The Barbell Method of Reading
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The Barbell Method is a phrase coined by Nassim Taleb. ⤴️ The Barbell Method takes this into account by integrating your reading habit into your personal knowledge management with two steps:
- Read the book. Read swiftly but don’t skip any parts. Mark all the passages that stand out and contain useful, interesting or inspiring information.
- Read the book a second time. But now you read the marked parts only. This time you make notes, connect them to past notes (zettelkasten) and think about what you’ve read. Make mindmaps, drawings, bullet points – everything that helps you to think more clearly. ⤴️
The quality of the book will now determine how much time you invest in it. ⤴️
The first step of the Barbell Method of Reading is just reading. That is a shallow kind of processing that suffices to understand what is easy to understand. You are probing the text and can later decide what you should do with it. You decide on a part-by-part basis.
A text consists of four different types of parts:
- Useful and difficult to understand.
- You want to process these parts heavily for understanding and exploitation.
- Mark these for later.
- Useful and easy to understand.
- You want to process these parts heavily for exploitation.
- Mark these for later.
- Not useful but difficult to understand.
- You actually don’t want to process these parts but you don’t know if they are useful. Sharpen your mental theeth with them and then ignore them after you found out that they are not useful.
- Not useful and easy to understand.
- Ignore these. ⤴️
# References
ways to improve learning, retention and understanding while reading The importance of writing for learning, understanding, thinking and retention