3 Habits That Help You Remember the Books You Have Read

Build mental models using the knowledge in the book

Charlie Munger uses 100+ “mental models” to help him understand the world, and one of the side benefits is helping him to remember the books he has read. Whenever he reads a book, he merges that book into one of the mental models in his head (Here is a post about how he does it). Here are 2 ways I see we can do it as well:

• Remember the mental models in our brains. As I am adopting Charlie Munger’s method when I am reading a book, I imagine I am putting little gifts on a giant Christmas tree. Every gift is a piece of knowledge and every branch is a mental model.
• If you like note-taking, then creating a “digital mindmap” in note-taking software could help you to construct mental models. Then make it a routine to review and update it. For this habit, I recommend the app “Coggle” (for tree-like mindmap UI), “Roam Research” (for bi-directional linked document network), “Notion” (for database-like knowledge indexing and custom filter and sort), or “OneNote” (for tags system and expandable sub-bullet-points). A habit that helped me for this is every morning/evening when I conclude my learning in my diary, I would pick out the best learnings of that day and paste them in my mindmap. Every time when I paste those learning in, I also had to skim through other parts of the mindmap and think about how my new learning can fit into my existing knowledge tree. And this is a great method for learning as well.

Teach the book you have read to someone

There is a saying, “teaching is the best way of learning”. I find by organizing the knowledge I learned from books into a teach-able format, it helps me to develop a deep understanding of the topic that can last a long time.

• One way of doing this is by actually teaching someone. 3 years ago, I was in a mastermind group where we call once every week and teach each other about books/book summaries that we read during that week. There were multiple books that I only read its summary, but after teaching what I read to the group, I am still able to remember them till today.
• What if you do not have a real person to teach to? Then writing a blog to share your learning could do the same thing as well (just like this one :) ). This is because blogging forces you to organize your knowledge into a flow where other people can also learn something from. I once talked to a very productive blogger. His habit was to use his blogging website as his real-time thought-organizing notebook. Whenever he is reading a book or learning something, he would have his blog open on the side and note down his learning as drafts of blog posts. Then every once a while, he would pick out the ones that look complete, edit them, and publish them. He found this way note-taking helped him organize and deepen his learning very efficiently.

Connect the lessons/stories from the book with yourself

We remember things that we experienced ourselves much more than remember things we heard that happen to other people. This is why if we can convert the lessons or stories from the books to become apart of our own experience, then we will remember them very well. Here are a few ways to do it:

• Knowledge that is “just in time”(help solve our current problems) is much more memorable than knowledge that is “just in case”(help solve future problems). So, one way of doing this is to only read books or chapters in the books that solve the problem we currently have. We will apply what we learned from the book right away to solve our problem. The experience of applying the knowledge will help us remember it well.
• What if you are reading books that are “just in case”? There is another method that can help it here. You can imagine a made-up situation that actually could happen on yourself and that is related to the stories or lessons from the book. Play that through in your brain. Imagine yourself say or do or apply as what suggested in the book. I find this could lead to close the same amount of memory retention as directly apply the knowledge.

Final note

It is time-consuming and demotivating to do all this extra work when we can just enjoy ourselves in the process of reading books. However, after forgetting and rediscovering knowledge in my books so many times, I learned that it is worth it for the long term gain to develop these habits to help us retain our memory. Just give it a try for yourself!