The Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books: How to Distill Ideas to Accelerate Your Learning

Summaries == Interpretations

Creating a book summary requires a surprising amount of creativity. Because the truth is, these are much more than summaries. They are actually reinterpretations.

Ways to summarise: useful, relevant, action

It can be biased toward usefulness, toward relevance, and toward actionability.

Highlighting == judement

As I decide what to highlight, which is the very first step of summarizing, I’m practicing my judgment – the skill of deciding what matters and what doesn’t, what’s important and what’s not, and what’s interesting and what isn’t.

Summaries == your understanding

Your book summaries are the building blocks in the edifice of understanding you are constructing.

Sharing the summaries

Summarizing a book and sharing it with a group of people who have already signaled their interest in it is the opposite of spam. It is a generous, honest, and helpful way of contributing to the knowledge of others. Those people are far more likely to follow you, subscribe to your services, and give you helpful feedback on your work.

Five steps to go from reading a book to publishing a summary blog post:

1. Read and highlight
2. Export highlights
3. Progressively summarize
4. Outline
5. Write

Criteria:

• Unique – something I haven’t heard before or that I’m surprised by
• Helpful – a piece of information that equips people with solutions to their problems
• Interesting – a surprising or insightful idea that catches people’s attention

Leave out:

LEAVE OUT PARTS THAT ARE BORING, OBVIOUS, OR TOO LONG

Value

We need to add an extra layer of value: the context and perspective that comes from deeply engaging with new ideas.