Hi friends!
Welcome to 2021. Also, a warm welcome to the newcomers who have so kindly subscribed to my newsletter
2020 has been a mixed bag - learnt quite a lot and experienced loss in the family due to COVID. How will this new year be - better or worse. Instead of worrying, let us take it day-by-day and soak in the learnings. Now on to the newsletter:
This fortnight, I will be taking a slight detour from my usual topics and talk about - An Architecture for Reading and Writing. It is New Years’, and I can take a wild guess and tell that at least one of your resolutions involves reading or writing. This is an underrated skill for early employees in startups. You would have to write well and read a lot in your industry to grow into the roles.
Disclaimer: Don’t take this as something set in stone. Think of it as a friend sharing his journey to consistent learning and sharing the field's best practices.
Know anyone for whom this advice would be helpful? Why don’t you share this article?
Source: Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
So how many times have you thought to read and write more and yet failed? What follows next is a process that would
It looks like a very trivial question to pose. But as early employees, the thing that we don’t have enough of is time. So it is important to manage time properly and polish existing processes so that we read and write well. Reading is the input for ideas which later becomes crystallized as we write and share with the audience.
Let me share my thoughts on reading and how I approach books.
I love reading books. I was a voracious reader in college, and sporadically continued the habit. I started to keep goals like reading 1 book per month or x books in a year over the past few years. I miserably failed in every year. My Goodreads shelf used to be always behind. I felt I was never able to build a good reading habit.
I refused to give up, and I introspected on what could have gone wrong and made the following observations:
I focused more on the number of books read, but I failed to focus on these books' learnings and what I am applying from these.
Sunk cost fallacy: At times, I wasn't excited by a particular book. But I continued because I was obsessed with moving the counter on the number of books read. Due to that, I did not enjoy reading. It felt like a chore, and so I dropped the habit multiple times. I spent less time reading, and as a result, I always found it hard to reach the goals.
As James Clear puts it in Atomic Habits, goal-driven habits rarely work. We need to go process-driven. There were fundamental flaws in my reading process. Here are a few epiphanies I had in the reading process:
No of learnings from a book takes precedence over the number of books read. One book can contain multiple learnings, while others might have 1 or 2.
Learnings are hyper-personal. What we feel is an earth-shattering insight might not excite others.
The book must hold your attention and not the other way around. It is completely fine to abandon a book midway. Just because someone we admire recommended it, we need not force ourselves to read it.
Except for fiction, we can read a book anyway we want. Sample a book any way you want and then decide to commit to reading it cover to cover.
I love the cluster reading concept I discovered from Juvoni and Slava. This means reading multiple books at once. I am planning to read 2 book clusters of related topics. (The original recommendation is to go with five-book clusters. It would be too much for me. I wish to go a little more conservative and go with two books, to begin with. It is up to you how you would design your cluster.)
Why is cluster reading exciting for me? Two different views on the same topic or core ideas might give a deeper perspective. I am done with the first cluster on books related to money (I would love to discuss money in my upcoming issues). Interconnected ideas are exciting.
How I choose books? I go with a funnel approach (using a marketing terminology here).
Top of the Funnel: All book recommendations on newsletter, Twitter etc. (Around 100 books reach here)
Middle of the Funnel: Pick topics of interest and check the summaries on Blinkist, blog, reviews etc. (~20 to 30 books.) I usually pick books that at least 2-3 people in my network suggest.
Bottom of the Funnel: If the context feels a lot important, then purchase the book and read. (~2-3 books).
Two great people to follow about reading: Alex Wiec and Juvoni Beckford. Their thoughts resonated a lot with me. Alex too has similar thoughts on finishing a book (and I feel reassured on my thinking). Do look at his advice and a better challenge to follow - 25x250 challenge. In this challenge, we read, make notes or apply the learning for 25 mins a day for 250 days.
Juvoni's MEGA thread is packed with wisdom bombs on reading. If you are serious about the reading process, you must go through the entire thread.
I also found Ankur Warikoo's thoughts on the reading process insightful.
Reading well has kept our brains brimming with ideas. But reading without writing is like pouring water into a leaky bucket. So we need to keep taking notes and occasionally share our learning with the world.
I started consciously working towards it from Aug 2020. I am documenting my journey, my learnings and how I did it. The system is barebones and will continue to evolve throughout the year.
Here is the writing curriculum I went through before I consciously started writing:
Guide to Writing well by Julian is 🔥. Must-read for every aspiring writer. Please read it and re-read it every day.
Josh Spector's tips on writing + For the Interested newsletter.
Doing Content Right ebook by Steph Smith. (This is a paid ebook but quite comprehensive in coverage and highly recommend it.) If you don't wish to purchase, read her blog post on writing instead.
Here is my Tech Stack for the writing process:
Notion: knowledge base.
Bear Notes: distraction-free writing space.
Raindrop.io: bookmarking.
Grammarly Premium: good writing.
Drafts/Otter: voice notes.
Substack: newsletter
Publer/Typefully: compose tweets.
I have taken an exclusive email only for newsletters. I haven't shared this email with anyone else. These inbox newsletters are the main inputs for my ideas and content and the random scrolls on Twitter throughout the day. If I stumble upon an interesting article, I first bookmark on raindrop.io. Later, I use the Notion Saver to clip and save the article in the relevant Notion database. Here is a snapshot of one of my Notion databases.
In the 1st pass reading, I keep the key ideas of my topic and delete the rest of the lines. Here, I don't put much effort and retain the important ideas in the author's words and remove the rest of the details. This is a sample article in Notion after the 1st pass. (I also add backlinks to similar articles.)
Next, I take the key points from similar articles and put them in Bear Notes. Bear is a very clutter-free software which allows me to focus and put my thoughts together. I rewrite the ideas in my own words and add my perspective too. The article above now transforms into this piece of writing on Bear.
I maintain a weekly log in Notion on what tweets and articles I read. This is a good self-accountability system. Any week I read less, I put fewer links in the weekly journal. This is an automatic feedback loop which shows me my learning week on week. My weekly log on Notion looks like this:
In summary, my writing process is: Bookmark -> Web Clip -> Key Ideas -> Mix ideas -> Rewrite. Short essays go as tweets/small essays. Multiple such points with more research become a newsletter post.
Timeline
Aug 2020: started systematic reading and note-taking process.
Sept & Oct 2020: deliberate reading habit and optimized my process. Started my newsletter.
Nov 2020: pivoted my newsletter and ready to start daily writing to hone my skill.
Dec 2020: 30 days, 30 essays challenge completed.
I hope that my reading and writing architecture has given you some idea to design your own learning architecture.
Inspired? Why don’t you start already? :)
Finds of the Fortnight
The last fortnight was great. I was writing consistently and came across some really great tweets. The first one was about ‘The Balloon Effect’. It is very relevant for people who slog silently but don’t see immediate returns. As we patiently hustle, a moment arrives where we occupy the stage. Go through the post in detail to understand the phenomenon and the power of compounding better.
The next one is about tips for a better life. We are a few days into the new year, making it slightly better is definitely on our minds.
A Story that Seized me
"Suzuki Roshi, I've been listening to you for years," a student asked following a lecture, "but I don't understand. Can you summarize Buddhism to one phrase?"
Everyone laughed. Suzuki laughed.
"Everything changes," he said. Then he asked for another question.
My takeaway: Everything changed in 2020. Everything is going to change in 2021. Things will never stay the same, and I know that every storm will eventually run out of rain. We have adapted really well and will have to continue doing so shortly too.
Hope you liked this issue. Any thoughts, comments or suggestions? Any suggestions on a different system/architecture that you follow for yourself? Feel free to reply on email or reach out to me on Twitter. If you think someone else will be benefited, feel free to forward the email.