Getting more out of the books I read

I read a lot of books, but I’ve noticed that I’m not retaining what I read particularly well. That’s frustrating, and this blog is intended to help with that. I think it does a little bit, and my retention would be even lower without it, but more needs to be done.

I shared a few months ago that the value of summarizing a book is far greater than the value of reading that summary, and I’m taking a few steps to create additional summaries.

First, I have the new Sunday Summaries every week that lightly touch each of my posts from earlier that week. This forces me to go back and look at them again, and many of them have content pulled from books that I’ve recently read.

Next, we’ve recently started a monthly virtual book club with our Meetup group. This creates a mixture of “I need to read that book before the meeting” or (more often) “I need to refresh myself on that book again before the meeting”. It’s free and open to all and you’re welcome to join us. Details are here.

Lastly, I’m starting another podcast (to go with “A Brighter Web” that Robert and I already host). The new podcast is called “Stacking Knowledge” ( website, Apple) and it’s another way to revisit the books that have impacted me the most. The format is loosely based on the “Founders” podcast, but I’ll be covering a wide range of business…