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How to turn the wisdom from books into money in your pocket
Books are our superpower.
What I mean by that is not necessarily that knowledge is power, although that’s true. I’m talking instead about how the books you read, even the ones you’ve finished years ago, can inform your up-to-the-minute reporting and your future pitches, the stories you’ll write here and the business you’ll launch.
That’s an idea that’s relatively new to me.
About five years ago I began a practice of taking notes as I read books. I was tired of finishing books and then, six months later, not recalling a single thing that happened in them. The notes I took were not just the major plot points but passages of great writing, a cool idea, a fascinating historical fact, or how a writer structured a chapter. The notes were anything I found of interest in the book. I took the notes as I read the book, so it wouldn’t feel like laborious homework to try to recall everything I liked when I finished it.
These notes became very cool Cliff Notes of the books I loved. I began to read just these distilled versions for fun; the notes were the best passages from the best books. For a while I thought that would be the end of it — that it would just be awesome to have these notes around.
