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Give yourself some credit for going through 99+ books, though; if something doesn't sink in after all that, then you should reconsider the way you read. :)
by kmfrk 16y ago
Give yourself some credit for going through 99+ books, though; if something doesn't sink in after all that, then you should reconsider the way you read. :)
- joshkaufman 16y agoIt wasn't just 99 - it was thousands. The books on the list are just the best. :-)
- bosie 16y agothousands? if your average book has 300 pages, and you read 30 pages per hour, you would need to read for 10000 hours, doing it for 8 hours a day you need 1250 days. that's without repeating anything of course. am i wrong? in what timespan did you read those thousands of books?
- dagw 16y agoI'm not the original poster, but I've found that most 300 page business books contain 10-20 pages of useful info and 280-290 pages of fluff and filler. I generally skim through the average business book in an hour or 2, including the time to make notes of all the potentially useful advice I find. It's rare to find a business book worth carefully reading cover to cover.
- joshkaufman 16y agoThat's exactly what I do, only I've practiced enough to cut the time per book to 10-20 minutes, depending on complexity. Reading for information extraction vs. word-for-word is much more efficient, and if you practice, your comprehension and retention is just as high. It's not uncommon for me to go to the library or B&N and read a stack of 20-30 books in a few hours. I've been reading business books for six years, and easily read 200-400 books a year. Here's a post I wrote on effective non-fiction reading techniques, for more info on the approach: http://personalmba.com/10-days-to-faster-reading/ http://personalmba.com/10-days-to-faster-reading/
- sunkan 16y agoWow! Has anyone else achieved this level of efficiency in their reading? -- 10-20 minutes per book? -- 20 to 30 books in a few hours. I am a bit skeptical, but maybe it is doable. I am curios to know if anyone else on HN can read/comprehend a non-fiction business book in less than 30 mins. I went ahead and ordered '10 days to faster reading'.
- johnwatson11218 16y agoJust this morning I had the idea that since so many books are appearing in electronic format it won't be long before lots of the text has been tagged. I'm reading an enjoyable book about sleep right now. In many places the author goes into personal stories that led to a particular discovery. I thought 'wouldn't it be nice to be able to have those parts filtered for me by my Kindle software?'. I could see things getting to the point to where you could have the option to generate an executive summary from any popular book that tries to hit the main points. Then you drill down as you want more information. Books could function almost like mini-wikis at that point but with a narrative or order that you use to drive through it.
- jacques_chester 16y ago1. Get out your kindle 2. buy a copy of Neuromancer 3. search for the part where Case tells his Ono-Sendai to "sift this shit. 2 minute precis" 4. Be amazed once again that a guy with a typewriter predicted what you're doing.
- crasshopper 16y agoWhat about MS Word's AutoSummarize feature?
- phlux 16y ago@JohnWatson Serendipity! I was thinking the same thing -- though I was thinking more along the lines of Quora posts. This is a feature I have posted about and asked for on Reddit actually; the ability to tag information to topic and quality etc. This would really apply to quora best though, as the information is already sorted in one dimenstion: quora topics. I'd like to be able to assemble and curate information from sources like quora and get them into a more of a how-to; infact I posted a question along these lines on quora, with little response. (http://www.quora.com/Would-Quora-users-like-an-entrepreneurship-how-to-section http://www.quora.com/Would-Quora-users-like-an-entrepreneurs...) However - I predict that this will be a golden goose of social search. A question is asked within a particular topic, experts respond - then the best answers to the most popular questions within a topic, and tagged by the audience, are assembled into cliff-notes of information on that topic.
- crasshopper 16y agoThat's a great point and unfortunately it does not work that way with math books. Well, fortunately in that the signal-to-noise ratio is high. Unfortunately in that one must be very selective about what one chooses to invest time into reading.
- thebigredjay 16y agoI like the idea of reading ridiculous amounts of things more than reading one thing ridiculous amounts of times.