Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.

– Ezra Pound

I run a One Man University.

I’m the Dean, the Professor, and the entire student body of OMU. My major is the conscious pursuit of happiness; my minor, everything else. My tuition is paid in regular installments of hard work, self-determination, and persistence in the face of failure and rejection.

I’m an able student even though I’ve never gotten high marks in my courses. In fact, I’ve never gotten any marks at all. I have no GPA. And there is no shiny piece of paper at the end of this educational rainbow. My progress is measured exclusively by the tangible results my research and experiments produce to make my life an adventure worth living.

Much of my learning takes place along the intellectual highways paved by great works of literature, both factual and fictional. There are few places the written word will not go. For virtually every branch of human knowledge there is a book offering to start me down that path.

So it should be no surprise that the heart of my university is its library. From Ayn Rand to Aristotle, Tim Ferriss to Henry David Thoreau, I’ve got access to a universe of interesting people and fascinating ideas to help me navigate the murky waters of reality.

But building my library of good books is pretty easy. The hard part is knowing how to read them.

Reading for Growth

All deliberate action is prefixed by an idea. Books provide a rich source of intellectual leverage. Knowing how to read is one of the most important skills you can learn on your path to personal growth.

So when you look down and notice yourself holding a good book in your hands, what do you do next? Assuming you picked it up accidentally, you’d probably want to put it back down. But if it arrived there by intent, you’d probably want to flip to the first page, fix your eyes on the first word in the top left corner, and continue in a left-to-right, top-down fashion until you reached The End.

Unfortunately, if your goal is to actually learn something from your efforts, things get a little more tricky. Reading is to acquiring knowledge as typing is to building software: it’s merely data entry. The challenge is to extract maximum value from what you read.

Personal growth books require particular consideration. There’s a fundamentally different process involved in reading a book about, say, starting a business versus reading a book about the emerging sex toy industry in China. The only reason to read a book about starting a business is if you actually intend to start a business. Likewise, reading a book about losing weight is pointless unless you have some pounds to shed.

So what’s the best way to read a book whose sole purpose is to get you to do something?

While the ideas in this article are biased towards the study of books on subjects like starting your own business, eating healthier, getting your finances in order, and other growth-related topics, most of these ideas should apply to non-fiction in general, and even fiction to some extent.

Speed Reading

There are two kinds of reading. The first kind of reading treats a book like an integer, like the N in “I’ve read N books on subject XYZ.” This is the quantitative hunger fed by technologies like “speed reading.”

Or, even worse, photo reading.

The speed reader assumes that reading twice as fast makes him twice as productive. The best speed readers are so good that they can read a book by simply farting in its general direction. And they’ll even score 60% or better on a comprehension test while the smell lingers patiently in the air.

Of course, a reader who thinks that doubling his reading speed makes him twice as productive is like a programmer who thinks that doubling his typing speed will halve the amount of time he takes to finish a project. Effective reading is not measured by how fast you can vacuum words off a page. It’s measured by how well you integrate new ideas into existing conceptual frameworks, and how you use those ideas to do things you haven’t done before.

Slow Reading

The second, much more effective way to read, is to treat every book as an opportunity to expand your reality. The main variable in this equation is not speed, but change: How did this book change my life? What actions did I take as a direct result of reading this book? What were my results? What did this book teach me that I didn’t expect to learn? How have I applied that knowledge in my day-to-day life?

Reading well means going slow and making your brain hurt. It involves asking tough questions that push you outside your intellectual comfort zone, and being willing to explore unfamiliar ideas until you understand them, no matter how long that takes.

During the four years that I played chess seriously at a fairly high level, I probably read no more than 10 chess books cover to cover. It wasn’t because I didn’t like reading them or because I was too lazy. I just needed that much time to explore the ideas they gave me to a depth that satisfied me. The first two or three books I read were fairly basic. But by the time I started studying books of the great masters, I could read the same book over and over and gain new insights every time.

While my book consumption habits were well below those of the average player, my tournament results well exceeded them.

One Book at a Time

I eat, sleep, and breath every book I read. I find there’s no better way to absorb new ideas than to carry them around with me wherever I go.

When I read Never Eat Alone, for example, I completely immersed myself in the relationship building mindset. I spent a great deal of time implementing what Keith Ferrazzi was talking about as I learned it. I reached out to “aspirational contacts”, went out of my way to volunteer my time and effort for projects that interested me, and planted the seeds of mission-centered relationships. It was during this flurry of activity that I even met my current girlfriend.

Had I speed read my way through this book, or diluted my efforts by juggling three or four other books at the same time, I doubt any of this would have happened. I’d have worn my four-minute literary mile like a badge of honour: N = N + 1. Next.

Relentless Curiosity

The Perl programming language has the notion of a “taint” flag. When set, this flag adds a rule to the interpreter saying that, roughly speaking, any data that enters your program from the outside world (files, user input, environment variables, etc.) cannot be used to affect anything else in the outside world, unless you explicitly untaint it.

This is a useful model to apply to your research. Trust your own mind above the author’s, no matter who he or she is. Question every chapter, every page, every paragraph, and every sentence you read. Practice relentless curiosity. Start with the most basic questions you can ask and work your way up from there. For example:

• Why am I reading this book? What problem am I trying to solve?
• Is this the best source of information I know of on this subject?
• What is the author’s solution to this problem?
• What are the advantages of this solution?
• What are the disadvantages of this solution?
• What ideas from this chapter/section/exercise can I apply to situations in my own life?

Reason is the primary means by which we “untaint” ideas. Relentless curiosity is not just some cutesy Dennis the Menace personality trait, it’s a basic tool of survival.

Three Big Ideas

Even if you read every book slowly and deliberately, you’re still going to encounter far more interesting ideas than you’ll ever hope to remember. The penultimate step to thoroughly devouring a good book is to extract the Big Ideas out of it. I read a lot so I tend to limit this number to about three, but feel free to tweak as you see fit.

I’d encourage you to write the summary in any format you want, whether as bullet points or more coherent prose. The goal is to simply create something that you could look at in several months and be able to regurgitate the most important lessons the book had to offer.

Act Quickly

The last step is the most important: Act immediately on what you read. Take action as you read the book. Do the exercises, if possible. As I’ve mentioned previously, the idea for 30 sleeps came from one of my answers to an exercise in The 4-Hour Workweek.

The call for timely action applies to almost any book you read to acquire a new skill. For example, when I read books about the Ruby on Rails programming framework and spot a useful feature that I didn’t know about before, I try to immediately update all of my code, where applicable, to use this feature. This helps me commit the new idea to memory and ensures that I actually use the idea in my code, rather than deferring it to an ever-elusive “someday.”

Ultimately, every growth-related book is a 30-day challenge in disguise, limited only by your creativity and willingness to transform thought into action. You’ll know the quality of your reading habits not by how many books you can claim to have read, but by how many of the good things in your life can be traced back to a spot on your bookshelf.