Read One Book Five Times Instead of Five Books Once
For years I kept a count. Forty books a year, fifty in a good one. I’d finish one and start the next the same evening, and I had the shelves to prove it. Then one day someone asked me what I’d learned from a book I’d read eighteen months earlier, one I’d rated highly, and I couldn’t produce a single idea from it. Not one. I’d read it, enjoyed it, and it had passed through me like water.
The books that hadn’t passed through, the four or five that had actually changed how I lived, had one thing in common. I’d read each of them more than once. Some of them many times.
Why the first read is mostly lost
The first time through, you’re finding out what happens. Where the argument goes, what the author’s claiming, how it ends. That’s a map-making exercise, and most of the attention goes to the map. The ideas themselves barely register, because you’re too busy learning the terrain to live in it.
The second read, the map’s already drawn. Now you can notice the sentences. The third, you start arguing with them. By the fifth, the book has become part of how you think, and you can’t remember a time before it.
Which books deserve it
Not many. Most books are fine to read once or not at all. The ones that earn a return are the ones you keep thinking about weeks later, the ones where you underlined a third of the pages, the ones whose argument you keep testing against your own life. You’ll know. There are maybe a dozen in a lifetime, and the trick is to notice them and treat them differently.
How I reread
Slowly, with a pen, in a different colour each time, so I can see how my response has changed. A chapter a sitting, not a book a weekend. After each chapter, a few lines in a notebook: what’s this saying, do I believe it, where in my life does it apply this week. Then, and this is the part that matters, I try to do something with it before the next chapter. A book that doesn’t change what you do on Tuesday hasn’t been read yet.
Space the readings
A year apart, roughly. You’re a different person each time, with different problems, and the same book answers different questions depending on who’s asking. The book I read at thirty-five and forty-five and fifty-five was, in every sense that matters, three different books.
What happened to the count
It dropped by half, and I’m sharper than when it was high. Fewer ideas, held properly, beat a flood of them held not at all. I still read new books; I just stopped treating finishing as the achievement.
The test
Pick a book you loved more than a year ago. Try to write down three ideas from it without opening it. If you can’t, it hasn’t been read yet. It’s been visited.
This month
Choose the one book that’s affected you most. Read it again, slowly, with a pen. Do one thing from each chapter. Then put it on the list for next year.
Launch list
Be there on day one.
One email when the book opens on Kickstarter. Nothing else. Already reading the book? Your Cheat Sheet is at wisdomdeck.com/free.
Coming soon on 
The book itself — 40 laws in ten parts, 320 pages, each ending with The Work — is funded first on Kickstarter.