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Who Should Read This
Anyone who:
- Tries to “read more” and somehow remembers less.
- Binges textbooks, lectures, or podcasts and then promptly forgets 90% of it.
- Needs to actually use what they learn (students, professionals, self‑learners) instead of just collecting fun facts.
If you’re already a flawless learning machine, you can skip it. Otherwise, it’s for you.
Resonating Quotes
Quote
- “The two stages of consuming and digesting must always be balanced. Everything you consume must be digested in order for you to retain and use it.”
—Justin Sung via How to Remember Everything You Read
This seems to describe a state that I’d like to aspire to, but will never be able to reach. Reading and not taking feels so much of my fleeting time (bathroom, waiting in line at Wal-mart, during commercials), yet processing is limited to the scant hours of deep thinking. I don’t feel, for me, that these two will ever balance. I almost feel that is part of the design of following my curiosity. I’m free to read whatever I want, but if it’s not high quality or relevant to current problems I’m interested in solving, I’m under no obligation to process those notes.
Quote
- “As a learner, our job is not to remember the sequence word for word. Our job is to try to recreate that network of knowledge that the expert had.”
—Justin Sung via How to Remember Everything You Read
This resonated with me given my interest in Zettelkasten. One clarification from my perspective: the goal isn’t to replicate an expert’s mental model, but to integrate their knowledge into my existing models so my worldview expands in a way that remains usable to me.
Quote
“I’m just going to get through as much of it as I can,’ and they spend more time reading and reading, and essentially just consuming more and more. But this is the learning equivalent of overeating.
They haven’t had a chance to digest it, so they’re just going to end up vomiting it all up again through the mental vomiting process we call forgetting”
—Justin Sung via How to Remember Everything You Read
I loved this metaphor, because metaphors and analogies really help me learn, they’re kind of my thing. I also disliked this metaphor because it called me out as an overeater. I can’t make a great counter-metaphor to how I see reading, but I’ll try. It would be like if you were able to consume whatever food you wanted, and then bypass the processing of some foods. I love to consume margaritas, but they’re not great for my diabetes or liver. I love guacamole, but it’s hard to eat it without a pound of chips. Chips, again, aren’t great for the ole’ diabetes. If I could just eat what I wanted in life, but then choose what my body has to process, I would be one happy Miranda. Process the salad, but not the fried chicken. Process the water, but not the unhealthy chemicals used to flavor it. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for humans, but it does work for reading. I feel there is a benefit in following my curiosity without being forced into processing my notes to maintain a balance between consumption and digesting. I read fantasy books all the time just for fun, those hardly ever make it into these notes. But I also come across topics that piqued my curiosity but didn’t resonate with me in the end. Or resources that are maybe poorly written, but I still get a couple of good ideas from. I don’t want to force myself into a grueling process to digest these “subpar” notes for the sake of process. Some notes, it’s just not their time in my life. I might come across them two years from now and they make more sense to me and fit better into my world view. So, in principle, I agree with part of what I believe the author is trying to say: If you’re not spending time digesting your notes, the nutrition will be lost to you forever. But, I don’t think the goal always needs to be having a clean plate.