---
aliases: ["Read More by Reading Better"]
Is A: Evergreen
Topics: ["[[topic-reading-books]]"]
Status: Published
---
# Read More by Reading Better
The bottleneck in most people's reading isn't speed — it's selection and retention. They read too many books they don't finish and retain too little of what they do.

Three things have improved my reading dramatically:

1. **Permission to stop.** If a book hasn't earned its next chapter by page 50, I stop. Life is too short for dutiful reading.

2. **Writing after reading.** I write a brief note — what was the core claim? Do I believe it? What does it connect to? This takes 20 minutes and dramatically improves retention.

3. **Re-reading deliberately.** I re-read a handful of books every year that have proven worth re-reading. Each time I find something new.

The writing-after-reading habit is the one that has made the biggest difference, and it connects directly to how I think about knowledge management. Before I adopted this practice, I would finish a book, feel like I understood it, and then six months later struggle to recall anything beyond a vague impression. Now, the act of writing a note forces me to distill the book's central argument into my own words, identify which parts I agree with and which I dispute, and connect it to ideas I already hold. This process regularly reveals that I understood less than I thought — and that is exactly the point. The note becomes the proof of understanding, not the feeling of understanding.

Selection deserves as much attention as the reading itself. Most reading advice focuses on speed or volume, but the highest-leverage intervention is choosing better books. I maintain a running list that is heavily filtered by recommendations from people I trust — not bestseller lists, not algorithm recommendations, but specific books recommended by specific people whose judgment I respect in specific domains. When [[person-matteo-cellini]] recommends a book about systems thinking, I take it seriously because I know his track record of recommendations in that space. This social filtering dramatically improves the hit rate compared to browsing a bookstore or scrolling through Goodreads.

Re-reading is the most counterintuitive of the three practices because it feels wasteful — why read a book you have already read when there are thousands you have not? The answer is that you are not the same reader the second time. A book like Essentialism or Deep Work means something different after you have spent a year trying to implement its ideas. The second reading is not a review — it is a dialogue between the book and your experience. I typically re-read 3-4 books per year and get more from those re-readings than from most new books. The insight density of a great book on its second pass is remarkably high because you know which parts are relevant to your life.

## Key insight
Reading productivity is determined by the product of three factors: selection quality, comprehension depth, and retention rate. Most people try to improve reading by increasing speed, which affects none of these factors. The highest-impact interventions are ruthless selection (stop reading bad books immediately), active processing (write notes after reading), and strategic re-reading (revisit the best books as your experience grows). Together, these practices mean reading fewer books but extracting dramatically more value from each one.

## Related
- [[knowledge-management-is-not-filing]] — Writing after reading is knowledge integration, not filing
- [[the-compound-effect-in-knowledge-work]] — Reading compounds when each book connects to previous reading
- [[note-deep-work]] — One of the books worth re-reading annually
- [[note-essentialism]] — Another re-reading candidate that improves with experience
- [[note-atomic-habits]] — The habit architecture for building a consistent reading practice
- [[topic-reading-books]] — Broader thinking on reading as a practice
