写总结比多看书更重要

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Sep 25, 2023

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来源：Andreas Fragner 安德烈亚斯-弗拉格纳

Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

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One thing I’ve learned over time is to read fewer books but to take the time to write summaries for the good ones. The ROI of spending 2h writing a synopsis is much higher than spending those 2h powering through the next book on your list. Reading is not about page count or speed [1]. What matters is how it changes your thinking and what you take away from it. Optimize for comprehension, not volume.随着时间的推移，我学到的一件事是少读一些书，但花时间为好书写摘要。花 2 小时写概要的投资回报率比花 2 小时读完清单上的下一本书要高得多。阅读与页数或速度无关[1]。重要的是它如何改变你的想法以及你从中得到什么。优化理解而不是体积。

If your goal is to maximize comprehension, you need to ask questions while you read — questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading. This is something I believe curious people do naturally. Forcing yourself to ask questions and to answer them also makes it easy to write a synopsis: When you’re done, simply write down the most important questions you’ve encountered and how the book has answered them. This is the template I use:如果你的目标是最大限度地理解，你需要在阅读时提出问题——你自己在阅读过程中必须尝试回答的问题。我相信这是好奇的人自然会做的事情。强迫自己提出问题并回答它们也可以让写提纲变得容易：完成后，只需写下你遇到的最重要的问题以及本书如何回答这些问题。这是我使用的模板：

In 1-2 sentences, what is the book about as a whole?用 1-2 句话概括这本书的整体内容是什么？

What are the 3-4 central questions it tries to answer?它试图回答的 3-4 个核心问题是什么？

Summarize the answers in one paragraph each.每一段总结答案。

What are the most important things you have learned personally?您个人学到的最重要的事情是什么？

While the end product is short and concise, it takes time and focus to write it. Which is of course why it’s effective: It forces you extract and re-formulate the book’s insights in your own words.虽然最终产品简短明了，但需要时间和精力来编写它。这当然就是它有效的原因：它迫使你用自己的语言提取并重新表述书中的见解。

Not coincidentally, I use a similar framework for writing essays: I structure them around questions I’m trying to answer, typically no more than 3-4. If I can’t formulate those concisely, or if there are more than 3-4, it’s usually not worth posting the piece. Without that clarity, it ends up either rambling or shallow and not offering any coherent insights.并非巧合的是，我使用类似的框架来撰写论文：我围绕我想要回答的问题来构建它们，通常不超过 3-4 个。如果我不能简洁地表述这些内容，或者超过 3-4 个，那么通常不值得发布该文章。如果没有这种清晰度，它最终要么是杂乱无章，要么是肤浅的，并且无法提供任何连贯的见解。

Since summarizing leaves you with less time to read, you’ll have to get better at selecting books. I use a combination of two simple techniques for this, topical reading and inspectional reading [2]:由于总结会让你阅读的时间减少，因此你必须更好地选择书籍。为此，我结合使用了两种简单的技术：主题阅读和检视阅读 [2]：

Topical Reading — Each quarter, I select 4-5 topics I care about and want to gain a deeper understanding of. Start wide and get a sense of what the important works are for each topic. Collate a broad list of works.主题阅读——每个季度，我都会选择4-5个我关心并希望获得更深入了解的主题。从广泛的角度出发，了解每个主题的重要著作是什么。整理广泛的作品清单。

Inspectional Reading — Use inspectional reading to prune the list for each topic down to max. 2 books. Inspectional reading is simply systematic skimming or pre-reading: Read the summary on the back of the book, and the preface or introduction, study the table of contents to get a general sense of the book’s structure, read the summary statements at the beginning or end of each chapter. This typically takes no more than an hour and can be extremely effective at filtering out works that are not useful or irrelevant to you.检视阅读——使用检视阅读将每个主题的列表精简到最多。 2本书。检视阅读只是系统的略读或预读：阅读书后的摘要以及序言或引言，研究目录以大致了解本书的结构，阅读开头或结尾处的摘要陈述每章结束。这通常需要不超过一个小时，并且可以非常有效地过滤掉对您无用或不相关的作品。

It’s surprising how even many of the most prolific readers I know are unaware of the value of inspectional reading. Most readers start on page one of a book and plow through until they’re done or decide to cut their losses — without ever reading the table of contents or the preface.令人惊讶的是，即使是我认识的许多多产的读者也没有意识到检视阅读的价值。大多数读者从一本书的第一页开始阅读，直到读完或决定减少损失，而无需阅读目录或序言。

One great alternative to writing summaries is to talk about the books you’re reading. Explaining the ideas you’re reading about to someone else is one of the best ways to engage with the material, since (a) it forces you to formulate it in your own words, and (b) they might challenge the ideas and get you to examine them more critically.撰写摘要的一个很好的选择是谈论您正在阅读的书籍。向其他人解释你正在阅读的想法是理解材料的最佳方式之一，因为（a）它迫使你用自己的话来表达它，并且（b）他们可能会挑战这些想法并让你更批判性地审视它们。

Footnotes 脚注

[1] Speed reading — very hyped in tech circles a few years ago — is largely a scam in my view. Beyond a certain point, there is simply a hard tradeoff between speed and comprehension.[1] 速读——几年前在科技界大肆宣传——在我看来很大程度上是一个骗局。超过某一点，速度和理解之间就需要进行艰难的权衡。

[2] Adler & Van Doren, How to read a book (1972)[2] 阿德勒和范多伦，《如何读书》（1972）