How I Remember Everything I Read
The seven levels journey to remember everything that you read.
I was struggling in my studies; it was hard to remember my subjects, and even though I have the concept but I was not able to produce as much as alike in the textbook. Of course, that wasn’t the concept of road learning, but that was the concept of how accurately you can reproduce your learning.
Then I started the research that how can I improve my memory retention capacity. I go through many books and other available content on the Internet, like YouTube, and here are my memory retention techniques. These techniques help me a lot to remember everything I read. It might be helpful for you as well.
The seven levels journey to remember everything that you read.
If you’re like me, who read books but probably forgot most of the stuff you’ve read.
A few months ago, I recognized that this was a big problem for me too. So I’ve been actively working on trying and resolving it.
List of Levels
- The Muggle
- The Squib
- Hufflepuff
- Ravenclaw
- Dumbledore’s Army
- The Order of the Phoenix
- Dumbledore Himself
The Muggle
We start our reading careers at level one, the Muggle. This is where we read stuff, but we’re just reading it. We’re not engaging with the material beyond just passively reading it.
We’re not highlighting it; we’re not taking any notes.
When we’re muggles, we’ll end up just reading loads and loads and hoping we’re going to absorb stuff by diffusion, by osmosis, whatever passively. Still, we’re not like actively using any brainpower to engage with it.
This is fine if we’re reading fiction, but for nonfiction, and when I read nonfiction, I want to get some insights from it. I want to learn stuff. I’m dumb, and therefore, I forget everything that I read and, thus, this isn’t good for me.
there is a phenomenon in memory research called the forgetting curve, which shows that over time, our memory for everything decays
unless we find a way to engage with it or consolidate our memory of the thing. At some point, we might realize that our Muggle existence is pretty unfulfilling.
And so we’ll come across level two of the journey, which is The Squib
The Squib.
And when you become a Squib at level two, you’re now reading stuff, but you are highlighting or underlining the things that particularly resonate with you.
This is easy enough to do if you read on a Kindle.
For Apple: Kindle
For Android: Kindle
But the problem with highlighting stuff is A; we don’t remember the stuff that we highlight, and there is a mountain of evidence that shows
that highlighting or underlining does nothing to improve our memory of the stuff. So.
I reached level three, which we’re calling Hufflepuff.
Hufflepuff
And level three, Hufflepuff, is when you have a systematic system for reviewing your highlights.
Service called Readwise.
Link
For Apple: Readwise
For Android: Readwise
And what Readwise does is that it automatically connects to your Kindle account, and it pulls in all of the highlights you’ve ever highlighted
from all the books that you’ve read. And what they do is that every day,
they send you an email with five random highlights. But that is not quite enough too. So.? Next level four.
And that is when we get to level four. And we’re calling level four Ravenclaw.
Ravenclaw
This is a system whereby you automatically pull in your highlights into a central note-taking app.
I’ve got my Readwise database, which has all the books, and it shows all the highlights I’ve made in each one.
This is where we’ve got a tool that automatically pulls in our highlights. It’s all very convenient when it’s sitting there.
But level four is still a little bit problematic because this is still very passive.
All we’re doing at this point is bringing in highlights, and we’re hoping that our future selves will at some point revisit the highlights just because we want to.
And this is where we start to get into the fun territory because now we have level five, Dumbledore’s Army.
Dumbledore’s Army
When you’re at level five or a member of the DA, you engage with books by taking quick notes on the stuff that you’ve read.
Notion app Link
For Apple: Notion
For Android: Notion
So this is very quick. And this level, level five, is what I regret not doing
with everything I’ve ever read. Because if you can summarize a book in three sentences, that’s like a fantastic way of actually engaging with the content. And as someone like Richard Feynman would say, it’s a way of actively ensuring that you understand the concepts in the book.
Now the point of this system is that it takes a small amount of time to think about, but it’s not a significant amount of time.
So level five is, I think, an excellent sweet spot between the amount of effort it takes to do this, i.e. it doesn’t take that much action, but I think it also gives you a lot of value when you can start summarizing books in three sentences.
The notion is a fantastic app that it’s probably changed my life.
I organize my entire life around it. I use it to take notes at school and to prepare for a number of my exams.
Let’s move on to level six.
The Order of the Phoenix
This is where we start to get interesting because level six is the Order of the Phoenix and the only difference between level five and level six is that in level six, you’re still doing all of this stuff. You’re still writing kind of book in three sentences, the impressions, how it’s changed your life.
But we also have a section for a summary and notes on the book itself.
So what I’m trying to do with all of the books that have particularly resonated with me over the years, books that I would write five stars
or books that I think have changed my life. What I’m doing is I’m going through them again, and I’m writing literature notes.
I’m creating my mini summary of the book. Still, I’m focusing on the points that have particularly resonated with me or topics that I found particularly interesting or insightful or surprising.
There are a few things to keep in mind about this. So firstly, there’s an excellent book called “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sönke Ahrens.
This book talks about the Zettelkasten method of note-taking, which is kind of what inspired this article. And sort of one level of this is as you’re reading stuff, you’re taking literature notes, but the idea of literature notes is that we want to avoid copying and pasting quotes from the book.
We want to actively try and rephrase things in our own words to make sure that we understand the concepts, and the other benefit of taking book notes is that if you are interested in sharing your work online,
you can publish your book notes.
If anyone’s considering starting a personal blog or a website or a YouTube channel, taking notes from books is an enormous value add because many people don’t have time to read or think they don’t have time to read. And there are also so many good books out there that if you can act as the curator if you can curate the best books, this is the sort of stuff that helps you build your brand as a sharer educator.
And it’s just a pretty fun thing to do.
So this is where I’m aiming with level six, but then we come to level seven, which is Dumbledore himself.
Dumbledore
This is where we’re going whole ham on these Zettelkasten Method of note-taking. This is sort of where I’m hoping to go, eventually. I’ve only really done it for a handful of books, but I found the exercise to be quite helpful every time I’ve done it.
And the idea behind this is that once we’ve taken our literature notes about the book, what we’re going to do is we’re going to turn them into permanent notes as in these Zettelkasten Method, or an Evergreen Notes as Andy Matuschak, who’s this also note-taking guru on the Internet.
That is the vibe.
I prefer the phrase Evergreen Notes because I think it sounds a bit better.
You can give a name whatever you want; it’s your choice.
It was like a method that this German, called Lumen used to use back in the day And as I read stuff in books, articles, podcasts, tweets, whatever,
what I’m trying to do slowly, very slowly over time, turn these into Evergreen Notes and then have this index for Evergreen Notes.
It is nice because it helps you consolidate your thinking on all sorts of different subjects, especially if you have many interests. It can be kind of hard to keep track of all the stuff that you’ve read, but this is one layer of abstraction above the things that you read, figuring out a way to consolidate the insights from them.
You need to write summaries in three sentences of all the books that you’ve read and write your thoughts on them. Because in 2 years in 5 years, you’re going to be so incredibly grateful that you’ve got this treasure trove of knowledge inside a system other than your brain because you’re going to forget everything that you read otherwise.”
The seven levels journey to remember everything you read is a promising solution if you follow it seriously.
https://mtouqeer.medium.com/5-promising-strategies-of-being-memory-athletes-911f75256374
