"You have two options: sink or swim."

"He began to treat his mind like technology infrastructure."

"Suddenly, instead of building systems to optimize server performance, he was optimizing his own brain: he was building himself into a learning machine."

"Simon realized that in order to level up fast enough to do his work he needed to read — a lot. And not only that, he needed to retain what he read."

"Along the way he discovered that reading broadly was the best way to get to the bottom of things, and therefore the best way to get better at his job."

"When I started managing, I felt a strong obligation to be the best lead I could for the team. Managing is a big responsibility — and it’s especially challenging when some of your reports are 10 years older than you."

"It seemed to me that the best way to meet this responsibility was to wake up earlier and read something every day before I came in."

"As I started to read more, the question was whether to go deep or wide. I am curious about so many things, so I naturally gravitated to read widely. I strive to be T-shaped: really good at something, but with a wide foundation — and that’s a metaphor we use widely at Shopify."

"What I found was that choosing books with a fancy process ends up being more about what I “ought'' to read, rather than what I actually just find most fascinating."

"The one thing I do try to follow is to go on streaks of reading a lot of books on a particular topic around the same time."

"The core of the system is highlighting."

"Anything that I find that’s important, I’ll highlight on my Kindle. All of those highlights automatically go to my Readwise where I can add them to my learning system. Readwise is fantastic because it automatically scrapes all of my Kindle highlights and puts them into one place for me where I can search, tag, and review them."

"When I come across something in a book that seems useful to understand and remember, I will highlight it on my Kindle and add a note to it with the text: “.flash”."

"All notes with “.flash” in them are then automatically loaded into Readwise and organized under a “flash” tag."

"I’ll then periodically open the list of “flash” tags in Readwise, and then translate them into flashcard form in Anki."

"I am creeping up on 10,000 cards in Anki, and I’ve been doing this for over 4 years. It’s probably the most impactful habit I have in terms of impact over time invested."

"When I highlight something from a book that contains an idea, concept, metaphor, or generally something more abstract, I’ll put it into my Zettelkasten instead of my flashcard system. These highlights aren’t to be remembered, they are to be connected."

"Keeping a physical system started to get out of hand, so I tried a bunch of software solutions — Workflowy, Dynalist, Notion — but they were all too slow, didn’t have the features I wanted, and I worried about how they’d age. I wanted a system that I could use for life."

"It’s just text files on my computer written in Markdown, and edited using a plaintext editor. I’ve also written a lot of small, auxiliary tooling for searching, browsing related notes, editor integration, and so on. The main repo where I keep all of it is on Github."

"I’ll continue searching through my archive like this, and go down the rabbit hole to think about how this note connects to everything else in the system."

"So that’s what I find helpful — knowing all of these facts becomes a kind of memory connector."

"I have three main areas I throw tasks into:"

"Growth (a list of personal projects) Life (chores) Work"

"He uses a reMarkable tablet to read long documents and emails"

"Over the years, I’ve found that reading dense PDFs or Google Docs isn’t very good on a laptop or on a Kindle."

"a friend was raving about the reMarkable tablet, and I now use for reading those types of documents a fair bit. It’s a simple e-ink tablet. It’s larger than the Kindle, and feels like paper when you write. It doesn’t replace your Kindle. It’s not good for long-form."