I’m working on establishing a habit of synthesizing the books I read and sharing what I learn. I want to not just consume what’s in books but also digest and understand their ideas. I’ve set Thanksgiving and Christmas goals to synthesize a few books for each holiday. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Painful – I don’t have a good rhythm or any tricks for synthesizing, so every time I sit down to do it, it’s painful. It reminds me of the pain when I first started blogging in 2020. It feels like the pain of learning to do something new.
• Daily is better – I started out doing marathon sessions. The problem was that it’s hard to consistently carve out time for them. So, I’ve moved to working on this as close to daily as possible. I’m basically breaking the synthesis up into smaller sessions.
• 50 pages – This seems to be the limit of what I can do in a single day before it becomes painful. That’s not a bad pace because I could hypothetically synthesize a 350-page book in a week. Luckily, most books I read are in the range of 250 to 300 pages.
• Time – Synthesizing 50 pages takes a few hours—a lot more time than I’d like. I want to get to the point where I can synthesize 50 pages in an hour or less.
• Outline – Creating an outline of key information in each chapter feels natural and is working well.
• My wording – Rewording what I read, instead of copying verbatim, forces me to really understand what I’m synthesizing. Copying word-for-word defeats the purpose.
• Blog-post prerequisite – Creating an outline while synthesizing a book makes it possible to write a rich blog post. When I don’t do this, it feels impossible to write more than a surface-level post.
• Creating assets – Creating syntheses is painful, but I think each one is an asset, and I could end up with a library of valuable (to me) assets that will likely pay dividends in the future. I can’t say how, but I know having these in electronic format will make it easier for me to use this knowledge in the future, versus being trapped in physical books. Pretty sure I’ll run these through LLMs to help me make decisions in the future.

That’s what I’ve learned so far. I’m still working to try to find my groove and establish the habit of synthesizing books. It’s not easy, but hopefully, as I get more reps, the habit will form.