Writing a summary is 100x more valuable than reading one

I’ve recently started listening to David Senra’s “ Founders “ podcast, and it’s fantastic! Every week he reads a biography of someone interesting and then shares his insights from the book in a ~60 minute podcast.

While I’m enjoying listening to it, and I’ll continue to do so, I can’t help think one thing — David is getting way more out of this than I am.

Reading the entire biography is more valuable than listening a summary, for sure. Beyond that, though, David also takes the time to put together the summary, and then read it for all of us. Some of the main insights from each book he’ll probably look at five or six times by the time it’s done, and we’ll simply have heard him mention it once.

It’s kind of like the idea of visiting your notes more frequently; David is touching this content many more times than a listener like me, and he’s getting way more out of it as a result.

The Productivity Game

It’s similar to something else that a friend just shared with me called The Productivity Game. In this case, Nathan Lozeron shares book summaries in the form of PDFs, illustrations, and videos. Like David, Nathan does a fantastic job of assembling his summaries, but I’m again left feeling like Nathan is learning a ton more in building…