Turning a Book into a Lens

How I approach the reading and note-taking of books.

In the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, the authors tell the story of a pilot (Matt) who successfully responded to engine failure by bringing up the relevant knowledge and taking the necessary steps to land the plane safely.

“While we don’t need to understand each of the actions Matt took, he certainly needed to, and his ability to work himself out of a jam illustrates what we mean in this book when we talk about learning: we mean acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.”

But what’s the source of that knowledge and those skills?

And how do you choose the precise things that you’d like to commit to memory?

One of the building blocks that I rely on are books. The desire to remember more of what I read is the whole reason I got into sketchnoting in the first place.

As I reflect on my reading and note-taking process, I’ve realized my purpose in learning from that type of material: I want to use a book as a lens through which to view a particular situation.

This sketch was inspired by the lens visual framework from Dave Gray.

What does the book Thanks for the Feedback have to say about this conversation that I’m having with my wife about how the past month has gone?

What does the book What Works have to say about how I’m thinking about the upcoming year and planning out my big projects?

What does the book Hunt, Gather, Parent have to say about how I’m interacting with my boys in the peak of toddlerhood.

What does the book Company of One have to say about this change that I’m thinking about making within my business?

What does the book Make It Stick have to say about what I do with my visual book summaries after creating them?

I don’t have to take any specific suggestion that might come up while asking myself those questions, but they at least give me options.

Though I can of course refer back to my sketchnotes of those books to help me do that type of thinking, I’m finding that I benefit from being able to pull up those images from memory, and make use of the ideas in the moment they’re needed. I’m particularly enjoying the long runs that I spend reflecting on books that I’ve read and considering how they apply to what’s going on in my life in that moment.

Thinking about books as lenses gives a new sense of purpose to the reading and sketchnoting process. Each time I complete it, I’ll have a new set of glasses that I can put on to help me see a challenging situation or a potential opportunity in a new way, and then take more meaningful action because of it.