The Art of Reading Farnam Street Course Review

Course Review:

The Art of Reading by Farnam Street is a pace-past-pace system for reading and fully absorbing books (although, you can use it for annihilation you're studying) in an efficient manner.

The course starts by helping you find and decide on what books you lot should read. It gives you a funneling procedure where you have the books that you hear about or that are recommended to y'all, and yous'll accept them through many filters and so that yous're just left with books that are a good fit when it comes to your goals and interests.

The second phase is about determining whether a book (or whatsoever information technology is that you lot've decided to study) is worth your fourth dimension or not. And you can exercise that by giving the book an inspectional read where yous'll scan and skim sure sections to determine what you'll do. If you've decided that the book is worth your time, you'll then demand to decide whether you'll read information technology in full or in function—y'all definitely want to skip the sections that aren't aligned with your goals and interests.

The next phase or step is to actually start reading. Your goal here is to be actively engaged with the volume. You desire to read with a salubrious dose of skepticism, connect and compare what you're reading to what yous already know, take notes and put comments on the margins, use post-it flags on pages you desire to return to, underline, highlight, describe, then on.

You also want to analyze what y'all've read past using The Feynman Technique where you'll take something that you didn't fully understand, write its name on a sail of paper, write down the little that you understood nearly it, and and so go along going back and forth between the volume and your little sheet of newspaper to fill up in the gaps in your understanding.

Later on you're done reading, yous'll set down the book for a few days and pick it dorsum upwards to review what you lot learned.

The terminal section in the class is most syntopical reading. This is for those who desire to take their understanding of something to the next level. Basically, this is a type of deep and comparative reading where you compare two books (authors) simultaneously.

With that said, The Art of Reading organization isn't just about reading books. You tin can use for articles, essays, courses, and anything else you're trying to fully understand in the shortest corporeality of time possible. This is definitely a class I wish I have discovered earlier in my life.

Course Notes:

The post-obit notes fromThe Art of Reading by Farnam Street are meant to be concise, reminding me of high-level concepts and not trying to recreate the whole form. This summary is basically a bunch of notes and lessons paraphrased or quoted directly from the course and does not contain my own thoughts.

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• You lot desire to master the all-time of what other people have already figured out. There's no meliorate way to do that than to read.

• The way that we go about reading has a profound impact on non merely our understanding simply the fourth dimension it takes us to get the relevant data that nosotros want out of reading.

one. How to Read a Book

Try is Important

• People rarely follow systems in part because they are not flexible. Prescriptions don't tend to work.

This is why self-assistance continues to dominate the bookshelves. At that place'southward all these "do these 5 things and you will exist successful", but it never actually works that mode.

Yous pick upwardly the book, yous do those 5 things and yous come away doing no improve than you were earlier.

• People need to come up upwardly with their own adaptations of whatever it is they're trying to utilize because it has to be context-dependent.

Make Conscious Decisions

• The cadre of the Farnam Street system for reading is to make conscious decisions when yous're reading every step of the way. This means you're going to pick what yous read consciously.

Y'all're going to choose why you're reading something consciously, and y'all're going to focus on what you're reading.

The Farnam Street Ethos

• Here are the principles and the ethos that ground the organisation:

1. You lot're better off puttinga lot of energy into a few amazing books than a little free energy into many.
2. Some books demand to exist read in their entirety. Nearly don't. Information technology's your chore to make up one's mind.
3. Agile engagement is key to reading for understanding. Exactly how is less important.
4. E'er exist skeptical. It'south okay (fifty-fifty skillful) to disagree with what you're reading.
5. Great leaps in agreement come fromimagined conversations betwixt authors.

• If you read a plethora of books then fast, you won't really retain and connect and synthesize the information you want.

• If you're selective nigh what you read, y'all can go 1 or 2 books and you tin can become a ton of data out of them.

• Focusing our efforts and putting more than energy into fewer books or fewer online articles gives the states the opportunity to go a little bit deeper and hone our understanding of key ideas rather than trying to understand everything, or rather than just reading to read.

• Some books need to be read in their entirety but not all of them.

• You desire to be actually selective about what y'all're reading actually deep. You want to read books to attain your goal and you lot don't desire to let it sit and interrupt your reading on other things.

• Taking notes is not an stop to itself, and my notes look very different from book to book. I do unlike things with different books and I connect the ideas in different ways.

• It amazes me how many people accept the written word as truth. You tin rebel against this and stay skeptical. You don't have to concur with everything yous're reading. You desire to question the writer and the conclusions, and you can practise this in a style that's non-politically correct.

• You lot can go expect up counter-arguments and y'all can deep dive into a field of study and once again, the goal is to get towards deep fluency.

• Consciously directed effort is the fundamental to exponential rewards when it comes to reading books, and as I said, the arrangement is elementary merely not easy.

2. Find Keen Books

How Do Nosotros Discover The Correct Books

• The most important thing that we're going to emphasize is that you really simply get out of a book what you're willing to put into it.

• Sitting and reading passively is a great feel. There'south nothing wrong with reading Harry Potter passively and enjoying it. With that said, you shouldn't read a scholarly text on the history of the English language language the same style you read Harry Potter.

• Reading on auto-pilot or getting lost in the book is great for entertainment, but information technology doesn't work every bit well for learning and agreement. You lot accept to go along your brain turned on.

The Funnel

• You want to employ sort of a funneling process. You fill the top of the funnel with as many ideas every bit possible, then you focus on your curiosity and your goals. You focus on what you're passionate about and what y'all desire to learn nearly, and so yous do your best to filter out bad books and stick to the bully ones.

• I want you to imagine that all of the book recommendations you get out of the Amazon browsing sections, the bookstore gazing, the bibliographies scanning and so on are throwing book ideas into the height of the funnel.

The other end of the funnel is what's going to make it into your brain, so how do nosotros make up one's mind what makes it through? The way we're going to figure that out is past figuring out what we're about curious about right now. Nosotros have to effigy out what books will become us there most effectively.

Footstep 1: Fill Your Funnel

• To fill your funnel, y'all can solicit recommendations from friends or from your audience if you accept a blog or something similar.

• Another thing yous can do is to search on Google by your favorite smart person (e.grand. writer, professor, football passenger vehicle, business leader). You can likewise selection books from a good book'south bibliography.

• Once you've got some corking books in hand, the other thing yous tin can do is check out the bibliography or the appendices. Figure out who it was that influenced the author and what sources he or she drew on. This is a very underrated source of volume finds, and not many people have advantage of it.

• Finally, you always have the old-fashioned way, which is browsing. Get to the bookstore, go to the library, ask the clerk what their favorite volume is on X, Y or Z. Gaze at the shelves, encounter what piques your curiosity.

Build an Anti-library

• The most valuable part of our library is non the books we've read, but the books we haven't read. They're a reminder of all the things that nosotros don't know yet, they're inspiration. We call these the anti-library.

• Some other purpose that an anti-library serves (besides inspiration) is serendipity. I tin can sort of walk over and browse my shelves to run into what's piquing my curiosity, or if my curiosity has already been piqued, I can see what books I've already got on that topic.

Step 2: Follow Your Goals and Curiosity

Cull What to Read

• The question is: Do I even care? That's actually the question I ask earlier committing time and energy to read a book. Do I care? Am I being pulled in by my curiosity? Right now, is this the thing I want to spend time on?

• Unless you have an bodily project with a borderline that y'all're working on, in which case you're being forced past life to sort of feign interest in a topic, you lot need to follow your passions and your curiosities, follow your interests. That way, y'all're going to bask the process of getting to know the cloth, so what goals are you really after? Nosotros call this answering your why, getting to know your why.

• Showtime by taking a second to figure out what it is yous're setting out to practise. Did you see a documentary on the Civil War that made you want to swoop into that topic, did y'all read a biography of George Washington that fabricated you want to know something about the other founders, well-nigh the founding of the state, did yous realize that yous knew nothing virtually evolution and wanted to remedy that?

Did you come across War and Peace in Barnes & Noble and decided that that was the fourth dimension to pick upwardly some Russian literature?

Find your why and focus on information technology.

• At present that you know what you want to read and you know why you want to read it, it'south time to sort of go through that stack at the height of your funnel to selection some books that can fit the profile.

Stride 3: Utilize Effective Filters

• It'southward of import to recognize that choosing to read a book carries an opportunity cost. This is right out of Econ 101. Nosotros can't emphasize this point enough. Reading, like all of life, is filled with these opportunities costs. The weeks you spend on i book are the weeks you won't spend on some other.

• Don't waste your time reading mediocre books unless y'all have to, there are too many good ones out there. Ane great book is worth ten or a hundred average ones.

• Some of this filtering is going to accept to happen while you're reading. It's incommunicable to filter out bad books a hundred percent of the time earlier you get-go reading them, sometimes information technology'southward difficult to know.

• Filtering at a glance:

• Trust from referrals: Personal or from distant.
• Age: Old books that are however effectually have passed the test of fourth dimension. Seeking fundamental truths. If no one is going to read it in ten years, you can probably skip it.
• Read reviews.
• Google the author.

• When you've got a list of x books that are satisfying your why, become ahead and
start with the ane that comes the most highly recommended by the people you
trust the most.

• You lot can read reviews and read interviews with the author. Recall that reviews tin can exist highly biased and sometimes they're ridiculously nitpicky, and then yous demand to tread carefully when you're reading reviews.

• 1 quick question you lot can ask yourself is: Are books really the best way
to absorb this type of information? You could besides exist reading a series of articles or you could be talking it over with someone smart, you could practice some original thinking.

iii. Before Nosotros Read: Is It Worth Your Endeavor?

• Now that we've figured out what we're going to read, let's dig into how we're going to read it. The question we want to spend our fourth dimension figuring out is the following: is it worth my fourth dimension to read this book in full, in part, or perchance not at all? This is chosen giving the book an inspectional read.

• The central to an inspectional read is to not try and grasp all the book has to offer right at starting time, not on the showtime get-round here. We will do that later if it's worth information technology, but for at present, nosotros're going to exist doing what you lot might phone call an intelligent scanning process.

Create a Map of The Book

• We're going to start past making a map of the book. There are a few points we want to tease out here:

1. Concept
2. Argument
3. Interest

The first is the concept.What is the book about in whole or in part? What am I supposed to learn?Yous want to gain an agreement of what and how the book would teach you.

The second part isunderstanding the structure of the argument.

Remember, a nonfiction volume seeks to persuade. At that place'southward no such thing as zero bias.

The author has a indicate of view. He has to. This is non a bad thing, simply y'all must be aware of it. How will he/she be making that argument to me as a reader?

What are the parts of the book and what are the parts of the parts? Y'all're creating a mental map of the book.

Lastly, we want to effigy out which parts, if whatever, of those arguments are going tointerest the states every bit readers?

Do we want to read the whole chain of argument or just a specific piece? Is there only one area of knowledge that we're looking to pick upwardly here? If information technology'southward a biography, exercise we desire to know the whole life of the subject area or just a sure period?

Step One: Identify The Concept

The First (very quick) Skim

• The commencement role is this quick skim. Information technology really should only take 5 or x minutes realistically:

• Offset with the tabular array of contents: How is the volume structured? What kind of parts are at that place? What kind of chapters are there? What are the big concepts?
• Read the grit jackets: What is the gist?
• Skim through the intro.
• Read the online reviews, either on Amazon or more professional ones if you oasis't done that yet, simply to see what you're getting yourself into.

The questions in the back of your mind are "Is this book worth pursuing?" and "What am I going to learn?"

This is merely a basic showtime step towards an eventual meliorate understanding. We're basically just dipping our toe into the water at this betoken.

The Superficial Read

• The side by side thing we want to do is a superficial read of the whole book. This will accept slightly longer simply you lot really want to keep around xxx minutes if yous can, more than or less depending on the size of the volume:

• Read through the introduction in full.
• Read the chapter titles and subtitles.
• Read the first and last paragraphs: A smashing strategy is to get ahead and read the offset and terminal paragraphs of any chapters that y'all call back you're going to desire to read in full eventually. Obviously, if it's a book with a narrative, you may want to exist careful about what surprises and then on that you lot're ruining for yourself. The average nonfiction volume really doesn't have any surprises. The terminate is not more important than the beginning. Information technology'southward but a series of arguments. You can begin absorbing it from the stop; that's okay.
• Read the terminal affiliate of the book: You tin can too get ahead and read the final affiliate in its entirety, the conclusion or wrap-upward to the book. This should sum up the author'southward viewpoint in a pretty effective mode.

At this indicate, we've spent less than an 60 minutes and we should accept a adequately good idea of what the book is nigh and where the author wants to take u.s.a.. We sort of read the guidebook. Now information technology's fourth dimension to accept the bout.

Step 2: Sympathise The Argument's Structure

• The fashion we're going to do that is by trying to understand the structure of the argument. This is the adjacent pace of the inspectional process. At this betoken, we're going to start having some thoughts on whether we agree with the writer or non.

Don't worry; nosotros're going to do a lot more of that after as we read more analytically and deeply, but it really starts here. We're going to start engaging with the text, at least on a surface level.

Get the lay of the Country

• As we go the lay of the state, we sort of want to ask ourselves questions:

• What is the book arguing and how?
• Is this a relatively sensible argument? Do you concur with the idea in principle?
• What are the author's biases?
• What exercise you already know about the topic?
• What don't y'all understand?
• If there are parts of the book, what are the parts?
• What are the sub-parts?

I can't tell yous how many books I've thought I wanted to read, merely to notice on inspection that either:

1. I didn't intendance what the author was talking about or how he was structuring his statement. Or
2. I could run into too many flaws in the style he/she was going to do information technology. I simply knew that spending more time with the author was not going to benefit me. It wasn't going to meliorate my understanding of the topic. It was either too surface or only besides incorrect given what else I knew, or maybe I was but no longer interested in it when I looked more deeply.

• You don't demand to understand the full volume yet. The goal is to determine if it has ideas worth exploring.

• We've outlined the book in our head. We know the construction of the work we're going to tackle. We know the playbook. Ask yourself, "Can I state the basic argument of the book in i, or merely a few sentences? Practice I know the parts of the work? Do I know the construction of the parts?"

Pace 3: Identify Areas of Interest/Focus

• If we've decided that nosotros're going to stick with the book at this point, and this is a big primal, now nosotros go to determine what parts of the volume we're going to read in a deep analytical way.

No ane seems to tell yous this when you lot're in school, only you really don't have to read the whole book comprehend to cover.

You've got a proficient book with half-dozen parts and you lot're only interested in the arguments from parts one and iv, which you've plant out as you've been doing this inspectional reading process, so go ahead. Read parts one and four.

• If you've taken the one-half-hr or hour to do the intelligent skimming procedure, yous know that in many cases, you tin go 95% of the of import knowledge into your caput by reading 20 or xxx% of the volume.

If you're reading for understanding, that may exist your smartest strategy. Information technology may not.

You need to find out, simply it just really doesn't take much time and in the long run, the fourth dimension y'all spend doing this volition save you and so much more time afterward.

• Here it is. We've gone through the table of contents. We've read some paragraphs out of the chapters. Nosotros spent a few minutes understanding exactly how the book is structured, tried to effigy out if we're at the right level to proceed reading more than deeply, and if our interests remain even in doing and then. Now we make the decision. What to read? All of it? None of it? Part of it? Go ahead.

• This process should really have taken you less than an 60 minutes. It's non likewise much to enquire, but the advantage is that you volition take avoided a lot of wasted effort in our side by side module, which is analytical reading.

4. Critical Thinking: Reading For Understanding

• Then far nosotros've spent some time wisely finding books and using our intelligent filters to make up one's mind what to read. And then we started past choosing our start book and doing an intelligent skim of the contents so that we take a mental map of a book in our head and a good idea of whether we want to read the volume in whole or in part.

At present it's time to become down to work and that means reading parts of or entire books in a style that enables deep learning and deep understanding.

• Try to figure out how to classify more time to reading while maintaining your good habits.

Increasing Active Engagement

• The way we're going to ameliorate our yield is by increasing our active engagement with the text. Reading for understanding means having your brain turned on the unabridged time you lot read. If we tin do this successfully we volition be better readers.

• We figured out why we were reading this particular text and how it fits in with our goals and our curiosities. Nosotros took a small amount of time to get the structure and the statement of the volume direct in our caput before we dived right in. We're already alee of the bend and now we tin can take it some other step.

Hither's how we're going to do information technology:

1. Engage: We're going to engage with the text as we read.
2. Analyze: Nosotros're going to do a trivial bit of simple analysis after nosotros're done reading.
3. Return: We're going to render to the text later and engage with it again.

• 1 of the first steps toward becoming a great reader is developing your skepticism. You must, must, must learn to disagree with the author and to utilize your encephalon while you read.

The author is trying to convince you of something. Never forget that. It's your chore to see whether you agree.

Step 1: Be an Engaged Reader

Question Everything

• Separate reality from not-reality and try to sympathize what really works in the world versus but accumulating red herrings that audio plausible.

The fashion that we do that equally we read is to keep a sort of dialogue or statement going with the author as nosotros go along. Do we concur with what's being said? How does it fit in with what we know about this or other topics? How does it fit into our preexisting drove of mental models?

• If we're having a mental dialogue with the author, agreeing, disagreeing, noting new or quondam information, we will remember what nosotros've read, but we'll besides go way more that. We'll as well exist able to synthesize it with other information to create new ideas and understand the world more than correctly.

• Your engagement with the text is crucial. We never desire to have anything at face value.

Constantly Ask

Your next chore, of course, would be to practice your best to reconcile the conflicting facts. This is the essence of the learning procedure:

• How does this fit with what I know?
• How does it conflict with information technology?

Beware of The Great Writers and Anecdotal Stories

• One part of becoming a great reader is to recognize and be very agape of great writing.

• You demand to stay on guard of the great author and the simple fact is that the better the writing, the harder it is to do this.

• Remember, also, the plural of anecdote is not information. Some authors string together anecdotes extremely well. A corking anecdote can pound an thought into your brain very well, which is why teachers utilize them, simply don't forget to enquire, is the thought really correct? Are there explanations that are more consummate and more right?

Take Notes When Moved

• Unlike books require dissimilar levels of effort and different levels of note-taking. Different books present information in very different ways. If nosotros did our job correctly in the last module, nosotros're going to know how the information is being presented to united states.

Trying to have one method used beyond all books has never seemed to work for me, and I don't remember it'south worked the same for Shane either. Most people nosotros know are the same.

• The most important matter is that you're doing something. Accept a pen and pencil in hand. Employ information technology periodically. Do this consistently and you'll be ahead of the game.

• To exist engaged and take notes, you'll need to do things such as putting comments in the margins, putting picayune doodads adjacent to concepts you idea were of import, underlining, drawing boxes around phrases you really liked, using little post-information technology flags on a particular page because you knew that page was and then good that you might come back to it later, writing folio numbers on the forepart folio of a book with short reminders of what was on the folio that you were interested in (yous might add even more than page references on a second or third or fourth read).

Stride 2: Analyze What You've Read

The Feynman Technique

• You're reading and taking notes, you're engaged and you want to connect this new information to what you already know, but what can you do to make certain you actually understand what you've learned? What tin you exercise at the end of a chapter or a department or a volume?

It's adequately simple. When you want to examination and improve your agreement of a topic, yous need to teach information technology to yourself. Catch a slice of paper, write down the subject at the meridian and brainstorm explaining in unproblematic terms any it is you're worried about that you lot don't sympathize.

Let'south say that y'all've been reading Poor Charlie'south Annual by Peter Kauffman. You finished Charlie Munger's speech at the stop of the book, called The Psychology of Man Misjudgment. You want to see what you recall.

Go alee and write it out and see. How many examples of each detail misjudgment can you recall after you've finished reading and close the volume? Is it fashion less than yous thought? Go back to the text and relearn it.

This is very constructive considering it will quickly expose gaps in your understanding.

Actively Consider What Y'all've Read (Spark Thinking, Not Memory)

• Step ii is really just a continuation of pace one equally far as our date with what we're reading. What we want to figure out is

• What are the key ideas?
• How does this relate to what I already knew?

Exercise I agree with the writer?

• Are the conclusions accurate?
• Are the conclusions biased?
• Is there something missing?
• Practice the facts support the conclusion?

Footstep 3: Set Down the Book

• Footstep iii is a quick interruption. When we're done with our start major digestion, we put the book downward. Shane and I usually detect it'south about a week, and I would prepare that every bit a crude minimum.

You have to let your brain move on to other things before y'all come up back to what you read earlier. That'll help you make new connections when you come up dorsum.

Stride 4: Selection The Book Back Up

• "Curiously plenty, one cannot read a volume; ane can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader." — Vladimir Nabokov

How Does information technology Hold Up?

• Now I want to know how it's held up since I've put it downward. I flip through and look at my notes. I read back a few sections I had read previously. I read whatever notes I took or Feynman sheets I put together.

This can exist a short reflection or a long ane. It depends on how much y'all enjoyed the first read, how much you remembered, and how much of the material you've decided yous wanted to revisit.

• I have books that I've reread every unmarried year since I read them the first time. Some of these books are budgeted 7, eight, 9, x rereads at this point, simply I'm all the same picking upwards new things.

v. Exponential Leaps: Reading Across a Topic

• To proceeds a deep fluency in anything, you need to read more than one opinion on it. To do this in an optimal manner, we'll need to larn how to read syntopically. Whether it's an article or a book, in that location's no one definitive source on all of the cognition or all of the dissimilar arguments on that have.

• If analytical reading was a discussion between you and the author, syntopical reading is going to be you facilitating a word amongst several authors on the aforementioned topic.

• Because there'due south an opportunity toll to reading, you should unremarkably merely do the deep and comparative reading on the general principles that stand the exam of fourth dimension. The mental models. Things like reciprocation, or Newton's laws, or thermodynamics, and evolution. These are the ideas that you really want to sympathize deeply.

• In 'How to Read a Book," Adler outlines the five steps to syntopical reading. The first is to observe the relevant passage.

1. Figure out how much yous want to read. You need to figure out do you desire to read the whole volume insufficiently, or practise you but desire to read sure sections of it that you might be having trouble with or sections that you want to develop a deeper understanding of.
2. Translate the vocabulary so yous can understand what the author is saying. People apply unlike terms and jargon and one of the primary efforts involved in syntopical reading is to translate these into your own linguistic communication. That's a large part of understanding.
3. You need to be clear about what questions you desire answered. What are the keys to the author's arguments? What are the propositions? How do they construction things? What practice dissimilar people remember about these? What are the facts?
4. You demand to define the issue. Almost people are non going to see things in the same way. If they exercise, information technology'south kind of ho-hum. It's not actually interesting. You want different takes on the same problem, the aforementioned idea. This helps you come across it in a three-dimensional way.
5. Y'all want to clarify the discussion. When you're reading these books, you desire to brand sure that yous've read at least one or more sources on them. You need to take a good idea of what it is y'all're reading and why you lot're reading it. The just thing I personally desire to get into this level of detail on is the general principles, the mental models, that agree up over time.

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