How to read a complex and lengthy book and retain most of it

Neera

I am a long-time fan of Tony Buzan, the inventor of the Mindmapping technique.

In his book Use Your Head he suggests an Organic Study Method that could be applied to reading complex and lengthy material for maximum retention with minimum time investment.

The usual way to study text or non-fiction is to start the book from page one and read, reread incomprehensible areas, take a break, force yourself to go back to where you left off, and continue reading, rereading, and taking breaks until the book is finished. Then going back and revising it, sometimes multiple times, for retention and still not succeeding.

It is like starting the jigsaw puzzle from the bottom left-hand corner and insisting to build the entire picture step by step from that corner only.

The normal steps we take to solve a jigsaw puzzle are:

  • Find edges and boundary pieces.
  • Sort out color areas.
  • Fit ‘obvious’ bits and pieces together.
  • Continue to fill in.
  • Leave ‘difficult’ pieces to end (for reasons that as the overall picture becomes more clear, and the number of pieces used increases, so does the probability increase that the difficult pieces will fit in much more easily when there is a greater context into which they can fit).
  • Continue the process until completion.

Tony Buzan proposes that the jigsaw analogy can be applied directly to study.

Similar steps in reading a book would be:

For a book, it would be

1. Overview—Review the book for all the material other than the actual text such as a table of contents, illustrations, photographs, chapter headings, graphs, footnotes, summaries, and so forth Use a pen or a pencil to provide a visual aid to the eye. This stage is equivalent to finding the edges and boundary pieces.

2. Preview—Cover all the materials not covered in the overview. In other words, the paragraphs, and language content of the book. This is likened to organizing the color areas of the puzzle. During the preview, concentration should be directed to the beginnings and ends of paragraphs, sections, chapters, and even whole text, because information tends to be concentrated at the beginnings and ends of written material.

3. Inview — This involves filling in those areas still left, and can be compared with the filling-in process of the jigsaw puzzle once the boundary and color areas have been established. Major reading is not necessary as in some cases most of the important material will have been covered in previous stages. Jump over the difficult sections, leaving them for the next stage.

4. Review—This stage is to concentrate on the difficult areas. It is aided by making notes on the book itself or separately in a notebook, including making mind maps. Notes such as the following can be made in the book itself.

  • Underlining
  • Personal thoughts generated by the text
  • Critical comments
  • Marginal straight lines for important and noteworthy material.
  • Curved or wavy marginal lines show an unclear or difficult material.
  • Question marks for areas that you wish to question or that you find questionable.
  • Exclamation marks for outstanding items.
  • Your own symbol code for items and areas that relate to your own specific and general objective.

5. Continued reviewing—Apart from immediate review, a continuous review program is essential. It is seen that memory didn’t decline immediately after a learning session, but actually rose before leveling off and then plummeting. Reviewing just at the point where memory starts to fall leads to the longest retention.

Unforgiving and overdisciplined

Neera

How unforgiving and over-disciplined we have become?

We not only can’t forgive others but also ourselves.

We are harsher on ourselves than we are on others. We judge and punish ourselves if we think that we have not done what we expected to do. We deprive ourselves of the kindness we preach ourselves to offer to others.

We berate ourselves over not being able to write well, write regularly, build an audience, summon our muse, or be good enough when all the time learning, getting better, and not giving up.

We are killing ourselves with the discipline we impose on ourselves. What to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, when to sleep, how much to sleep, how much exercise to do, how many words to write in a day, what goals to set, and how challenging they should be.

All these aspirations are not making us any more creative. They are, in fact, killing our creativity.

With all the advances in the twenty-first century, we have not freed the human spirit. Instead, we have imprisoned it to fulfill our wants. And wants never end. They keep on becoming bigger and bigger.

How about waking up from this delusion and liberating ourselves? Be kind to ourselves. Let go of the pressure of performance, productivity, and achievement, and let the mind wander freely into the realm of true creativity.

Coastal beauty

Neera

Last weekend, I was on the southern coast of Australia. The stretch of the coast between New South Wales and Victoria is called the Sapphire Coast, where the color of the ocean is deeper than the sapphire, and the sky is just a shade lighter.

At the heart of the Sapphire Coast is the sleepy town of Merimbula, which has a long point for whale watching and a short point for surfing.

The vast stretch of wilderness, national parks, and ocean teeming with life attracts lots of artisans and is home to lots of galleries, public art, and boutiques.

In the above shot, I was trying to capture a flying helicopter when a seagull flew across. It came right in the center of the frame.

Below is a sculpture by the beach.

Have a linear goal…

Neera

I was going through one of my old journals when I found one of my favorite quotes:

“Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere.

But the work of building a path was a living sum so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow.

A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there’s nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end.

The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make?

It is not proper for man’s life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him–man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station…”

– Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged (Emphasis and line-breaks are mine.)

We all need linear goals in our lives to rise above the monotony of circular lives. That is the only way we have to show something at the end of the day.

Twenty years ago, I chose to write as my linear goal. It has not only kept me sane through the madness of the daily grind but also has given me a purpose in life.

Initially, I had little goals such as writing childhood memories, remembering those sounds, smells, and scenes from the past, and learning to describe them. Soon I started attending courses. The first one was a Life Story Writing course. An offshoot of that was a writing group that still has been meeting in my home for the past fifteen years.

I joined another writing group and practiced reading my writing to others.

Encouraged, in 2014, I joined a novel-writing course A Year of Novel at ACT Writer’s Centre. Five of the writers from there continued to meet after the course to continue working on our novels. We are still meeting and critiquing each other’s work.

In between, I won NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) twice, wrote several short stories, and started two blogs.

With writing as my linear goal, I am achieving little milestones just like Ayn Rand said in the below quote:

“[A] man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station…”

Share something every day

Neera

Two months into the blog and I am feeling the need to post every day. Not because I have lots to say, but because the opposite is true.

Coming up with something to share is a constant struggle for bloggers. Something I need to tackle head-on.

Today Austin Kleon came up with the post. Put it on the refrigerator. He is referring to a quote from a 2002 Jeff Tweedy interview. The full quote is here:

“To say I’ve never been inhibited by expectations would be a lie. It’s more daunting to contend with yourself. It’s like saying I don’t even need to write songs because the greatest songwriter in the world has already done this–Bob Dylan. But he’s dealing with himself, too. The internal stuff is the stuff that kills you. I want to write the greatest song in the world sometimes. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in wanting to do that, but I think you’re better off when you realize you have no control over it. You just gotta keep making s–t up, scribbling–like sitting down and drawing with my kids. It reminds me to do that in my songs. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad.”   

It is every artist’s responsibility to keep making the s–t up. And to do that every day. That is the only way to get better. That is the only way to find some nuggets in your work.

An artist’s other responsibility is to put their work out there. Worrying for your best work, and waiting till you get better won’t make you better. Putting your work out there, however amateurish, most certainly will.

I am setting this challenge for myself now, to start daily blogging, fully aware of the fact that there will be days when I cannot post anything, particularly when I will be traveling.

But I will tackle those days when I get there. 

Take the pressure off you

Neera

I read the following story in “O’s Little Guide to Finding Your True Purpose” and couldn’t help sharing it.

A friend had an Indian guru who was the embodiment of love, and the guru died. Bereft, my friend, went back to India and stayed with the guru’s principal disciple, and one day the disciple said, “Do you want to see the precious thing the guru left for me?” Then he pulled out something wrapped in an old Indian cloth and ceremoniously uncovered a beaten-up pot. He said, “Do you see?” My friend answered. “No. What are you trying to tell me?” And with a mad glint in his eye, the disciple said, “You don’t have to shine!”

What a great idea! You don’t have to shine.

We have such high expectations of ourselves all the time. Whatever we do, we want to be top-class in it.

We want to write a perfect story in the first draft. We expect our very first blog to be amazing.

We want to dress perfectly, work effortlessly, speak fluently, and so on.

What if we take the pressure off ourselves and just be ourselves?

Mediocre but daring; inept but forgiving; troubled but enduring.