Brian Etchison Jr

The average American reads four books a year. More than a quarter read none at all. That's a shame, because a book is one of the highest-leverage investments you can make. For the price of a workday and a few dollars, you get access to what the smartest people alive have already spent decades figuring out. But only if you read it right. There are 3 principles that change everything: 1. Use the Lindy Effect. The longer a book has already survived, the more likely it is to keep surviving. Read the classics, read the ancients, time has already done the filtering for you. 2. Read to absorb, not to check a box. There's a difference between finishing a book and being changed by it. You don't need to read cover to cover. You need certain passages to become part of how you think. 3. Distill to understand. When you finish a book, take ten minutes and summarize what you learned, in your own words, on a single page. That act of distillation is what turns information into understanding, and understanding into knowledge that's actually yours. Reading isn't the leverage. Understanding is. Effortless, pg 163