“You read so much, how do you remember all of it?”

Easy. I don’t.

Nor do I expect myself to. And neither should you.

Now, let’s ask ourselves a couple of questions about this city.

Where did you stay? Was it a house or a hotel? Do you remember what the street looked like where it was? Do you vaguely remember what part of town it was in

Books are the same way. Most of the information you pick up in books, you won’t even realize you remember it until it becomes relevant to your life somehow.

And school conditions us to assume that we should be able to actively recall most things we read. We shouldn’t. Human memory doesn’t work that way. We just did that to make decent grades on the tests we took.

All the stuff I write on my website, I don’t remember it, I just remember where I saw it. And then I go pick the book up, flip to the appropriate chapter, refresh my memory, and write it down again. Voila. I “remember” shit.

I have a personal rule, if I get 10% of the way into the book and am still not enjoying it, I put it down and move on. Life is too short and there are too many books in the world.

Many books that I’ve “read,” I’ve actually only read chapters 1, 5, 6, 11 and 12. The rest of the chapters didn’t interest me, so I skipped them.

Similarly, if you run into a section in a book that isn’t interesting to you or that you already know a fair amount about—skip it!

I have consistently read 60-75 books each year. A lot of friends and family hear that and look at me as if I have some sort of superpower. But the fact is, my reading speed is only slightly above average. My secret is that I schedule time to read every day and rarely miss a day.

If you implement some of the non-sequential techniques above (and also don’t feel obligated to highlight or memorize everything), then you probably only end up reading 150-250 pages in an average book. That’s 180-300 minutes or 3 to 6 hours per book.

If you budgeted thirty minutes a day to read and consistently hit it, that’s a book every ten days… or 35 books a year!

week after week, year after year, and one day you’ll wake up having read a few hundred books and everyone will look at you like you’re some sort of freakish encyclopedia who knows and remembers everything—but really you remember nothing—it’s just that something someone said triggered a memory about a book you read four years ago and a bunch of associated ideas came flooding back into your mind and now you sound super fucking smart.