth of linear notes in Obsidian from three books. Literally just three books. It was The Problems of Philosophy by Burton Russell. It was The Republic by Plato and Aristotle's The Nick McCain Ethics. And that is 35 2,000word newsletters I could have written. That's over half a year's worth of I don't I actually don't even know if I've written that many newsletters. I've been doing this for about 6 months, but that is an insane amount of work for very little knowledge that I actually managed to put inside my head. I I wrote all those notes, but I didn't actually learn anything. And this visual explains why I think taking linear notes is a disease. A genuine real disease because real knowledge looks like a spider's web. It doesn't look like a page worth of notes.

Obsessing over memorization kills your reading comprehension cuz reading isn't actually a receptive process. It's a creative and an iterative one. And I think the value of reading a great book has nothing to do with memorizing what the author has to say. I think the real value from reading comes from how you learn to evaluate what you read and how you build your own mental frameworks. And no two people read the same book because each mind filters and rebuilds differently. So let's begin.

Part one. Your brain wants survival while your soul signals interest. Your brain is hardwired to forget anything that's not important with regards to your survival. I remember sitting at my kitchen table when I was in sixth year. It's about I don't know like four years ago now, four or five. And I used to spend about three or four hours every night like studying. Well, I was studying but it wasn't really high quality studying. It was kind of just pseudo work. Like I just you like you just can't study for that long. I don't think you could probably get about one or two hours a day proper maybe three. But I always used to wonder why it was that I struggled to memorize and learn and tried to remember or retain everything that I was trying to read or learn or all the notes that I'd written down. And it took me many years to realize that I actually have an answer. I just didn't [ __ ] care.

And I think this is the first major insight or profound idea with regards to retaining what you read. Interest is leverage. And this isn't a bug, but rather a feature of your own mind. When you don't care about complex numbers, tumbolos, or the picture of Dorian Gray, I think I need to give that book another go. The information is going to feel quite isolated. It feels like it doesn't have a purpose inside your spider's web of knowledge inside your own brain. But when you have an interest in what you're learning, so for me that at the minute it's jiu-jitsu and I'm reading Albert Camu. I'm reading the myth of sysfist. We're going to talk about that in a second and I'm absolutely loving that at the minute. But it feels like it can retain information so much easier. But why is this the case? Here's a profound idea. Interest is the best leverage you have in achieving anything you want in life. Because if your brain is interested in learning something, it becomes easier to see how what you're learning fits inside the big picture. In other words, the information is integrated and connected to other ideas and concepts. If you can relate what you are reading to a famous Danish philosopher, a Substack article, and that one time you went on a drive at the lads around the Irish coastline until 2 a.m. one Friday night, your brain is going to retain that information better because it feels relevant. It feels connected and thus it has a purpose. It's almost like you're trying to trick your brain to think that certain information is relevant compared to others cuz your brain hates learning information. It doesn't really like change. I think it also helps that if you're interested in what you're learning, what's going to feel like work to other people is going to feel like fun to you. And that's the best form of leverage you have in life because you will be able to outwork anyone. And I think it's really mad. Like think about how much further you would get past most people in life if you really just followed your interests. I will not get into this profound idea right now, but I think you should think about that.

It's scary once you realize that a lot of people think of learning or education as something that can be completed or finished for life. Your mind is not a box that you can store toys in. It's a living, breathing ecosystem. It's a garden of knowledge that must be grown and cultivated across your entire life. And any type of information that feels isolated, it's going to get weeded away. Whereas, if there's information that's connected and integrated inside of the schema inside of your head, inside of your spider's web of knowledge inside your brain. That's how you plant roots and then the information becomes immovable because it's part of your garden of knowledge. Your mind is not a fault. It's a spider's web. This is why you need to view books as raw materials to use in building your own webs of knowledge, which is what people mean when they mention building mental models or mental frameworks. I never understood what people meant when they'd say like, "Oh, build a mental model or build a mental framework." But this is what it actually means. I already learned this about two weeks ago. I think it's very, very cool. You're basically just building a spider's web. You're building lots of dots connecting to each other in their own way, and you're making a mental model that makes sense to you. That's the important part. But you need to be interested in what you're reading. If not, none of this is really going to work very well and it's not going to be enjoyable and you probably won't sustain it.

Part two, the important step that nobody follows. Here's a profound idea. Consumption without thinking is effortless and you cannot grow without effort. True comprehension requires you to continually destroy your understanding through constant evaluation and reiteration. I'm going to repeat that sentence one more time. True comprehension requires you to continually destroy your understanding through constant evaluation and reiteration. Reading a book has never been about storing information. It's about change, transformation. Here's what the evaluation process looks like. Build a rough mental model, test it against new information, evaluate the model, rebuild it, and consume more information, and evaluate and rebuild, and so on so on. It's like trying to achieve any type of goal in life. You have a desired outcome in your mind. You act and try to achieve it. You gain data and thus feedback on whether you moved closer to your goal or not. You evaluate and reiterate and you try again, hopefully with more skill this time.

So, let's say you wanted to start a newsletter on Substack like I did. This is something I've kind of been messing around with for the last 2 weeks or so. Um, let's say you write, you decide to wake up and go, right, I'm going to write for an hour and a half every day. But maybe after a week or so, you kind of realize that after an hour, your head kind of gets a bit foggy. You can't really concentrate as much. you realize that you're kind of getting the bulk of your work done in that first 60 minutes. The last 30 minutes, you can kind of cut it off. You don't need it as much. So, you've acted, you've gained feedback through your actions, and you've learned something. So, now you can decide, okay, for next week, I'm only going to wake up and write for an hour every day. But then another problem's going to come up. You're going to realize like, go, uh, I don't like doing my newsletter across two days. I'd rather do it across four days. Then you go again, you test, you try things, you iterate, and that's just life. That's literally like life in a nutshell, really. A more practical example I could give is probably jiu-jitsu. You try a takedown or a new submission and you fail. And maybe you realize that you're not a baby trying to walk for the first time. You don't tell a baby who couldn't walk after its first attempt to sit down and stay in its arch for life. You need to think about what went wrong and see what changes or improvements you can make to get you closer to your desired outcome.

So here is an example with relation to remembering what you read. Here's an example of how I did this last week reading the myth of cysphus by Albert Camu. Just a quick note, I'm not an expert in any of this and I'm only trying to learn this for myself. And the best way to learn something is to practice teaching it and maybe you can find some value in this too. That's why I wrote this newsletter and this is why I'm making this video right now. This is what my mind map or mental model look like after having read 19 pages. I'll leave it on screen for a second. I think that was about my fifth or sixth iteration. And if you're wondering why there's not many words on the page, it's because I don't need them there. They're all inside my head. I said this in my last video last week. Learning happens inside the brain. It doesn't happen on a page or on a screen. It happens inside your head. So, the less that's on the page, the better. It's inside my own brain. And that mental model makes sense to me when I look at it, which is important because it's my brain. It's the information inside my head that's important. And anytime I come across like a keyword or a concept or an idea, I I add it to my mind map and then I have to re-evaluate the entire model like the entire model changes. So I add a concept or a keyword to the big picture and as a result the whole big picture has to change. The whole mind map gets evaluated, destroyed and rebuilt. And the entire process of doing this helps me to think about what I'm reading because again thinking happens inside your mind and it should always happen there first before you ever touch pen to paper or Apple pencil to iPad. So I always try to force myself to think for at least 20 seconds before after I close a book and before I write anything down or draw anything on my mind map, I force myself to think for about 20 30 seconds. I look at the wall and I just question myself. And the reason why destroying your mind map and then rebuilding it is so effective is because of what's called the hypercorrection effect. This effect shows that when you were wrong about something, you actually remember the correction a lot more than if you were just uncertain about it in the beginning. So before I read anything, I like to do a bit of pre-learning. I like to skim through what I'm about to read literally just for the purpose of exposing myself to the text. I'm not trying to remember anything. I'm just looking out for concepts, keywords, have them in my head, and I try to visualize or even I'll draw it I'll draw it out poorly, but I'll draw out a mental model of what I think I'm about to read. And the reason why is because of the effect. So, when you are reading, you should draw or visualize a mental framework and accept that it's probably wrong, but it's just a hypothesis. You want to come across new information so you can evaluate the model and rebuild it. This allows for deeper processing and encoding of the material. So build your mental model with confidence. Let new information reshape it and your brain will retain the correction far more deeply.

Here's another profound idea. If you're trying to remember everything you read, you're just memorizing and not actually thinking. I think true reading is about evaluation. So here's a three-step system that can help you to evaluate, retain, and remember more of what you read. And although I'm still learning a lot of this myself, I'm not an expert at any of this. This even this system isn't perfect, it will still help you with your comprehension quite a lot. My comprehension has already increased 10fold. I've been doing this for like the last two weeks and I it's mental. I think taking linear notes is an absolute waste of time. I think being able to evaluate information from a book through mind mapping. I think it's I'm going to be I want to learn about it. I want to learn and I want to write about it and I want to do videos on it cuz if I'm finding value in it, maybe you will too.

Here's your framework to remember everything you read. Step one is pre-learning. The reading process actually begins before you open the book. You want to prime your brain with information it can start making connections to immediately. So spend 5 to 10 minutes doing what I call pre-learning. So flip through some pages. Look out for headings, chapter names, keywords, or concepts. Read a line or two here and there. Like I said, this step is purely for just exposing yourself to what you're about to read. That's it. Just skim. Just look through. Just flick through a couple of pages. Read a paragraph here and there, a page here and there. Look out for text in bold or italics. You're just looking at the text before you read it. Then take a guess as to what you are going to read or what you think you're going to be reading about. And this will help with the hyperorrection effect. So for the myth of Sisphus, my scan of the first few pages led me to my incredibly vague hypothesis. I think the myth of Seisphus will be about the story of a man pushing a boulder up a hill. And upon my reading of the book, I realized that the book was a lot more complicated and it had a lot more examples than just Seephus. And from my skimming of the book, I realized that the section on Seisphus was actually a lot shorter than I thought. And this is the hyper correction effect. I remember that. I will always remember that now. So, I skimmed through the first 30 pages or so, and here is a list of all the keywords that I found interesting that stood out to me. I'll leave them on screen now for a second, but this has given me a rough idea of what I'm going to be reading about. And before I open the book, I was visualizing thinking about how these concepts might relate to one another and why. This step is mainly for building the mental scaffolding in which you can start building your understanding upon. And it's not just for helping you memorize isolated pieces of information. Remember, you're evaluating and rebuilding your understanding as you read.

Step two is reading. Here are your two profound reading rules. Number one, read until you come across a keyword or concept that causes you to re-evaluate your mental model. Number two, read for 10 to 15 minutes max before stopping to re-evaluate and rebuild your mental model. Because when this happens, you found a piece within the big picture. Thus, your entire mental model needs to change. And because of the hyperorrection effect, you don't want to write all your concepts down and then mind map later. You want to be building, evaluating, destroying, and then rebuilding as you read. Here is a profound idea. Thinking happens inside your head first, then on paper. Any type of thinking on paper in the form of notes, mind mapping, etc. should help you think inside your head. But most people think on paper in order to skip doing the hard work of actually thinking with their brain. That's why highlighting and annotating is pseudo work. It feels like you're doing work, but you're just tricking yourself. I spent 1 hour doing this during the week, and I read 15 pages. And most of my time was spent evaluating and rebuilding my mind map, and I was just thinking about the text. That was what I was doing for most of the time. Any type of questions I had, I just wrote them down beside me or I just ask Google. And then I searched for an answer when I was trying to evaluate my mind map and see how the answers fit inside of the big picture. Here are some additional tips on when you should know when to stop reading. You feel confused. You feel overwhelmed. You realize you didn't fully grasp something from one page ago. Your mind starts wandering. You're starting to feel bored or you've hit your 10 to 15 minute reading limit. You don't have to do a mind map for all this, but I genuinely do think it helps with evaluating with the evaluation and the reiterative process. Like all study tools or techniques, they are only as good as the learning they seek to aid inside your own head. I've said this in a few newsletters now, and I said it in last week's video, and I think I've already said it today, but I'll say it once more. Learning happens inside the brain, not on a page or on a screen. Anything happening outside the brain should be helping your learning inside your brain through thinking or evaluating. Because what matters when it comes to reading a book, it's not page count, it's comprehension. Read to comprehend. Read to evaluate. Read to destroy and rebuild. Read to separate the wheat from the chaff. Read not to memorize but to understand. Read to think, to visualize, to become someone new. And while you're reading, always ask yourself these questions. Where does this fit within the big picture? How does it relate to other concepts? What do I need to correct and rebuild in my mental model? What patterns can I see or potentially visualize?

I'm going to show you two pictures now. This is how my mental model has changed between my first reading session and my second reading session about the Sysphus fella. This is my mental model after having read 19 pages shown once more. And this is my mental model after having read 29 pages. I did a lot more iterations in this, but in all honesty, I forgot to screenshot them. So, these are the only two that I have. But I I think I've done at least 10 or 15 different like the mind map has looked completely different 10 to 15 times and it's just evaluating the information, the concepts, the relationships, trying to see how do they connect in a way that makes the most sense to me in the most simplified way possible. And by the time I complete my next reading session, this mental model is going to look completely different once again.

Step three is consolidation. For this step, I like to teach my mind map out loud. I watched one of uh Dr. Justin Song's videos on how Olympic athletes train because I want to create my own feedback system for jiu-jitsu. I want to be able to improve my jiu-jitsu as much as I can and I don't really have a system in place for learning it. I kind of watch videos and then I kind of train and then I don't really have I don't really know I don't have a system in place for it. So I watch this video and I ended up making this mind map worth of notes from that video. So the mind map basically went through seven or eight different versions of itself before I landed on this one. I think this one for me anyway. I'm only a beginner. I'm not an expert in any of this. But for me as of right now with my current level of knowledge, this makes the most sense to me. And my dad was telling me about some golf lessons he's been doing. So I showed him this and I explained it to him as I thought it would have been quite useful for him to to take some information from it. It would probably apply to his golf if he's trying to improve it. So I use that as a chance to test my understanding of it. This step on consolidation is about being able to understand and comprehend information inside your own head. That's why there are very few notes on the mind map above. For example, I know that LLP means latent learning period. It's just inside my brain and not on the page, which is what truly matters. That symbol beside the injection is a reference to the tool album Fear Inoculum, reminding me about fear inoculation and how it improves stress tolerance. In simple terms, do lots of something you don't find very comfortable doing and you will eventually get more comfortable doing it across time. And I think this is why taking hundreds of pages worth of notes or 70,000 words worth of notes like I made the mistake of doing is complete [ __ ] Your notes need to be in your head, not on a page.

Here's another profound idea. Use the Fman technique to explain your mind map out loud as if teaching someone who has never heard of these concepts before. This exposes gaps in your understanding that you can go and fill in later. Then you just have to review your mind map across time. Space repetition couple times a week, a couple times a month. Start with every other day, then a couple times a week, then once or twice a week, then once or twice a month, and then so on.

I'm going to leave it there for today, but I just want to say that I don't think this video does justice on what I've been practicing or learning about or what I've been trying to learn. And there are so many better sources on all this. I would highly recommend Dr. Justin Sun. I've been watching a lot of his videos. I think he's absolutely incredible. Again, none of this is I'm not an expert in any of this. I just have an interest in it and I think the best way to learn something is to practice teaching it. I think making these videos and writing about it in my newsletters is a very good way of helping me to learn all of the great techniques that he talks about. Go check out his stuff. Don't watch my stuff. Watch his stuff. He's an expert in it. He's very knowledgeable in what he's talking about. I just have an interest in it. I'm just trying to offer my perspective on nonlinear learning on my maps for for now. Anyway, I'm going to be talking about other stuff in the future. I have plans of what I want to talk about, but again, I'm just trying to learn this from myself and I'm just trying to hope that you can take something valuable from it as well. If you're skilled at mind mapping, can you please leave a comment and tell me if I've made any mistakes or if there's any gaps that I can improve on or what I could do to improve my mind maps. I'm always hoping to learning and thank you to everyone that commented on the literacy crisis video that I did. I read every single comment. I've been trying to respond to all of them and I really really like how people have been just starting conversations and talking about things that they're interested in, books that they're interested in. I'm a lot more motivated to start reading some fiction now. I think I would like to do videos on it in the future. I think I want to do a proper full-on video on the myth of Sisphus in the future on the idea of purpose now to find it and I'm kind of brainstorming at the minute. But yeah, and if you've been learning that in yourself or reading anything, send me a DM on Substack. I'd love to hear about. And if you want a complete reading system with step-by-step protocols and evaluation frameworks, you can download my new guides to profound reading. You'll also get two bookmarks that will help you with the evaluation process instantly. And you'll also get two months free access to my paid Substack tier. So you get all my paid newsletters and all that for free. Two months on any other paid posts that I'm going to be doing. It's currently 20% off until December 9th. So check that out down below. Anyways, thank you for your time and your attention. I know it's very, very valuable. I really really appreciate it and you're an absolute legend. Thank you.