Reading Tip: The One Thing

The counterintuitive approach to remembering what you read.

What did you learn from that book?

This question used to put me into panic mode. It was humiliating. Here I’d spent hours reading a book and I couldn’t recall a single idea from it just a few days later. I’d be left bumbling some incoherent answer wondering why I was wasting time reading if I couldn’t remember what I read.

When I started Books of Titans in 2017, I had dual goals of reading more books and remembering what I read. This project has been a series of experiments to test what helps me best remember books, whether I read them last week or last decade.

The practice that has hands down helped me the most is to try to just remember One Thing from each book. At first, I thought this would be a tremendous waste of time. Here I’m spending hours with a book to only pull away one idea. What a waste!

But what I discovered was that the reason I couldn’t remember what I had learned from books was that I was trying to remember too many things from each book. When I switched to just focusing on One Thing, I was usually able to recall that idea, which in turn helped me to remember other ideas from the book.

This was completely counterintuitive to what I thought would happen.

That’s why I close out each of my podcast episodes with The One Thing. It’s the one idea, practice, or lesson I always hope to remember from that book. For fiction, it might be a question I’m still pondering from the narrative. For non-fiction, it might actually be a practice that I can immediately implement in my life for better productivity, sleep, or peace of mind.

I hope you’ll give it a try. To help you remember that One Thing, share it with others through text, social media, or via podcast.