Remembering books with flashcards

I've met people who read (non-fiction) books and they just remember all important details effortlessly. I'm totally not one of them. The concepts might have an impact on me for a while but then quickly fade. A year later, it would be challenging in a discussion to refer to what I've read with any confidence.

Thankfully there are options to help with that. My system consists of taking notes and then boiling them down into what fits on a flashcard so I can continuously revisit it as time passes:

  1. When I read something valuable in the book, I highlight it and copy the paragraphs into a book summary text file.
    • The text file helps conveniently revisiting all valuable information
    • Personal annotations go there as well
    • If the book is not digital, I just highlighting with a marker
  2. In parallel, I write down the essential key points of the book.
  3. When finished, I re-read my book summary (or go through all marked passages) and make sure that I identified all the key points.
  4. I boil down the key points into the 5 most important takeaways.
    • It depends on the reader which key points are most important. Much of what's written in books is plain obvious. But even then, being more aware of the obvious can be a game changer.
    • Some key points are derived from more basic, essential key points. Boiling them down helps identifying commonalities and finding the essential ones.
      • Yet some of those derived key points are so impactful that they warrant a place in the final list of 5 key takeaways.
    • For very large books, one could boil down 5 key points for arbitrary subsections of the book.
  5. Finally I create a flashcard with those 5 takeaways on the back, and something like "What's the 5 takeaways of book X?" on the front.
    • To avoid forgetting the context, I also add some extra quotes, images and explanations to the back side of the flashcards, which I don't need to remember, but it's there if I need it.
    • I use Anki as a flashcard app, but whatever floats your boat.
    • In Anki, I give these flashcards a specific tag so that I can quickly revisit them by using a "Filtered Deck", e.g. in preparation for pivotal events.

You might find more than 5 takeaway points. I'd urge you to limit the flashcard to the 5 most important points, and create supplementary flashcards that remind you of the other points instead. Otherwise the main flashcard will get too big and too hard to review. But feel free to experiment.

You might find less than 5 takeaway points. Great, now you have the option between making the flashcard smaller and therefore easier to remember, or adding some non-essential points to remember even more about the book.

The Flashcard

The critical part is the flashcard of the 5 key takeaways of the book. It forces me to not only read the key points but also to be able recall them. By reviewing the key points over and over again, in different places, at different times of my life, I keep applying those key points to all sorts of contexts and keep looking at them from different perspectives. They really get ingrained into the way my mind works.

The price of this system is the overhead while reading, the extra work of summarizing, and the need to form a habit of regularly reviewing flashcards.

Note that creating the right kind of flashcard is hard, and it will take several iterations to get it right for you personally. Do not make many of these at once before testing whether they actually help you.

Let's have a look at some examples:

Example 1: Antifragile

Here's my flashcard for the popular book "Antifragile" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Of course, the five succinct points don't get across all the context. They won't help you much if you didn't read the book in the first place, but they do help holding it all together in your head once you did read the book.

  1. The Triad:
    • Fragile (a chore, breaks with stress, concave)
    • Robust (a habit, unchanged by stress, constant)
    • Antifragile (a desire, grows with stress, convex)
  2. Barbell Strategy:
    • Invest most safely (robust, with low risk for negative black swan)
    • Invest a little with high risk (antifragile, with possibility of positive black swan)
    • Invest nothing in the middle ground (fragile)
  3. Antifragility consists of redundant, fragile components (muscles, evolution), or of exploitation of the fragility of others (hedge fund managers)
  4. Nurture antifragilities by
    • Allowing stress/volatility (Minimize interventionism when possible)
    • Provide redundancy (Even antifragile systems have a breaking point. Raise it to survive)
    • Optionality (More positive black swans)
  5. Via Negativa: Instead of worrying about what exactly to do, focus on subtracting things that are obviously bad

I consider the card "passed" even if I don't recall what's in the parenthesis. That's just extra context.

Example 2: Never Split the Difference

Another example is my flashcard for "Never Split the Difference", a book on negotiation by Chris Voss.

Again, without reading the book first, along with all the explanations, examples and context, this will probably not help you much.

  1. Always think win-win. (Your negotiation counterpart is the collaborator in solving the underlying issue, from which you both will benefit)
  2. A "no" is an opportunity to explore their limits.
  3. Ask open-ended questions so they solve the problem for you.
    • How am I supposed to do that?
    • What about this is important to you?
    • What can I do to make this work for us?
  4. Inconsistencies between their belief & action indicate hidden constraints (Black Swans). Find them and you can start working on the real problem.
  5. Aim high! (Self-esteem is a huge factor in negotiation, and many people set modest goals to protect it. It's easier to claim victory when you aim low.)

Example 3: Meditation

This system can be extended to elucidate and remember the essential points of any practice.

I did this for mindfulness meditation, and this helped me to stay on track during the practice, where looking up notes would be distracting, and a dependence on guided meditation would be limiting.

Here it's more crucial than in the case of a book to mention: The list is custom-tailored to a person, and it will not actually help unless one did the initial work of studying the theory, and practicing, ideally with a tutor. But I think it's valuable as an example:

  1. Take a deep breath
  2. Stop moving and focus on the breath
  3. Notice things as they arise, let them pass, and gently return to the breath
  4. Remember that the mind is fully malleable and every experience is constructed
  5. Practice on the good days so you're sane on the bad days

For point 2+3, I have a supplementary text:

"Ancient Pali texts liken meditation to the process of taming a wild elephant. The procedure in those days was to tie a newly captured animal to a post with a good strong rope. When you do this, the elephant is not happy. He screams and tramples and pulls against the rope for days. Finally it sinks through his skull that he can’t get away, and he settles down. At this point you can begin to feed him and to handle him with some measure of safety. Eventually you can dispense with the rope and post altogether and train your elephant for various tasks. Now you’ve got a tamed elephant that can be put to useful work. In this analogy the wild elephant is your wildly active mind, the rope is mindfulness, and the post is your object of meditation, your breathing. The tamed elephant who emerges from this process is a well-trained, concentrated mind that can then be used for the exceedingly tough job of piercing the layers of illusion that obscure reality. Meditation tames the mind." -- Gunaratana, "Mindfulness in Plain English"

Objections

One problem is that it's bad practice to make big, complicated flashcards. Ideally, they should focus on small, atomic pieces of information to make the cards easy to review. Cards with a lot of information introduce friction and slow down the reviewing process. Just imagine cards like "List the oblasts of Russia in alphabetical order" or "What's the date of birth, place of birth of Isaac Newton, and what were his 10 major contributions to science?" Whenever you'd see them, you'd loose momentum, and it might stop you from reviewing.

But from experience, I can say that it actually makes me happy when these cards show up. Yes, they take longer to review, but it's very rewarding too, and that keeps me motivated. I also have the choice of how deep I go. When I'm in a rush, I briefly list the 5 items. When I have more time, I give it more thought, reframe the information in the current context of my life and see what lessons I can derive.

An alternative or supplement to this is the creation of many smaller cards to elucidate multiple facets of individual takeaway points, and I'm currently experimenting with this. I suspect that relying on smaller cards alone will not provide the overview of the book necessary for high-level reflection and effortless recall.

Either way, I found that flashcards are a journey and there's no perfect system. In the end you need to experiment and see what works for you.

Summary

What better way to wrap this up than by applying the advice to this post itself?

  1. Highlight passages and formulate key points while reading the book.
  2. Boil down the 5 essential takeaways. (For large books, 5 takeaways per subsection.)
  3. Create a flashcard (e.g. with Anki) with those 5 takeaways + some optional supplementary context.
  4. Continuously review it so you can recall the takeaways effortlessly for the rest of your life.
  5. As you review it in different times of your life, you'll reframe it in various contexts and derive new lessons.
— 2020-03-21, by hut, tags: #productivity