Shot a video recently on how to not fight fair, the five outsized advantages, and I actually got a better response on it than I was expecting, which is good news. So, I wanted to dive into my favorite unfair advantage, which is reading. I think reading is the most important skill, habit you can cultivate, as you can tell. from the annoying virtue signaling background that I have in my videos. I read a lot believe it or not, this is not the room in the house that has the most books. I've developed a protocol for my reading that I'm actually really proud of. I'm going to walk you through my system. You don't have to use my system if you don't want to, but this is going to help you with retention. Maybe most importantly, but also honestly just kind of makes I think reading more enjoyable. Feel free to customize this However, it is you see fit the first and most important thing and this was actually I was indoctrinated by a friend On this level is start is you need to use a pencil. So go by yourself I've got these real fancy mechanical pencils because I just like nice writing utensils It makes me enjoy the process more go get yourself some nice pencils Because you're gonna start writing in your books, and I realized in the very beginning that this feels sacrilegious. Don't write your antique first editions, obviously. But I've had to change my mind on this. I used to feel like writing in a book was disrespectful. Now I've decided that it's me. Communing with the book and I'm having a conversation with the author. So just change what it means. you're not defacing it and and What's really important about being able to write in the book is this is how you can let yourself just enjoy the book because for so long what I would do is I would be reading and then if I needed to take a note or Look up a word was this constant back and forth and every time I would Take my eyes off the page It would stop the flow. it would decrease my reading time by multiples. So never stop reading, give yourself the opportunity and you're just sitting there and you've got your book. Nice plug for Brandon Turner's multifamily millionaire. And you've got your pencil and I actually kind of generally like to follow along with my pencil because I read a little bit on speed reading, which also really helps by the way. But if there's anything that's notable, interesting, thought provoking underline it. And I've got a key for myself and you'll want to develop your own key, but I put little symbols in the margins. So if there's a word that I don't know, or that I really like the usage of, so a lot of being articulate isn't necessarily knowing all the big fancy 12 words, it's knowing how to use, Normal words in unique ways, and so if I ever see an author use words in ways that I'm like, oh, wow, that's, that's brilliant, then I'll circle the word, so if I don't know the word or if I just like the word uses, I'll just circle the word, and then in the margins I put a V, and the V is for the vocabulary, and then I leave it and I continue to read, so I don't have to stop and write it down or take notes I just have it and we'll get to how we're gonna go and use this in a minute V is for vocabulary. Now, if there's a concept on the page Or a person or a reference that I want to research and learn more about. somebody mentions the Magna Carta and I'm like, you know what? I don't really know much about the Magna Carta. Then I'll underline that. And then in the margins, I'll put a question mark and I'll circle the question mark and the question mark lets me know we're going to go research this later. And what's nice is this satiates my blood lust for information because for so long I was like, oh crap I gotta go learn everything about the Magna Carta and I swear to God, this is true I would be reading a book and then the book would reference something I didn't know about and then I'd go read three books about That thing before I could come back to the book that I was reading which is just a horrible way to live your life So unless you find yourself in a position where the foundational knowledge necessary to understand the book you're reading Is a prerequisite Leave it for a moment. just put a little question mark. You know, hey, I'm curious about this thing. And then the third symbol that I use is a star. And I use a star for notable passages. there's a quote or a passage that I want to save for later. Something that I really liked, that I felt was really impactful, that I want to remember. Upon re reading, I'd really want to highlight. Then I put a star next to it. And y'all, I'm as aggressive as I want to be, and sometimes it depends on my mood, when I read Brené Brown's Daring Greatly, there were whole chapters that were just underlined. That's okay. because we're going to talk about what we're going to do with this stuff in just a moment. So, as you're reading, you follow along with, your pencil, and you're using, and by the way, come up with your own key. If you're a content creator and you come across something, you're like, Oh man, I should shoot a video on that. Or I should write a thread on that or a carousel or whatever. See content, bam, move on, but give yourself the ability to stay in flow. And what I like about this, what's cool is it makes your first reading leisurely. You're giving yourself permission to just read to read, just for the sake of reading, which is so helpful. So there's not that desperation of like, oh, I need to drink every last ounce of value from this book. When you're done with the book, your second reading what I like to do is, I go back through the book, but I only pay attention to the notables. And so I get done with the book, and I basically turn right back around, and, then in my journal I've got a Google Doc that I keep all my notable vocabulary and I'll look at that every now and again. if I just find myself with time in line at the grocery store, I pull up my vocab doc and I start looking at some of the words that I like. And there's just something about that that appeals to me. You don't have to do that. But whatever it is for you and then anything that I want to look up, I'll look up and I'll play the research game. And then any notable passages, and this is maybe where I go a little overboard, but I actually write those down in my journal, which means I'm effectively rewriting the book, but I'm only rewriting the parts that were notable for me. And what's cool about that is if I ever want to go back to that book, I don't necessarily have to return to the book as much as I return to my journal. And I can, I get all the distilled value from that book from my journal. Now I'd caution against relying on that too much because as you grow, you get different things from every book. You know, there's the old proverb that nobody steps in the same river twice because the person is different and so is the river. Books are like that. especially, I mean, really good books are like that. Give yourself the opportunity to revisit books. But, having your, distilled notes is really helpful. And then it's really fun to say like, Oh, I thought this was notable before, and now I actually, I, I resonate with this passage a little bit more. like that with a one two punch and the second reading isn't nearly as daunting as it sounds you're like, dude You're gonna read every single book twice. No, not at all second time you're basically paging through and it's shocking how quickly You can get through something along those lines I hope then again it helps with retention, you know I mean, there's all these studies done on writing things down and upon second review. There's a book. It's actually on my bookshelf right up there. It's called Make It Stick. And it's an interesting book about retention. really, all it says is effectively, you need to test yourself at the end of anything that you read. And test yourself with questions you come up with. doesn't matter, which is really interesting. that book's a good example. Some pro tips on reading. You have to pick your material properly. Make It Stick is a good example. And I'm not trying to bash those people. They took what should have been a blog and they made it a book. it pisses me off because that seems to be a trending theme. People are taking small concepts and they're expanding it into full books. Now sometimes that works really well. That worked with The Gap and The Gain. Dan Sullivan. It worked with Zero to One, Peter Thiel. It worked with The One Thing, Gary Keller. Those are actually three of my favorite recent books. And they're all very simple. But they're not written in simplistic fashion. They just help reinforce this idea. I'd strongly recommend all three of those books, and I read them cover to cover. But then there's books like Make It Stick, or Mel Robbins Five Second Rule, where I'm like, man, I could have gotten the value from... Like the cliff notes version of this book and the way to protect yourself from that is what I do for all nonfictions is I'll skim first in my opinion. It's on the author to capture my attention. I didn't used to feel this way I used to feel like I have to read everything cover to cover Otherwise, I'm not a real reader But then what happened is I became fatigued of reading which you don't want to do. It's so dangerous You have to love the author art of reading. So now I'm skimming. And if something captures my attention, then I'll dive a little deeper. And if it or retains my attention, then I'll stay deep and maybe even go a little deeper and so on and so forth. But then there are books that actually diminish in value as you go. One of those interestingly was Driven by, I think it's Douglas Brackman. And I say it's interesting cause I have a, a mastermind called the Driven Mastermind. The name of the mastermind is based on this book. Here's what's funny. All of the value in the book, the first three chapters. And then after that, it's just kind of like this repetitive sort of reinforcement of his original thesis that I didn't need. And so first three chapters were great, and then after that I started to, I went super deep, and then he lost me, and then I zoomed out, got shallow, and then just paged through and took a hike. And you can do that too. It's okay to skim, skip, jump around, choose your own adventure. Now, it's heavily dependent upon the type of book. Right? So like, that's obviously far, it's maybe only applicable for nonfiction. And then some books are sequential in nature. I'm reading Brandon Turner's Multifamily Millionaire right now, and it's a two volume book, and are foundational components where you actually need to read section one in order to understand section two. And then there's some components where... I can tell that I'm able to bounce around and I'm like, you know what, I actually really understand this concept. I'm going to move on. And so, you get more sophisticated as you get better at reading. But then there's books like, you know, I've got C. S. Lewis's entire set here and I happen to know for a fact, I've never read the screw tape letters, but it's been recommended to me often. And that's probably going to be one that I have to read cover to cover. So you'll get kind of good at figuring out what it is that you want to read. Another really cool pro tip is go use summary apps. There's Blinkist is one. ChatGPT now summarizes books really well. And what I like to do is summarize a book before I read it, because it lets me know whether or not I want to dive into this book. and there's ways to hack that too, by the way. What is it? Chat prompting. Prompt engineering. Which is not my favorite term but instead of asking, you know, I'll just summarize the seven habits of highly effective people. What you can do is go in and say give me a summary of the seven habits of highly effective people and give me the Ten key takeaways and it gives you ten key takeaways and then say okay Give me 30 more key takeaways and you keep asking for that until you notice that the takeaways get repetitious And what that exercise does is show you how dense that book is because there are books that are Insanely dense from a value perspective prince of principles by Ray Dalio so dense the seven habits so dense Neval Ravikant's the Almanac of Raval or whatever. It's called like Not a long read, but unbelievably dense. And when I say dense, I just mean like, the value per word is high. And so, you could tell from ChatGPT like, Okay, I need to go read Principles by Ray Dalio, because it's not getting to the bottom of this well. But then, The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins. Like, you could summarize that in a tweet. Sorry to go bash Mel. I just hated that book so much. I hated the fact that... I'm like, I can't believe she's getting away with this. Anyway, that's one pro tip. Another pro tip that I'd have for you is don't sleep on fiction. I get more out of fiction than I do nonfiction, maybe by a multiple. And that's getting more true as I get older. fiction requires more participation on your part. You know, nonfiction is like, here's the principle. You know, take it, run, here's how to, here's how to execute on it. and that's fine, you need that. And, and I like to go from non fiction to fiction. I always, I try to have one fiction and one non fiction. So right now I'm reading The Multifamily Millionaire, and then I'm also reading Tess of the Dubervilles, which was recommended to me by a, a Twitter friend. but I'm reading Tess and I get a little fictioned out, which really just means like, I mean, that's a really emotionally capturing book and I just need a moment that I can go switch over to the Multifamily Millionaire and they're so diametrically opposed. I'm not getting confused. If I read two fiction books at the same time, I always, convolute the stories. And then if I read non fiction books, I tend to be in different zones. Like I've got The Origins and Histories of Consciousness by Eric Neumann. And I know that. for me to read this and this at the same time, it requires just two different frames of mind. I don't want to shift in those gears. what's easy for me is to always have one fiction and one non fiction. That I can bounce back and forth between the two of. I have a dear friend who likes to have four or five books running all at the same time. And she can do that. She can keep it in her mind. I can't. I'm incapable of it. whatever works for you. But again, please don't sleep on fiction. Some of the greatest pieces of art that have ever existed are stories, stories, the oldest. Human art form. It predates language. It's how we think, it's how we dream. It's, the study of psychology is rooted in the study of story. It's how you articulate your life, both to yourself and to other people. Story's so important, and there's so many lessons in story. All religion relies on story. Heavily. You could say all religion is story, in a way, and that's not meant to be an indictment. I'm not saying anything's any less true. As a matter of fact, it's probably more true. when you see, like, people, and I'm stealing this from a thought leader I love, whose name I won't say, because he's polarizing, but... You'd say, like, is Harry Potter true? No, of course not. But, the... Principles and values articulated in Harry Potter are true on a meta level that maybe is more true than the things that you think of as true, honesty, integrity, bravery, friendship legacy. Like, there's truth there that is better articulated inside of fiction than it could ever be articulated outside of, in non fiction in the quote unquote real world. So please don't sleep on fiction. And if you don't know where to start, like just follow your passions. I love Victorian literature, I don't know why, honestly it's popcorn movie type books that I love. I love Charles Dickens, which I know is like supposed to be so pedestrian. But I don't care because I just, I love how sarcastic he is. And he's so much fun and thoughtful. And his characters are amazing. But then I love swords and sandals stuff too. I love Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss. I love George R. R. Martin. I love the Game of Thrones series. I love sci fi. I liked Orson Scott Card and who's the Red Rising guy. I could just go figure out what appeals to you and don't try to dive in. That's the other mistake I made too is I try to eat like all of the densest meals first. You know, you don't go, you can't go straight to Dostoevsky. You won't understand it. I didn't. I still can't tolerate Tolstoy as much as I know he's supposed to be brilliant. But then over time, like you kind of develop, it's like wine, I used to hate wine, but then you kind of develop a taste for it and then you, and then your palate improves and And then you find what you like, and it doesn't have to be what other people like. I'd love to know what you read. I'd love to know what book recommendations you have. I have a really good habit, anytime anybody recommends a book to me, I just buy it. You know, if it's somebody that I respect. And so if you have book recommendations, fiction, non fiction, I'd love to know what you think I should be reading and why. What books made the biggest impact on you, and why? What was the needle mover for you? And my experience recently, and I think I was... Indoctrinated into this thinking by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Nassim wrote a book called Anti Fragile. And I don't know if he said it in this book or if he said it elsewhere, but Anti Fragile is one of the most important books I've ever been exposed to. One of the most important thoughts I've ever been exposed to. And he's an obnoxious person to read, by the way. He's so arrogant. But he talks about how the longer a book has been around, the more likely it is of value. It's either an axiom or it's an oversimplification depending on where you sit philosophically in terms of your view of the history. But regardless, I've just found it to be true. I mean, go read The Republic, right? Go read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. So much value there in the family Marcus Aurelius is one of the smartest most powerful people who's ever lived and you can just read his Words, what a blessing Anyway, it's got a little preachy. Let me know what you read like comment subscribe. I'll see you tomorrow