They Felt The Same Way As You | How To Remember Everything You Read

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: They felt the same way as you. They were scared. They were nervous. They were frustrated. They were confused. They were tired. It's easy to think that the ancient Greeks and Romans were somehow very different than us, their lives far removed from our own. Of course, what a great historian is able to do is make it clear how untrue that is. As John Meacham has said, our ancestors did not dwell in some land called history or the past. Like all of us, they dwelt in a vivid, living, chaotic present. Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and Cato were all concerned about their declining institutions. They stressed about new technology.

0:54Ryan Holiday: They wondered if it was the beginning of the end of their country. They dealt with wars and natural disasters and fads and trends. But unlike us, as we read about these historical events, they did not know how it would end. They did not know whether they were doing the right thing or not. They were taking it day by day, doing their best, which is all we can do, which is what we must do. Like them, we have to keep showing up, keep serving, keep trying to do the right thing in difficult times. That's what every generation is asked to do, to play our part without knowing how the story ends.

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4:10Ryan Holiday: Look, it's good that you read. It's good that you read a lot. But if you can't remember what you're reading, if all this is just going in a black hole somewhere, you have a massive problem, right? Because a lot of what we read now, a lot of what we are learning now, it is valuable, and we may need it, just not at this moment. So the question becomes, how do you collect, organize, preserve all the things that you're reading and learning? Because the cost of forgetting a story or a lesson can be really high. It could be money. It could be time. It could be relationship, right? Like you're reading about something now that could be of great benefit to you in the future.

4:48Ryan Holiday: It could be the solution to your problem. It could save you. But if you don't remember it, if you haven't recorded it, if you can't easily access it, you may as well never have read it in the first place. Right? What reading is, is a way to learn from the experiences of others. We have to record and capture and preserve that information. I've read thousands and thousands of books over the course of my life. And before that, I was a research assistant under the great Robert Greene, who taught me a lot of what we're going to talk about in today's episode. And then my own learning and experience writing the books that I've done and having this job for many years.

5:20Ryan Holiday: I'm going to give you my four-part system that can help you remember and use everything you're reading and learning.

5:30Ryan Holiday: So first, let's talk about how to read. Obviously you know how to read, but if you're not reading with a pen, you might as well not be reading in my opinion To me reading is something you do actively you're reading you're taking notes You're highlighting things you're marking things. I don't care what kind of pen you use what kind of highlighter you use whatever it is the point is you should be reading and Selecting and noting things that stand out to you for some reason. I like to use sharpie So like you can see here. This is a page. I'm marking with a sharpie. I'm folding one page I'm marking to continue to the next one.

6:04Ryan Holiday: I'm marking things I want to use in my books. If you have a thought, if you have a disagreement, if you really like something, that's what the pen is for. This is called marginalia. It's something that the greatest writers and thinkers have always done. I learned this in David McCullough's book on John Adams. You can see these are all the pages I folded, and then I'll show you some of the notes that I took in mind. But in one book that he read on the French Revolution, his marginalia totaled something like 12 ,000 words. And McCullough points out that he read thinkers like Adam Smith. He agreed with them in some cases, disagreed with them.

6:42Ryan Holiday: In other cases, he made connections. He made notations. And that's what he's doing as an active reader. The point is reading should be active and it should be engaging. You shouldn't agree with everything. You shouldn't accept everything unthinkingly. You shouldn't even like everything. I often tweak or criticize sentences that I don't like, metaphors or similes that I think are lame, stylistic choices that I like, dislike, right? They call reading the classics the great conversation. I think that's a great way to think about it. This is, in fact, a conversation. It's a dialogue between you and the writer.

7:18Ryan Holiday: You know, some people are reluctant to do this because they want to preserve their books. They want to protect their books. No, books are meant to be read and used. Not only did I write in this one, I was scribbling with Sharpie on the cover. There's food stains you can see here. I put hundreds of miles on this book. I took it on airplanes. I took it on a car trip. I sat and ate my lunch over it. The point is I am engaging with the thing that David McCullough spent years of his life producing. I am not treating it like it's this delicate, fragile little thing. No, I'm integrating into my life.

7:50Ryan Holiday: I'm engaging with it. I'm subjecting it to the test, right? So part of what we're doing when we're reading is setting ourselves up for future success. Now, can you also do this on an e-book? Yes. But I actually think it's the act of reading it physically, engaging with it, that is so valuable, which leads me to my next point. Speed reading is bullshit. You're not trying to burn through these books as fast as possible. Mark Surrealis talks about this in meditations that he learns from his philosophy teacher. This is a passage here I underlined in book one of meditations. Mark's real is thanking what he learned from his philosophy teacher Junius Rusticus.

8:28Ryan Holiday: I'll read it for you here. I've underlined it and highlighted it multiple times over 20 plus years. He says from Rusticus, he learned to read attentively and not be satisfied with just getting the gist of it. It'd be better to read fewer books and really understand them, really process them, really take, extract from them everything that they contain, then read tons and tons of books and get nothing from them.

8:55Ryan Holiday: so the next thing i do after i read a book like this after i've marked all these pages is i just let it sit for a little bit they sit on a pile next to my desk and whenever i have spare time i sit down i do my extracts i do my note cards now it's the process of taking this information which is contained between these two covers and extracting it this is really important this is the best and most powerful part. The reason you're waiting is that some of the stuff that jumps out at you when you read it the first time, when you go back through it the second time, it's not gonna jump out at you. Also, this period of kind of setting it and forgetting it is really important because it's the second pass that's now allowing you to engage with the material one additional time.

9:36Ryan Holiday: But it's really important that we take the stuff that's in the books and we put it on the page, right? This is a great book, which by the way, I took tons of notes on. This is Roland Allen's The Notebook. The subtitle here is great. A History of Thinking on Paper. So I've read the book on paper and now I wanna turn it into note cards. I use four by six note cards because this is the method that I learned as a research assistant to the great Robert Greene. I remember I just started working for him and he takes me into his office and he starts pulling out these boxes. They look like long shoe boxes.

10:08Ryan Holiday: And he says, you wanna see how I wrote the 48 Laws of Power? Which is by the way, this like mind bending compilation of all these different facts and stories and anecdotes and quotes from all different cultures and great works of art. And he showed me how he did the 48 Laws of Power. It was the shoebox, it's organized and all these different, he's like, it's all about the note cards. The note cards are the building blocks. So I went out and got note cards and that's the system I've been doing for 20 plus years now. And there's actually a great quote in this book from Pliny the Elder, a great Roman thinker.

10:41Ryan Holiday: And he said, never read without taking extracts. And Pliny used to say there was no book so bad that you couldn't take one or two things from it, which is totally true. There's been books I've read about totally random subjects that ended up getting one line or one idea from that shaped one of my books or took me down a rabbit hole. I ended up looking something up. So that's the process. It goes from the reading to the extract phase and then to the note cards. Let me tell you why. A collection of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest treasure for a man of the world, as long as he knows how to weave the former into opposite points in the course of conversation and to recall the latter on fitting occasions.

11:21Ryan Holiday: Who is that? It's from Goethe, the German philosopher and novelist. And I took that on a note card and I put it here.

11:33Ryan Holiday: and so once you've extracted the information you're writing it down the next step is of course organizing it and you have to organize it into what's called a commonplace book so remember earlier i was telling you that story about john adams how did i know that was on page 619 of the mccullough biography because i have it right here on a note card which i took when i was writing my wisdom book i knew i wanted to do a chapter on commonplace books which is what we're talking about here and i said 12 000 words of comments on one book page 619 mccullough john adams so this is a building block for a chapter that i would write later and i have been collecting these note cards i have tens of thousands of them for over 20 years whenever i find something interesting when i find something i think i might use when i find something that i want to research i write it down on a note card and then i organize it in my commonplace book if you don't know what a commonplace book is well you should and i write about it in wisdom takes work because it's as i said it's a really important theme this is the create a second brain chapter for hundreds of years lovers of books and ideas have kept what is called a commonplace book where they collected observations quotes ideas his diary entries and anecdotes that they wanted to preserve.

12:52Ryan Holiday: As far back as the Greeks and Romans, Ars Exerpendi, the art of excerpting, was a skill to be taught. And I talk about all the different people that have done this, that have kept some version of a commonplace book. Anne Frank kept one. Montaigne kept a commonplace book. That's what formed his famous essays. Emerson kept so many commonplace books, did so much extracting, that he had to create a book just that's like a running table of context or index about where all the stuff could be found. Now, there's a bunch of different names and words for this commonplace system. There's a German word for it, Zettelkasten, which is interesting.

13:28Ryan Holiday: A lot of people use index cards like I do. That's my favorite thing. Look, you can do it as a notebook, but a lot of people use index cards. And you wanna know how I wrote that chapter on commonplace books in Wisdom Takes Work? A stack of note cards that I collected about people keeping commonplace books. Here's a note about Montaigne. His copy of Lucretius currently exists at Cambridge University. And you can look at all the notes that he kept. I actually read a great book a couple of years ago called Patton's Mind, which talks all about how Patton extracted knowledge from the books that he read.

14:04Ryan Holiday: And you can look at the pages of books that Patton read. And when he finished, he put a little R in the corner. More about John Adams. Darwin said, trust nothing to memory. Joan Didion may have done note cards at this table. She would organize her screenplays with note cards, but she also kept notebooks and note cards to remember stuff. And she says famously in this quote that I have here about how the reason we keep notebooks, the reason we write these things down is not just that it has a professional application. She finds little things she ends up using in her essays and books, but that it helps her keep in touch with who she used to be.

14:38Ryan Holiday: That is the delightful part of extracting and keeping a commonplace book. Several years ago when I was putting out conspiracy, I got invited to do an event at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. And I immediately said yes. Why did I say yes? And what was the condition my acceptance was predicated on? It's I wanted to see Ronald Reagan's note cards. Because I'd read a book actually written by someone I know a little bit, Douglas Brinkley. Ronald Reagan kept these photo binders way back beginning in his acting days and then his spokesperson days. than his government days about quotes, anecdotes, stories, facts that he really liked.

15:20Ryan Holiday: And I said, I'll give this talk if you let me go through some of his note cards. They did. I went into the library and they just had all these note cards laid out for me to look at. And it was incredible. Now, again, he put them often on these three by five cards or sometimes scraps of paper. Like I said, I prefer four by six note cards. That seems like the right size to me. So this is ultimately the president of the United States. Why was he such a good public speaker? Where did this sort of homespun wisdom came from? It wasn't off the top of his head. It wasn't extemporaneous. It was from his note cards.

15:51Ryan Holiday: And look, a really important part of this system is how painstaking it is and how much time it takes, as I was saying. So it's the process of reading and taking the notes, but then it's writing out the long quotes by hand or typing it up and printing it out. So now I've read it then I've opened the book up and I'm looking at it again and now I'm feeling those words flow through my fingers this way or that way and so now I've engaged with the material a handful of times and this is much better memory than you know highlighting it and sending it to your Evernote or to a Google Doc somewhere. I want you to sweat for it.

16:29Ryan Holiday: I want it to take time. I want it to be difficult the inefficiency is the efficiency let me show you what a commonplace book looks like this is one of mine we've been talking about wisdom takes work so i'll show you my commonplace book for my book about wisdom oh my god it's so heavy all right so this is actually a box it's called a cropper hopper or something i just bought a bunch of them online that uh is meant also to organize photos not unlike ronald reagan did and this is thousands of note cards This is the note card I did when I was writing the Virtue series, Courage, Temperance, Justice, Wisdom.

17:05Ryan Holiday: I would circle which one I was working on. But this is all the research and extracts I took while I was writing Wisdom Takes Work. There's a chapter in the book on wonder. That part of wisdom is about finding things that inspire you, that light you up, that make you ever curious. I'm talking about this book that I loved about Richard Feynman by Leonard Mudlenow. and uh there's a story so Feynman's exam for Leonard page 325 he said look if you're going to insist that I've taught you something I guess I should give you a final exam really one question okay sure go look at an electron microscope photograph of an atom he told him don't just glance at it's very important that you examine it closely right and then here's here's me riffing on it I said what does it matter if an atom makes your heart flutter because as Aristotle said another bit of reading I did philosophy begins in wonder no one can accomplish greatness in any field if they're not driven by love and fascination and genuine reverence so the point is we're collecting this stuff so we can use it in my case as a writer but maybe in your case in a speech that you're giving in a business plan that you're writing or an art project that you're doing or maybe just something you're collecting for a subject you're trying to wrap your head around And then here we have another quote from Feynman talking about Descartes.

18:24Ryan Holiday: This is page 118. We have a quote. Do you know who first explained the true origin of the rainbow? I asked. It was Descartes, he said. And in a moment, he looked me in the eye. And what do you think was the salient feature of the rainbow that inspired Descartes' mathematical analysis, he asked. Well, the rainbow is actually starts to explain it. And then Feynman cuts him off. He says, you're overlooking a key feature of the phenomenon. OK, I give up. What would you say inspired his theory? I would say his inspiration was that he thought rainbows were beautiful. So I just love little stories like that.

18:54Ryan Holiday: I think the Greek term for him was a kreia. They're little sort of anecdotes, moral lessons, moral stories that you tell. And it helps you capture and understand the essence of someone, but also the essence of the world or some truth about the human experience. And look, all of this would be impossible for being to keep in my brain. I could keep some of it, but not all of it. And so it's the process of writing and rewriting and organizing and putting them in these little file folders that allows me to engage with the material over and over and over again. I remember I asked Robert Greene, I was like, can I just do this all digitally?

19:28Ryan Holiday: And he was like, no, the whole point is that it's physical, not just the painful part of doing it. Like when I read a big book like this, sometimes the reason I take a couple of weeks before I pick it up or months, this would be multiple days work, right? transferring these extracts might take two or three days of work but it's not just that that is important like sweating for you really learn it but having it here having it laid out allows me to organize it put it in themes but move them around and go actually no this doesn't go here this goes here this belongs in two categories and now I got to write it again and I'm engaging with the material again so it's creating the recall the familiarity but also in my brain I have a sense of where they all go, what belongs with each other.

20:10Ryan Holiday: And then I can see as I'm writing a book or as I'm researching and accumulating a book where these themes have started to come together. So I have commonplace books for each of the books that I write. I have commonplace books about philosophy. I have a commonplace book of just life advice, just things that I try to apply as a person and as a parent. So you can do this however you want for whatever you're doing it for. It's changing and evolving over time eventually I'll run out of these boxes, or maybe I'll come up with a more permanent solution. The point is, it's designed to be tweaked, but the core basic principles, the nuts and bolts of it, that is perennial and timeless.

20:49Ryan Holiday: I want you to put your own spin on it, but most of all, what I want you to do is do it, right? I got some advantage out of it when I started on my first book, but it was my second and my third. It's all the accumulation of these cards over many, many, many, many years that I've derived the most value of. And so the best time to have started a commonplace book, to have started this system for you would have been a long time ago. But the second best time is like right now. Because your future self, you five years from now when you're working on a project, you 20 years, 30 years from now when you're really struggling with something and you know you read something or you thought you heard this somewhere, you're going to want to draw on that wisdom.

21:28Ryan Holiday: It's going to be right here in whatever form you've collected and organized it in. That's what it's all about. And these principles are timeless, right? Read intentionally, read with a pen, take notes, extract them from the book, put them physically manifest them on the note cards, organize them. And then this is the most important part. How do you apply them to your actual life, to the work that you do? So yeah, it would be better to have done this a long time ago but now is pretty good too, provided that you keep doing it as you go and as you grow.

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