Beyond Progressive Summarization
Moving from managing knowledge to engaging with authors
A few years ago I finally admitted the truth: I was reading a lot of books about spiritual practice and forgetting most of their content.
I’d finish a book that promised to transform my life. I’d rave about it for a few days and then slowly return to my daily grind. A few weeks later I’d pick up the book again and realize that I’d lost almost every impression it originally made on me. It was as if I’d never read the thing in the first place.
This happened more times than I can remember, and eventually it scared me. There was shadowy swamp in my brain that swallowed up all the life-changing insights I’d ever had — a black hole of oblivion.
I couldn’t live with this. So I read everything I could find about how to remember what you read. A consensus emerged: If you want to retain ideas, then put them in writing. Craft book summaries. Capture the key points in your own words. Condense, compress, distill.
I got right to work.
A post by Jason Fried inspired me. It’s about the college course he wanted to teach:
It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version. I don’t care about the topic. I care about the editing….into one perfectly distilled sentence.
One perfectly distilled sentence. Yes! That was my mission.
I read everything I could find about how to write summaries. I founds lots of instructions and examples. What a mess it was. The instructions were all over the map, and the examples mostly sucked.
Summarizing is seldom done well because it’s hard work. Often I tried to make it simpler by summarizing through subtraction — highlighting the key sentences in a text and ignoring the rest. This might work for low-density texts — those with a few main points that are explicitly stated by the author. However, many books are high-density: They include many key points, and these are implicit rather than explicit — buried throughout the text.
Moreover, I simply assumed that every book can be summarized — reduced to an essential core. This idea quickly broke down when I applied it to fiction. Novels, short stories, and poetry allow us to enter another person’s mind and perceive through their senses. We inhabit another world, an alternate reality wholly created by an author. How do you summarize that?
Tiago Forte, author of Building a Second Brain, teaches progressive summarization, a method for taking notes on digital, text-based sources. This process has four stages:
Capture the key excerpts from a book or article in your note-taking app.
Boldface the most important excerpts.
Highlight the most important passages that you boldfaced.
Write a summary based on your highlights.
This linear and step-by-step method appealed to me. It also doubled or tripled the time I spent on summaries.
Tiago urges us to be selective about what we summarize and do it only one step at a time. This helped me, but other problems emerged: My notes were mostly other people’s ideas rather my own. In addition, I seldom got all the way to step 4. I did a lot of excerpting, bolding, and highlighting — and little summarizing.
One day I had an aha moment: Why not reverse this procedure and skip directly to step 4? Write the darn summary already, and stop procrastinating.
This idea seemed heretical at first — and then liberating.
Eventually I found another source of inspiration — a passage from Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process, by Peter Elbow:
If you want to digest and remember what you are reading, try writing about it instead of taking notes. Stop periodically — at the end of each chapter or when something important strikes you — and simply write about what you have read and your reactions to it. This procedure may make you nervous at first because you can’t ‘cover’ as many points or make something as neatly organized as when you take notes. But you will remember more. Perfectly organized notes that cover everything are beautiful, but they live on paper, not in your mind.
This was a revelation. Peter diagnosed my problem perfectly: The quest for perfect summaries lead to thousands of words, hundreds of notes, and zero engagement with ideas. My notes app was full, but my heart was empty.
Today I seldom summarize books. Instead, I respond to them. This process is lazier than progressive summarization — and much more useful.
I begin by taking my time. Instead of trying to summarize books immediately, I live with them for a while. I read some chapters several times and let them marinate in my mind until I get perspective on what I actually want to remember.
When I eventually I write about a book, I don’t try to summarize it. Instead, I document my interaction with it:
What was new to me?
What surprised me?
How will I see the world differently after reading this book?
What will I do differently as a result?
If I could take only one thing away from this book right now — one big idea, simple behavior change, or inspiration for my own work — what would it be?
I also agree with Ariel Curry and Liz Morrow: “All books are about transformation.” Fiction describes a character’s efforts to resolve a complication — a struggle that permanently changes the character. Memoirs offer first-person stories of personal change. Prescriptive nonfiction (self-help, spirituality, and business-related) holds out the promise of change and explains how to achieve it.
This suggests a wonderful way to write about any book: Look for the transformation.
In short, I’ve let go of my quest for the perfect summary. It doesn’t exist, and I don’t need it anyway. Though I want my writing to accurately reflect what the author said, I don’t demand that it capture every point in the text. Responding to books in this way is much more fun than subjecting them to merciless distillation.
And I no longer worry about missing something important or forgetting ideas. Forgetting is actually a useful filter. The best ideas — the ones that resonate to my core — will come around again. All those precious notes I collected are just records of when I first encountered certain ideas. That’s interesting information but mostly optional.
I can always return to a book and write about it again. I’ll be a different person then, and something else about the text will resonate with me.
The best books always have something new to say. I’ll have an ongoing conversation with my favorite authors, and we’ll become better friends over time.