Transcription
You know what it's like. You read a book, you might even take notes on it, and a week or two later, you're left with only some vague idea of what you learned. But if ultimately, it's almost as if you never read the book at all, then how much time are you actually wasting?
In this video, I'm going to show you the exact method I use to absorb, retain, and use everything I learn. A method I've not only taught to countless students over more than 12 years, but which I've also used to publish internationally recognized academic research. And this method is what I call the critical thinking approach to reading. And this method consists of two parts, which I'll give full examples of. The first part of this approach is deconstruction, and the second part is synthesis.
In addition to my academic work, I've taught and tutored in lots of subjects over the years, from history to standardized testing to statistics, neuroscience, you name it. And recently, I was tutoring a college student in macroeconomics. And I taught her in the same way I teach pretty much every topic. And it's the exact same way I want you to start reading, too.
So, I started to teach her about GDP and how most people learn this by examining the components of the GDP equation. And voila, now you're just supposed to memorize and accept it as facts because the book in all its unquestionable authority told you so, right? But the thing is, we don't truly learn and internalize information unless we question it and think outside the box.
So, it was at that point that I asked her a key question. A question you should ask yourself as you're reading any book. Can you see any potential flaws in this concept, definition, or measurement? That's when we broke down each variable in the GDP equation. And she started to realize that the variables in that equation measure the value of economic output solely in terms of money. Well, duh. It's an economics course after all, right? Sure. But then we started to discuss alternative and complimentary measures of economic growth such as gross national happiness or G&H, the human development index or HDI, and quality adjusted life years or qualies. Therefore, we got into the deeper question: how should we measure economic value and output?
And you might be thinking, ah, well, what's the point of all this? Why not just teach directly out of the textbook and have the student memorize the definitions? Well, because quite simply, that's not learning. You see, in recent decades, a lot of great work in the cognitive sciences has shown that this kind of questioning process and outside the box thinking, as applied to learning and reading, helps us own the concepts we learn. When you truly own the concepts by breaking them down and deconstructing them, you'll never forget them. They'll be literally hardwired into a new neural network of associations you physically created in your brain. And if you want to practice and dramatically improve this skill, then feel free to check out my free critical thinking master class in the pinned comment below.
So then, let's take a look at how I use this deconstruction approach to reading on almost a daily basis and how I've used it in the past. Let's take a recent book I read called The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy by Nick Romeo. Now, here are some of my notes on the book, which I almost always take when I read a book. There are lots of methods for notetaking out there, pretty much all of which can be effective. I find that the most important thing is not the specific method of note-taking you use, but instead just the fact that you one, go back and take notes on what you read in the first place, and two, add your own commentary.
As you see, I don't add my own commentary to every note I take, but as we scroll through here, you can see that I ask several key questions in my notes and bold them. And I also bold any notes that contain a bit of my own commentary or reaction to the author's ideas. In this way, I'm not simply passively reading and thinking, "Oh, that's a great idea," and then forgetting about it a week later. Instead, because I'm actively questioning and engaging with the material, the knowledge sticks with me.
For instance, let's take a look at some of my notes here on Romeo's chapter entitled The Hidden Costs of Everything. I found the concept he introduced here called true price to be very intriguing. But because I had never heard of it and therefore I had no prior knowledge of it, I wanted to take a skeptical stance, which by the way, is the same way you should treat any new information like this. As Romeo explains, true price is essentially a way of incorporating all the hidden human and environmental costs into a final retail price that the end consumer sees in the store. If true price is actually a viable way of helping mitigate these costs, then great. But note here some of the questions I asked in my notes: How do we calculate true price? Do we have actual large-scale data showing that it does not have negative effects on consumption? If so, can it be replicated at scale?
By asking these questions, it provides a jumping off point for further independent investigation on my part. In fact, as a result of just asking these few questions, it led me straight to the library to take out some other books that could help me examine these questions. And what do you think this helps me do? It helps to solidify the knowledge. And knowledge is kind of like planting a tree. If the roots grow only slightly below the surface, the tree won't last long and will die. But if the roots burrow deep into the soil, the tree can grow bigger and stronger and survive for a long period of time.
But this process of deconstruction is just the first step. After all, a tree can burrow its roots deep, but without water, oxygen, and sunlight, it'll also die. And so that's where the process of synthesis comes in. I find this idea of knowledge as a tree to be really useful. I mean, think about what a tree does with water, oxygen, and sunlight. It doesn't just use them in an isolated way. It combines them in the elegant biochemical process of photosynthesis to create something entirely new. And that's exactly what we should do too when we read books.
To illustrate what I mean, let's go back to that economics tutoring session I mentioned before. As I was teaching the session, we eventually got to the concepts of consumer price index or CPI and what is called the GDP deflator. Now, many students have difficulty telling the two apart and recalling what they are and what their purpose is. Of course, once again, they could simply robotically memorize the concepts, move on to the next topic, and not truly learn anything. But then, here's where the synthesis approach became important. Not only did I break down and deconstruct these two concepts for her, but I then gave her a new way of understanding them by relating them to each other.
For instance, CPI is used to measure inflation in consumer goods, whereas the GDP deflator measures economy-wide inflation. Now, that's pretty abstract still for a first-time learner. So, why not understand it in the following way instead? You see, CPI and GDP deflator aren't really two separate and distinct concepts. Instead, they are mathematically related to each other. For instance, the GDP deflator measures prices across the entire economy. That means it measures the prices of all goods and services. CPI is part of this in that it measures only those consumer goods. So then, the GDP deflator minus the CPI equals the price of all non-consumer goods in the economy, which is sometimes referred to as the inflation gap.
And so, do you see what I did here? I didn't have to invent some brand new concept from scratch here. The concept of the inflation gap is already in the economics literature. But what I did have to do was relate these two concepts to each other in some way that resulted in a new concept. In this case, an equation that relates the two to each other.
So then, how can you do this when you read a book? Well, let's take an example of a book I've recently been rereading, The Community of Rights by one of my favorite philosophers, Alan Goworth. So, I was just revisiting his idea of private property rights and his argument for what he calls the purposive labor thesis. Essentially, this thesis states that people have rights to as much property as they need to fulfill their generic rights to freedom and well-being as defined by what he calls the principle of generic consistency. Okay. Okay. I know this is a lot of dense material to reflect on here, but just stay with me for the sake of the example.
So, upon rereading this, I started to try deconstructing his argument by asking key questions as we saw with Romeo's book. And I came to the conclusion that it wasn't clear enough to me how we could determine based on his theory how much freedom and well-being each person is entitled to with respect to their property rights and why. But that's where I began to use synthesis. I asked the key question: What would the thinker Jorgen Habermas say in response to Goworth here? How would he solve this problem? By simply asking this question, it forced me to re-engage with what I previously had read from Habermas, relate it to what I'm learning from Goworth, and ideally synthesize it into my own ideas on the topic.
And this is exactly what you should do as you read. You should be forming your own opinions on what you're reading. One way I do this is by journaling and also, as we've seen, by note-taking. You can also do this by engaging in conversation with others about the content, but that's not entirely necessary to make this work. And by doing this, you're once again forming literal networks between different neuron groups in your brain, leading to the strengthening of memory associated with these concepts.
So, using deconstruction and synthesis in our reading process sounds great, but what if you don't know how to deconstruct concepts in the first place? Doesn't it take some prior knowledge to know how to deconstruct them? Not necessarily. As we've seen, all it really takes is a little effort to ask some basic skeptical questions about the content and look for further information or books to answer them. But I also make heavy use of large language models such as ChatGPT to help me understand and relate new concepts I'm reading about.
For instance, let's say you're reading something like Atomic Habits by James Clear, but despite the examples he gives, you don't really understand his concept of "make it attractive" as a method of habit formation. Well, you can simply ask ChatGPT to give you an example of this principle as it applies to a specific activity in your own life. Or let's say you're learning statistics from a textbook. Well, you might be confused about the difference between standard deviation and variance, as is pretty common. So, simply ask ChatGPT something like, "Why is variance calculated as sigma squared but standard deviation is just sigma?" From there, don't stop questioning and asking why, why, until you're completely satisfied with the explanation.
Critical thinking not only literally grows your brain, but it also is the key to self-mastery and self-directedness in our lives. What are you reading now? And how will you use this approach in your books? I'd love to hear about it in the comments. And if you want to keep leveling up your critical thinking to make a massive impact not only on your own life, but on the lives of countless others, then be sure to watch this next.