Wan Weigang talks about how a true reader should read!

Wuxia novels often depict martial arts masters as being able to take one for ten or even one for a hundred, but the truth is that one can't turn into a tank by practicing martial arts any more. In the real world, even if you have a high level of martial arts, I set up a ten-person gun formation - without machine guns, that is, the ancient kind of three or four meters long cold-weapon lance - can easily kill you. But a person's insight can reach the level of one for a hundred or higher. A really learned person, his "inner strength" is so high, you on more people will not be able to use.

Running and practicing martial arts to improve the physical quality of people are very limited, reading can be extremely large to enhance the internal power of human thought. This internal force is the understanding of the world and insight.

The purpose of reading is to gain insights and learn high-level thinking. Interesting things happen in the world all the time, and they excite, confuse, or anger a lot of people, and most people just vent their emotions in the comments on news pages. If you've read books on the subject, you might point out:

First, there's nothing really wrong with this incident, I know better/worse/weirder things than this; second, the opinion stated by that so-called expert belongs to the X school of thought, which is highly controversial in academia, and they're in fact outdated, for example, Theory Y, which won the ×××× Nobel Prize in Economics, is a better theory; and thirdly, I suspect that the matter will move in the direction of ××××××. Tim Harford, the famous economics author, has come out with a book, Dear Undercover Economist, a collection of short pieces in which he answers questions from readers in the Financial Times, and every single one of them follows this trope. Being educated is very different from being uneducated.

Even if you don't want to be a columnist, it's always useful to be an educated person. When uneducated people make a fuss, educated people can see the strange; when uneducated people turn a blind eye to the time, educated people can see the slightest thing.

From the perspective of reading, there are two kinds of people in the world.

One kind of people reading is to master skills, through all kinds of exams, or purely for entertainment. The other kind of person reads books in order to improve their own internal strength. These two kinds of people may not have much difference in the initial level of "intelligence", but in time, their "wisdom" level will be a world of difference. Only the latter are worthy of being called "readers".

The best-selling types of books in our country are the various teaching reference books and exam counseling books, which are not considered books. The most popular types of books in China are the teaching reference books and the examination guide books, which are not considered as books. We specialize in how to read those non-fiction books that can deepen one's understanding of a particular field after reading them, and can gain a sense of rising wisdom (even if it is an illusion).

There are three basic facts about such books.

First, most people don't read such books; they are not readers.

Second, most of them don't finish them, if they do read them at all. When you buy a Kindle version of an ebook from Amazon, you can see the most popular highlights that other readers have drawn on the book.The Kindle allows you to underline statements you think are highlights as you read, and Amazon marks the statements with more underlining in the book. I read a lot of nonfiction books, and one of the patterns is that the vast majority of popular highlights appear in the first two chapters. And after a quarter of the book, the focus markings are largely invisible. Are there no highlights worth drawing in the back of any of these books? The answer is obviously that most people stop reading most books after only a quarter of the way through. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal using a method of counting highlighted sentences on the kindle found that most readers read only 6.6% of A Brief History of Time, 6.8% of Thinking, Fast and Slow, and 2.4% of Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, considered the most important work of economics in recent years, even though it's currently the best-selling book on Amazon. People who love to buy books don't necessarily really read; many merely love to collect them.

Third, even for those who finish, most of them don't get it. I'll give Tim Harford's famous book Undercover Economist as an example. At the time I wrote the original version of this post, the book had three pages on Douban, of which only the Chinese version page had reader book reviews that weren't considered spam. Of the six popular reviews on Douban, the hottest one, "Tear the Skin Off Your Face" by "Zi Buzhi", talked about the book's claim that Starbucks coffee and supermarkets are messing with the price phenomenon; the second, whose title is the book's title, was not a book review, but more of an advertisement for the book; and the third, "Real-World Economics", mentioned Starbucks and then somehow started to talk about the book's price. Starbucks, and then somehow starts talking about another book on economics and his own process of reading economics books; and the fourth, which talks about Starbucks, house prices, supermarket pricing, and train tickets for college students. Reading these book reviews, it seems that Undercover Economics is a romp through life's economic tidbits.

But the book is not pure rambling nonsense. It has a pretty strong point of view and a strong theme. This book repeatedly emphasizes one concept, "scarcity". The first chapter writes about the example of Starbucks selling coffee in order to point out that it is impossible to make money without scarcity. The second chapter writes that with scarcity you may not be able to make a lot of money: even if you are the only supermarket in the neighborhood, customers may not spend a lot of money buying things from you. You have to use a range of tactics, even subterfuge, to get people to shell out money. The most typical way to do this is to price customers differently. Chapters 3 through 5 write about why economists like markets, because market regulation can automatically make scarce things less scarce! Then it talks about why markets sometimes fail. Some government policies, ostensibly for the sake of fairness, objectively promote scarcity, such as not allowing market-based enrollment in quality elementary schools. Chapter 6 points out that companies like Amazon don't really have scarcity power. Chapters 7 through 10 then show the application of these earlier theories to current hot issues.

If we read this book and remember only two words, they should be "scarcity". But if you look at the top four Douban reviews, none of them mention the word "scarcity"! If you only read these four book reviews, the two words you remember are "coffee". And how Starbucks sells coffee is actually what the first four pages of the book say.

With this kind of reading, even if you read another 15 books on economics, you won't learn to look at the world through the eyes of an economist, and what you'll get is just a bunch of dinner table quotes. When the next time you listen to the experts, you will still feel déjà vu, and you won't be able to tell.

So, reading this thing is not so simple, it also needs technology. There are those who can read, those who can't, not those who love to read.

There are many people have summarized the technology of reading. The best summarized is probably the famous book "How to Read a Book". Now on the Internet you can find a lot of notes summarizing the reading techniques in this book. In my opinion, the best thing about this book is not any particular technique, but a spirit. This spirit believes that there are three grades of reading: reading for pleasure, reading for information, and reading for understanding. First, reading is only worth taking seriously if it is done for the purpose of understanding something we didn't originally understand. Secondly, reading should be about me, not about the book. The author of this book says that there are no more than one hundred books in the world that are worth reading over and over again (and lists them in the back of the book), and that all other books can be thrown away after basically reading them. Anyone who can really do with such a spirit to read is a real spiritual aristocrat, they are completely different from those who collect books of bookworms. How to Read a Book almost handily teaches the reader a meticulous set of reading methods, so painstakingly that many readers get lost in the details of these methods. Ironically, however, I've read a lot of notes that people have taken on the book How to Read a Book, and most of these notes fail to capture this advanced spirit of reading.

*Power Reading

This book builds on How to Read a Book by advocating a high-intensity approach to reading called Power Reading. Unlike the step-by-step, tedious routine of "How to Read a Book," our "Power Reading" is more like an attitude and mindset. In fact, I would like to give this article an English title, called Deep Reading (deep reading), in order to echo the recent psychologists talk about the training of genius of the new results, "deliberate practice" (deeppractice), to echo.

"Power reading" isn't about reading specialized works like General Relativity; it's geared toward nonfiction books like Undercover Economics, written for a lay audience. It's called "powerful" because it seeks to maximize the depth and efficiency of reading, and tries to get the most out of a book. I once heard a joke about how we learn from others. We go to someone's house as if we were thieves and remove everything but the kitchen sink - and then we go back and remove the kitchen sink as well. That's the spirit in which we're going to read a book!

Power reading has three ****s in common with "deliberate practice":

First, it's not fun. There is no such thing as "fun and learning" at the World Championship Training Center. "Powerful study" is not for entertainment and rest, but with a very serious attitude, you have to be a book that is so well integrated that it "grows" in your brain. This kind of reading is quite tiring. I think writing notes is a very serious endeavor.

Second, it takes less time. Just as in the best music schools that specialize in the gifted, kids never really practice more than 2 hours a day. No one can sustain that kind of intensity for very long, and training without intensity is better than not practicing at all. You may spend a lot of time reading every day, but you're hardly going to be able to spend a lot of time studying intensely. Save your energized and undisturbed time slots for the best books.

Third, don't go for fast. Many reading methods teach people how to read a book as fast as possible, and those books that are necessary to read quickly don't deserve to be read at all. A key technique in reading is to read at different speeds for different readings. Entertaining novels, purely informational news, the faster you read, the better. Good books that are in our "learning zone" should be read slowly and carefully. Reading a book quickly is like playing a piece of music quickly; it's not practicing, it's completing the task of practicing. One of the secrets of readers is that by reading slowly, they absorb knowledge and grow their inner strength more efficiently. It is said that the reason why people with dyslexia are particularly prone to talent is because they read slowly.

A book should be read twice, and only twice. You can't get the essence of a good book by reading it once, and conversely if once is enough, the book is not worth studying vigorously. We're talking about books of ideas, not scholarly works, so there's no need to read them three times if they're any good. Two times is just right. And the most efficient way to do that is to read it once and then read it again.

The first time is a normal read-through, just relax and enjoy the author's brilliant ideas and interesting stories. Don't try to read it fast - a book that's worth stopping to think about from time to time is a good book.

Writing notes while reading for the second time. This is the time to stop reading every word, to skip stories that are used as examples in the book, and to focus on the train of thought. Read a chapter and take notes on it until you're done. Then the book can be put on the shelf, or even just thrown away.

One of the great things about reading notes is that they make it easy for you to revisit the book later as quickly as possible, just by looking at the notes. There are other great books out there waiting to be read, so it's best to write notes to the point where they can replace the original book.

I've seen a lot of mediocre notes, some of which are just like an elementary school student's overview of a text's central idea and the main idea of a paragraph. There are a lot of people on the Internet who use "mind mapping" to take notes, which doesn't make a lot of sense either. It's like using the three numbers of bra, hips, and waist to describe a beautiful woman.

Strong research requires that the book notes must include four aspects:

① clearly show the logic of each chapter;

② take away all the highlights of the book;

③ have a lot of their own views and insights;

④ find the book and other books or articles previously read. articles that are connected.

Many people's notes are only summarized in abstracts. Being able to do the first point and find a logical thread is considered excellent notes. I've only seen a very few people occasionally insert book highlights into their notes. As for the last two points, even fewer can do it. But only by doing all four can you maximize the utility of a book. And you'll find the payoff is huge.

I've taken to dividing my book notes into chapters exactly according to the chapters of the original book, even keeping the titles of the chapters. At the beginning of each chapter, write down in your own words exactly what the author is trying to say in that chapter, and the chapters thread together to form a system - but this kind of executive summary is not important.

What is important is to be sure to be able to see the author's line of logic. The reason why most people don't really understand a book is that they don't see this thread. The logical structure of each chapter may only be a few sentences if you really write it, but these sentences are often spread over dozens of pages. Good authors will often include a large number of fascinating short stories (including research cases, historical stories and anecdotes), and only by linking these short stories together can we understand what the author is really talking about. Looking at one of these stories on its own, everyone will interpret the story differently. Yet the story's role in the book is often overlooked, and one ends up only remembering the tree of short stories and not seeing the forest they make up.

Modern people love the little bits, and can often remember the jokes the author told and forget the author's intent. In U.S. history, there is no television, no network, not to mention the microblogging "printing press era", Stephen Douglas (he once competed with Abraham Lincoln for the U.S. President, but also competed for his wife, and finally failed) once had a series of seven famous debates with Abraham Lincoln. Douglas was extremely eloquent and often made brilliant remarks, but he cautioned his audience not to applaud them.

Douglas even criticized his audience, saying that he needed their understanding, not their passion, and that his audience should be contemplative readers. ...... reading requires rational thought. A good reader will not stumble upon any aphorisms and phrases and ecstasy or can not help but applaud - a busy analyzing the reader is afraid that there is no time to care about these.

The "Ancient Chinese Fables" that we studied as children are short stories from ancient books, and our interpretation of these fables often deviates from what the ancients intended when they wrote them. We remember the story but forget the text. So the first function of a book note is to put aside the story and remember the article. Let a book go from thick to thin, from concrete mountain scenery to abstract maps. Only when you jump out of the words and look down on the whole book with a condescending attitude can its veins become clear. After you see it clearly, don't copy the author's words, write this vein out in your own words, as if you were drawing a map.

But if a short story is really good, we have to leave it behind. Good book notes are not evenly distributed. Taking notes is the act of getting excited about an idea I've heard about and having to write it down for myself. In addition to the logical progression, if I find a really good short story - let's call it a "highlight" - then I write that story down as well, even down to the nitty-gritty. On the one hand, if you have to write an article in the future, you'll be able to pull it out of your notes and use it. More importantly, these stories will appear repeatedly in our brains, and they will influence our thoughts in various unexpected ways, until they change our understanding of the world. You have to admit that some paragraphs just live on longer than their original posts, to the point where they end up becoming tropes.

I use my Kindle to look at the key statements that other people underline about a book, and I find that most of them are summarizing, like the key sentences that elementary school students find in a text; they're usually the first or last sentence of a paragraph. The true masters of reading can not use this linear reading method, but should be "a startling". Which of the author's sentences is a knockout? Which sentence is a sentence to wake up the dreamer? Such things should be highlighted. I sometimes listen to Phoenix TV's "Eight Minutes to Open a Book," a television program that introduces books to viewers. I find that while several other hosts tend to tend to systematically introduce the content framework of a book in their programs, Leung Man Tao always finds a few individual highlights in a book, often coming up with one or two meaningful stories for the audience, so that one can appreciate the personality of the author of the original book. Reading notes have to have that effect. Reading, in a way, is about finding those highlights that stimulate your mind. We have to ignore the story when we are analyzing the chakra, and then take the story away after analyzing the chakra.

**Powerful study is an active method of reading. It is important to write down your own comments about the book in your notes as if you were having a conversation with the author. My current uniform practice is to put all my comments in square brackets "", so that when I flip through them in the future I can see at a glance which ones are from the book and which ones are my own.

Book collectors think the cleanliness of the book is most important, so they don't read the book; low-level readers will draw highlight lines all over the finished book; and high-level readers will write annotations all over the finished book. Historically, cattlemen who read books liked to annotate in the margins of the pages. It is said that people don't like to lend their books to Mao Zedong, because after he reads them, no one else can read them, and they are densely filled with his annotations. **

You can't be indifferent to a well-said passage. You can write down your own understanding of the matter, and you can write questions or affirmations about the author. A more advanced annotation would be to write down how inspired you were by what you saw in the passage. Each chapter of a good book can give rise to ten or more bursts of inspiration. Maybe it suddenly solves a problem you've been focusing on before - even though the problem may seem irrelevant to the book; maybe you'll want to take the author's theory one step further. These ideas may not all be useful, but they are all invaluable because if you don't write them down right away, they will soon be forgotten. Maybe when you look back over your notes years from now you'll feel that your inspiration is more valuable than the original book.

When you've read a certain number of books, you realize that there are connections between books. Especially in the modern world, very few books are written with ideas that are completely independent of the world, and truly new knowledge is often built on top of old knowledge. What do other books say on this subject? Is there any newer evidence for or against this conclusion? To find their ****ing similarities and differences. A really good active reader is very sensitive to such connections. I now use Impression Notes (Ever-note) to organize my reading notes, a tool that generates a link to each note that can be directly clicked and referenced by other notes. Such links often appear in my notes to point out book-to-book connections.

As children, we were all at one time or another very sensitive to new vocabulary. For example, you may have heard an idiom on TV, and even though you weren't sure of the exact meaning of the idiom, you still thought it was a good word. As a result, you come across the idiom many times over the next few months or even days! You may be wondering how you didn't notice it before, does this word love to find you specifically these days? A bookworm can remain so sensitive to new knowledge. Once you discover an interesting new subject and read a book on it, you'll have multiple encounters with it, either actively or passively. You just put the book down, and as soon as you go online you see another article on the subject. A few days later you turn on your phone and find someone on Twitter discussing it again. What should you do at this point? Open Impression Notes and organize a note on the subject!

If you read enough, you'll have an even rarer experience: feeling the progress of human knowledge. You'll realize that a problem is stated this way in this book, and a few years later someone writes another book, cites stronger evidence, and changes the whole conclusion. Sometimes you'll agree with this new conclusion, sometimes you'll disagree. Sometimes you have to judge which is the most reliable conclusion from several different conclusions in several books. Sometimes you think that none of them are actually right and only you know the right answer. At this level, you're on complete equal footing with the author of the book. You can even look down on them and judge the highs and lows between them. What should you do at this point? Write an article and publish it!

The most important reason to read a good book twice is for these insights, inspirations and connections. With a book that talks about territory we're less familiar with, on the first reading we tend to get so caught up in the author's thoughts that the entire bandwidth of our brain is used to comprehend the author's thoughts and there's no more room left to generate other ideas. "Humor is the embodiment of intellectual excess" and ideas only bubble up when there is excess bandwidth. It's only when you read it a second time that you can gasp out an opinion. The first read is to get stuck in, the second read is to jump out.

Taking notes is the greatest tribute to a good book. A book note is a very personalized piece of writing, an extension of personal knowledge. It's not a book review; it's written entirely for oneself rather than for public consumption - one can focus entirely on meaning without having to care about the writing. Granted, it's still fun to read someone else's well-written book notes, and reading notes directly saves a lot of reading time (Douban has a special system for readers to share notes).

If you can't do a strong study of the note standard, just do a general level of reading notes on their own can help, at least deepen the memory. There has been a study, let the subjects read a scientific article, and then divided into three groups: the first group to read a few times, the second group for this article to draw a "concept map", the third group with ten minutes to write a related article. One week later, the results showed that the group that wrote the article outperformed the other two groups in terms of memorization, even when they were asked to draw a concept map at this time. Drawing concept maps is not even as effective as reading them a few more times. So it's true that the saying "it's better to do it by hand than by eye" is true, and it's not really useful to use mind maps to take notes.

E-books

As we said earlier, reading slowly is better. Slow doesn't have to be active, if there are problems with the reading medium - such as the font's being too small, some of the words are hard to read or don't recognize - they will force you to slow down, and that's what gives just as good results. Some experiments have shown that when exam papers are printed poorly, students instead make fewer mistakes by taking the questions more seriously.

Possibly because it's more aesthetically pleasing, possibly because it feels more dignified and formal to hold in your hand, and possibly because the high cost of paper creates the illusion that the text is worth more as well, the average person is slower to read a paper book than they are to read an e-book.The variety of e-readers on the Kindle, iPad, and cell phones, which have made the reading experience infinitely cheaper and more convenient, are simply encouraging people to fast reading. It is often assumed that reading a paper book is better than reading an e-book. In fact, even when we see a good article online sometimes we love to print it off and study it carefully. Revising a paper you've written is even more important to do multiple printouts. The point is that the physical words printed on paper seem to stimulate the nerves of the brain and make us read with a more positive attitude.

But e-books have their benefits. For me the most important benefit of an e-reader is the ability to automatically extract your annotations and highlights that you've drawn in the book. Kindle, iBooks, and Good Reader all have the ability to do this, and the extracts can be saved directly to a file, and you can just organize the file directly to get your reading notes without having to flip through the book all the time.

Read e-books must be more annotated, do not waste that infinite blank space. If Fermat had read an e-book, he probably wouldn't have been able to write in the margins of the book because it was too small to give a proof of Fermat's theorem. One possible direction for e-book development is to socialize reading, with the Kindle now showing the sentences most highlighted by readers, and perhaps in the future showing each reader's annotations on each sentence.

The martial arts of readers

There are many more important things in the world than reading. Between doing and reading, doing takes precedence. But reading is the best way to quickly accumulate insights other than practice. Before the advent of television, the main activity when people had nothing to do was reading. In modern times, because of automated devices such as washing machines and dishwashers, people have much more free time every day than in the past, but they devote most of their cognitive surplus to television. And television is something that is fundamentally oriented to the largest possible number of people, just like a group dance in a square. Readers don't care about square dancing, we're after martial arts.

Strong research requires slow reading, but we know that many famous readers of the reading speed is very fast, this is why? This is martial arts. They read fast because for them the new stuff in the average book is already very limited.

The reader I admire most is the economist Tyler Cowen. Cowen is a "famous" economist who publishes his views on current economic issues in major newspapers and has written many books. But perhaps even more famous is the speed at which he reads! He could read several books a night. Anyone who witnessed him reading would be in a special kind of awe: the speed of turning the pages was so fast that he could read a page almost as fast as someone else could read a title. You might think that's a lot of reading, but I've been reading his blog all day, and I can responsibly say that he does know the key points of every book he reads.

What is Corwin's secret? He wrote a blog post specifically to answer that question. He said,

The best way to read quickly is to read lots. and lots. and to have started a long time ago. then maybe you know what is coming in the current book.

What's the secret?