Taking Book Notes How to Start

This is a book. A technology where you can't search the text, exporting highlights is painful, and your note-taking space is limited. But sometimes, reading an actual book simply can't be beat. In this video, we'll show you the easiest way to create a second brain that lives right on your bookshelf. Are you guys seeing this? This is incredible. A technique taught to us by book-reading influencer Alex in Books, who used this system to read hundreds of books a year and build an audience of over 600,000 book-reading fans. Alex's first step is capture. As I read the book, you want to highlight the important information. If something really resonates with you, sticks out, you want to capture that. If you open up the front few pages of the book, you have the table of contents. But what you want to do as a reader is create your own table of contents. So as I read the book and I find something interesting, not only will I highlight it, I'll go back to like the front cover of the book, and then I'll write down the page number and why I found that interesting. Page 19, how you explain what a common book is. Page 40, like three steps of product management system. Page 43, the code framework. The more impactful a book is, the more life-changing it is, the more notes you're going to want to take on it, because your brain would just be screaming at you like, hey, this is important, write this down, write this down. As I'm reading the book, I'm taking down the lessons and then organizing those lessons. You have your own custom table of contents, essentially inside of the cover, which is, like you said, the subjects, the ideas, the observations that you found most impactful, and a page number. If I highlight something and I find it like really important, I'll put a star next to it, and then I'll add it to like the table of contents, so it has like the star at the end. So that way I know it's like not just important, but like super important. The book becomes the notes themselves. Oh, what was that really great quote? You open up the front cover, you kind of just skim your table of contents. It's like, oh yeah, that quote was on page 77. Let me flip through it, and there it is. As I finish the book, next step would be to distill the information. So I go to the back cover, and on the back left hand side, I'm distilling the most important lessons I've learned from the book. In your own words, do you write them? Yep. Brilliant, perfect. Maybe like it's been a few months since you built your second brain, you want to refresh your memory. You just go to the back cover, and you'd be like, okay, what lessons did I find important, or what did I want to apply that I haven't yet applied? The last step in the framework is to express. I try to take the lessons I've learned and try to figure out how I could turn them into actionable advice. On the inside of the back cover, you have your expression, your interpretation, which is how you're going to apply those lessons. Exactly. And then what I also do, on the front cover, I write down the day I started the book, and on the back cover, I write the day I finished it. And then I could see how that kind of changed the trajectory of my life. You can either look just at those few pages, which are kind of a snapshot of who you were and what you found valuable at that time, or you could reread it, perhaps jumping around based on your custom table of contents, even see it in a different light, come away with different lessons. When do you do this? As you're reading, do you stop and then go add something to the table of contents and something to the lessons, or do you batch it into stages? As I'm reading it, I'll wait till I finish the page before I start highlighting, because otherwise I kind of find everything interesting. It is kind of a balance, because if I go to write it, it kind of breaks the flow of the reading. So what I'll often do is I'll dog ear mark the page, or I'll just put a star next to it, but it's super important. And then once I finish the chapter, then I'll take a few minutes to just write it down quickly, and then I'll go back to the reading process. It might depend on the book too, right? Some books that are intellectually dense, if you stop, it dissolves, right? Other books are almost like each paragraph is just one idea, very simple, and you can almost stop anywhere and just keep going the next time. So there's probably a calibration depending on the subject. How and when does that make the jump into digital? What is the bridge between the paper world and the digital world? Usually after I finish a book, I might want to wait a few days just to kind of cool off, and then kind of go back to it and revisit the back cover, where it's the lessons and actionable device. If you read a book like Atomic Habits, you can't just apply 20 habits at once. So I just came up with like a rule of three. Let me just find like three lessons and three pieces of actionable device. And that's kind of like my goal with every book I read. Let me just get three and three. Usually I write the newsletter like every Thursday or Friday, open up a new email doc, I'll look at my book notes and just try to think, okay, what are like the three biggest takeaways I had from this book? Share like a few sentences about it. Once I'm done with that, it's trying to figure out, okay, now that they know these lessons, how could you possibly apply them? Or how could you take this information and turn it into knowledge? Once the newsletter goes out, then I usually copy and paste it and then upload it to like Notion. From the moment you read the book, I bet part of your brain is thinking about the newsletter, the audience, what they're gonna think, what they're gonna expect, right? So it's like you have a reason to keep going and like a filter for things. It takes serious time, effort, energy. You have to say no to things to say yes to books. It's a really cool point to like build an accountability to your life and not just assume you're gonna on a regular basis decide, oh, I'm gonna write, I'm gonna read a book now. I love that Tim Ferriss question, like what would this look like if it was easy? And you talk about this in your books, like you never want to start with a blank page. So if I read this book and I take notes on it, I have those notes. I'm not starting with a blank page. So this newsletter, I could write in like less than an hour, like the whole thing. So the structure of the newsletter mirrors the structure of the steps of your note-taking process. Lessons, actionable advice. Yeah. It's not like you're having to do a lot of like re-reorganizing. So recently, I've been trying to figure out how can I digitalize my notes to kind of make it easier to find, easier to search and just bring up old notes or old books that I haven't like touched in a while. I do want to write a book one day. It makes sense to digitalize my notes, make it easier to find. I just keep like a simple Notion doc where I have like the book title, author, read in progress. If I finish the book or how the note-taking process is going, the rating of the book, what genre the book falls in. What made you choose Notion for this? One, it's like a free software. Two, it's pretty easy to use. I'll use Apple Notes, but then usually I'll graduate to another system. Once you hit like the ceiling and the system breaks, like for Twitter, I'm not going to write Twitter threads in my Notes app because I can't see the format of it. So then I move it to TypeFleet. The Notes app is like the high school of where you want to keep your notes. And then if they graduate, then you move them to like a certain college or specific app or a certain area of that. So you want the Notes app as your foundation. And then once the system breaks or it can't handle it or you need more features, then you go to the next app. But for now, just stick to the basics of the works. And then if you need something better, there's always an option out there. Oh my gosh. I love this point. And I'll talk to people. Oh yeah, I want to write a book one day. What is the ultimate book writing platform? Oh, I want to make a video. What is the best, most powerful video editing software used by Hollywood studios? Hollywood editors, they worked up to that. They started, I think, usually with informal general purpose tools that are not highly specialized. And then as you actually hit the ceiling, only then do you move to the next solution. And even then, you just go to the minimal next stage. It's like you are from high school to college, then your master's, then your PhD. Don't go from high school to PhD. If it's too complex, if it's too fancy, you're never going to use it. That's the way I look at it. Which app or technique am I more likely to use? And if it works, that's the one I'm sticking with. Simplicity over complex. To learn more about how to incorporate digital and physical notes together, watch this video next.