Writing to learn

28 Dec, 2024

At one point, reading a book was enough to make me feel good. In other words, I was that Goodreads user. But I've come to appreciate reading to learn so I can apply those learnings in my daily life. That's much harder and slower, but usually worth the effort.¹

Reading for learning requires you to remember what you've read. There are many strategies to improve reading retention, but one method robustly stands out above all other: writing about what you've read. You may think that you know what you think, but only after you've tried explaining what you've learned to someone else or writing your thoughts down, do you truly find what you actually think.

The Feynman method is ideal for this. Try explaining the topic first to yourself. It requires you to apply most of the useful reading strategies all at once. You have to read, make notes, re-read and re-write in your own words to show your thinking. You can write in private, that's perfectly fine, but if you decide to publish your writing, you'll create an additional layer of accountability.² You'll have to face your readers, their feedback, questions or criticism.

But there are at least two issues with publishing your writing.

First, reading a book on topic that's outside of your circle of competence may cause you to subconsciously moderate if not censor yourself out of fear of not getting it right. That's accountability. That's also perfectly understandable, especially if your career is on the line. Anything that ensures survival is rational, but there's no learning without failure and there's no wealth without skin in the game.³

Second, and one of the great tragedies of modern life, is that some professions will be naturally resistant to this approach. In some cases, making your writing public could expose you to considerable risk. Here, you'll be "unfree" to publish due to a possibility that your writing could be used against you, such as by an "adversary" or your (former) employer. Either way, a strong overlap with the first issue (accountability).

Thankfully for us, both issues can be avoided by writing in private, as I've done for many years. Not everything you know has to be written out, but most of what you want to learn about should be.