There are two kinds of books:
- Actionable Books: Books that create action items. Completing the action items improves your life. These are typically non-fiction books, but sometimes fiction books can also have lessons to be learned.
- Non-Actionable Books: Books that do not create action items. These are mostly fiction books and occasional non-fiction books that are purely informative (for example, an atlas book).
It is best to interleave actionable books with non-actionable books.
- This provides you more time to digest and implement the lessons learned from actionable books.
- This prevents you from getting overwhelmed with too many action items at the same time.
- Also, donโt try to extract too many action items from a book. For simplicity, you could try One Chapter == One Action.
- It also prevents getting bored from reading the same type of book for a stretch.
- Slow learning combined with suffering (Desirable Difficulty) is apparently better for the retention of knowledge.