You can watch how I create source cards here.
2. Define a selection intent.
Selection involves identifying source material that you determined is worth investing your time and cognitive energy into. Why did you choose that particular source among all the others?
Declare your selection intent on the front of your source card to remind yourself of why you chose to engage with the source material.
3. Scan before you read.
Look through the table of contents, index and chapter summaries of the book. What contents might you anticipate being more relevant to your selection intent than others?
Skim through the book and identify meaningful keywords and themes. If you find it difficult to understand the author’s definition of a keyword, that is a good indicator that there is a wealth of complex knowledge for you to simplify.
4. Extract only the most irresistible, novel ideas.
One of the most common problems I have helped my students overcome involves identifying what is worth extracting from source material. Often it is not that they don’t know what to extract, its that they don’t know what to exclude.
Writers do not have your unique interests in mind when they publish their work. It is up to you to filter out the noise that does not relate to your selection intent.
Engaging in new novel ideas inspires deep reflection which results in valuable knowledge development.
Be a knowledge creator, not an information collector.
5. Read multiple books at once.
If you are anything like me, this just comes naturally because your attention may shift in what you want to engage with day to day. I am always reading at least 3 books and it really helps to maintain my reading habit without getting bored or burnt out.
It is a good practice to be reading a variety of different books at a time, across different genres, topics and time periods. Any more than 5 books at a time can start to become overwhelming and cause decision fatigue, so try to stay within the sweet spot of 3-4 books.
6. Shortform: a tool to guide your selection process
Shortform will save you a lot of time selecting the right source material before fully engaging with the text. It is like book summaries on steroids as it synthesizes key insights from other seemingly unrelated literature in the summaries. I even used Shortform to distill the key insights from the book “How to Read a Book” mentioned above, and in the process I discovered a couple new books to add to my list.
Shortform also has an amazing realistic text to speech reader which allows you to actively listen to book summaries while writing notes, or passively listen on the go.
You can go to shortform.com/tony for a free trial and 20% discount.