Wan Wei just talked about how real scholars should learn!

Martial arts novels often describe martial arts experts as figures who can treat one thing as ten, or even one thing as a hundred, but the fact is that no matter how hard one tries to practice martial arts, he can't become a tank. In the real world, even if your martial arts are high, I can easily kill you with a ten-man gun array-without a machine gun, it is an ancient cold weapon pike three or four meters long. However, a person's knowledge can reach a level of one hundred or even higher. A truly learned person, with his "internal strength" high, it is useless for you to fuck a layman again.

Running and practicing martial arts are very limited in improving people's physical fitness, but reading can greatly enhance people's ideological internal force. This internal force is an understanding and insight into the world.

The purpose of reading is to acquire knowledge and learn high-level thinking methods. Interesting things often happen in this world, which makes many people excited, confused or angry. Most people just vent their emotions in the comments on news websites. If you have read books on this subject, you may point out:

First, it's nothing. I know something better/worse/stranger than this. Second, the so-called expert opinion belongs to the X school, which is controversial in academic circles. In fact, they are out of date. For example, Theory Y, which won the Nobel Prize in Economics in XX, is a better theory. Third, I estimate that this matter will develop in the direction of XXX. The famous economist Tim Harford published a book "Dear Undercover Economist", which is a collection of short stories he answered readers' questions in the Financial Times. Every article in it is like this. Learning is very different from not learning.

Even if you don't want to be a columnist, it's always useful to be a learned person. When uneducated people make a fuss, learned people can take it for granted; When uneducated people turn a blind eye, learned people can see the details.

From the reading point of view, there are two kinds of people in the world.

A person studies to master skills, pass various exams, or just for fun. Another kind of people study to improve their internal strength. The two people may have little difference in their initial "intelligence" level, but over time, their "intelligence" level will be quite different. Only the latter can be called a "scholar".

The best-selling books in China are all kinds of teaching reference books and exam counseling books, not books. The novels of Jin Yong and Qiong Yao are of course books, but reading such books is not worthy of attention. We specialize in reading non-fiction books that can deepen our understanding of a certain field and gain a feeling of rising wisdom (even if it is an illusion) after reading.

There are three basic facts about this kind of book.

First, most people don't read such books; They are not scholars.

Second, even if they did, most of them didn't finish reading it. After buying Kindle e-books on Amazon, you can see the most popular points drawn by other readers. Kindle allows you to underline sentences that you think are important when reading, while Amazon will mark more underlined sentences in the book. I have read many non-fiction books, and the rule is that most of the hot topics appear in the first two chapters. The book has reached a quarter, and there are basically no key marks. Isn't there a point worth drawing at the back of these books? The answer is obvious. Most people stop reading most books after reading only a quarter. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal found that most readers only read 6.6% A Brief History of Time, 6.8% Thinking, Fast and Slow, and 2.4% Capital in the Century, which is regarded as the most important economic work in recent years, even though it is the best-selling book on Amazon. People who love to buy books don't really read books. Many people just love books.

Third, even if I read it, most of them don't understand it. Let me take Tim Harford's masterpiece The Undercover Economist as an example. When I wrote the original version of this article, the book had three pages in Douban, of which only the Chinese version had book reviews from readers who didn't count as irrigation. Among the six popular comments on Douban, the most popular one, "Tear off the dough for you", talked about the phenomenon of disorderly price increase of Starbucks coffee and supermarkets in the book; The title of the second article is the title of this book. The content is not a reading experience, but more like an advertisement for a book. The third article "Real World Economics" mentioned Starbucks, and then I don't know why I started to talk about another book on economics and the process of reading it myself. The fourth part talks about Starbucks, house prices, supermarket pricing and college students' train tickets. Looking at these book reviews, it seems that "Undercover Economics" is a ramble about economic stories in life.

But this book is not purely rambling. Its views are quite distinct and the theme is prominent. This book repeatedly emphasizes a concept, "scarcity". The first chapter describes the example of Starbucks selling coffee to point out that it is impossible to make money without scarcity. The second chapter writes that you may not make a lot of money with scarcity: even if there is only one supermarket nearby, customers may not spend a lot of money on your things. You must use a series of means, even tricks, to make people pay. The most typical way is to implement differentiated pricing for customers. The third to fifth chapters write why economists like the market, because market regulation can automatically make scarce things less scarce! Then talk about why the market sometimes fails. Some government policies, ostensibly for fairness, objectively contribute to scarcity, such as not allowing quality primary schools to enter the market. Chapter 6 points out that companies like Amazon have no real scarce power. Chapters 7 to 10 are the applications of these theories in current hot issues.

If you only remember two words after reading this book, it should be "scarcity". But look at the top four of Douban book reviews, and there is no mention of the word "scarcity"! If you only read these four book reviews, the two words you remember are "coffee". How Starbucks sells coffee is actually what the first four pages of the book say.

Even if you read 15 books on economics in this way, you can't see the world from an economist's point of view, and all you get is a lot of jokes at the dinner table. The next time I listen to an expert, I still feel deja vu, but I just can't say it myself.

Therefore, reading is not so simple, it also needs technology. Some can read, some can't, not just love reading.

Many people summed up the skills of reading. Probably the best summary is the famous book How to Read. Now you can find many notes and summaries about the reading skills of this book on the Internet. In my opinion, the most exciting part of this book is not any special technology, but a spirit. This spirit holds that there are three levels of reading: reading for entertainment, reading for information and reading for understanding. First of all, reading is just to understand something we didn't understand before, which is worth taking seriously. Secondly, reading should be based on me, not books. The author of this book says that there are no more than 100 books worth reading repeatedly in the world (and they are listed at the end of the book), and other books can be thrown away after reading. Those who can really learn in this spirit are the real spiritual aristocrats, completely different from those bookworms. How to read a book is almost to teach readers a set of detailed reading methods by hand, which makes many readers lost in the details of these methods. Ironically, however, I read many people's notes on how to read a book, and most of them failed to grasp this advanced reading spirit.

* study hard

This book advocates a high-intensity reading method based on how to read a book, which is called "intensive reading". Different from the step-by-step and tedious routine of how to read a book, our "intensive reading" is more like an attitude and mentality. In fact, I really want to give this article an English title, called deep reading, to echo the new achievements in cultivating talents, and psychologists have recently talked about "deliberate practice."

"Intensive reading" is not for reading professional works such as general relativity, but for non-professional readers such as undercover economics. It is called "power" because it pursues the depth and efficiency of reading and tries to dig the biggest gain in a book. I once heard a joke about how we learn from others. We went to other people's houses like thieves and moved everything except the kitchen sink-then we went back and moved the kitchen sink, too. It is in this spirit that we should read a book!

There are three similarities between intensive learning and deliberate practice:

First, it's not fun. There is no concept of "entertaining through education" in the world champion training base. "Intensive reading" is not for entertainment and rest, but with a very serious attitude. You must master a book so that it can grow in your brain. This kind of reading is quite tiring. I think writing reading notes is a very serious job.

Second, it takes less time. Just like in the best music school that specializes in cultivating talents, children never practice piano for more than 2 hours every day. No one can stick to that intensity for a long time. It is better not to practice without intensity training. You may spend a lot of time reading every day, but it is difficult for you to spend a lot of time studying hard. Leave energetic and undisturbed time for the best books.

Third, don't pursue fast. Many reading methods teach people how to finish a book as quickly as possible, and those books that need to be finished quickly are not worth reading at all. A key technology of reading is to use different reading speeds for different books. Entertainment novels, pure information news, the sooner you read, the better. For good books in our "study area", we should read them slowly and carefully. Reading a book quickly is like playing a song quickly. This is not practicing the piano, but completing the task of practicing the piano. One of the secrets of scholars is that reading slowly will make it more efficient to absorb knowledge and increase internal strength. It is said that people with dyslexia are particularly gifted because of their slow reading speed.

A book should be read twice, and only twice. A good book, you can't catch the point once. On the other hand, if once is enough, then this book is not worth studying hard. The thought book we are talking about is not an academic work. No matter how good it is, there is no need to read it three times. Twice is just right. And the most efficient way is to watch it once and watch it again immediately.

The first time is normal reading, as long as you relax and appreciate the author's subtle thoughts and interesting stories. Don't try to read quickly. A good book is worth stopping and thinking about from time to time.

Write down your reading notes when you read it the second time. Don't read word by word at this time. You can skip the stories in the book as examples and focus on the ideological context. Read a chapter and take notes until you finish reading it. Then the book can be shelved or even thrown away.

An important function of reading notes is to provide convenience for you to review this book as soon as possible in the future. Just read the notes directly. There are other good books waiting for us to read, so it is best to write notes to the extent that they can replace the original books.

I have read many mediocre notes, some of which are just like the outline, central idea and general idea of paragraphs given by primary school students. Many people on the Internet take reading notes by drawing "mind maps", which is of little significance. Running books and reading notes are as boring as describing a beautiful woman with three numbers: bust, hip and waist.

Intensive reading requires reading notes to include four aspects:

(1) clearly shows the logical context of each chapter;

2 take away all the highlights in the book;

(3) I have a lot of my own opinions and experiences;

Find the connection between this book and other books or articles I have read before.

Many people's notes are just summaries. Being able to do the first point and find the logical context is already an excellent note. I've only seen a few people occasionally insert highlights from books into their notes. As for the latter two points, even less can be done. But only by doing these four things can you maximize the utility of a book. You will find that the return is huge.

I am used to dividing my reading notes into chapters completely according to the chapters of the original book, and even keeping the title of each chapter. At the beginning of each chapter, write down what the author really wants to say in his own words, and each chapter will form a system-however, this executive summary is not important.

It is important to be able to see the logical context of the author. Most people don't really understand a book because they can't see this line. The logical structure of each chapter may be only a few words if it is really written, but these words are often distributed in dozens of pages. Writers who are good at writing books often include a large number of fascinating short stories (including scientific research cases, historical allusions and anecdotes of celebrities). Only by stringing these short stories together can we understand what the author is saying. Just looking at one of the stories, everyone will have a different interpretation of this story. However, the role of this story in the book is often ignored. Finally, we only remember short trees, but we can't see the forest they make up.

Modern people like small jokes and often remember the jokes told by the author and forget the original intention of the author. In American history, there was no television, no Internet, and no "printing press era" in Weibo. Steven Douglas (who once competed with Lincoln for the president of the United States and his wife, but ultimately failed) had a famous debate with Lincoln for seven consecutive times. Douglas is eloquent and often quips, but he warns the audience not to applaud the quips. The book Entertainment to Death goes like this:

Douglas even criticized his audience, saying that he needed the audience's understanding, not passion, and that his audience should be thoughtful readers ... reading requires rational thinking. A good reader will not be ecstatic or applaud involuntarily because he accidentally finds any aphorisms-a reader who is busy with analysis may have no time to take care of these.

The ancient fables of China that we learned when we were young are all short stories in ancient books, but our interpretation of these fables often deviates from the original intention of the ancients to write books. We remembered the story, but forgot the article. Therefore, the first function of reading notes is to put down stories and remember articles. Make a book from thick to thin, from concrete mountain scenery to abstract map. Only by jumping out of the lines and looking down at the book with a condescending attitude can its context become clear. After reading it clearly, don't copy the author's words, write this vein in your own language, just like drawing a map.

But if a short story is really good, we have to leave it. Good reading notes are unevenly distributed. Taking notes is a very exciting behavior after I hear an idea. I must write it down for myself. Apart from the logical context, if you find a really good story-we call it a "bright spot"-then write it down, even the details. On the one hand, if you want to write an article in the future, you can turn out your notes for use. More importantly, these stories will appear in our minds repeatedly, and they will affect our thoughts in various unexpected ways until we change our understanding of the world. You have to admit, some jokes have longer vitality than their original texts, so that they eventually become allusions.

I read other people's key sentences about a book with Kindle, and found that most of these sentences are summative, just like the key sentences found by primary school students in the text, they are usually the first sentence or the last sentence of a paragraph. The real master can't use this linear reading method, but should be "surprised at first sight". Which sentence of the author is amazing? Which sentence awakened the dreamer? Such things should be emphasized and recorded. I sometimes listen to "Open the Book for Eight Minutes" by Phoenix Satellite TV, which is a TV program that introduces books to the audience. I found that several other hosts tend to systematically introduce the content framework of a book in the program, while Liang Wendao can always find several separate highlights in a book and often tell the audience one or two meaningful stories to let people appreciate the personality of the original author. Reading notes have to have this effect. Reading is, to some extent, looking for the bright spots that can stimulate your thinking. We should ignore the story when analyzing the context, and then take the story away after analyzing the context.

* * Intensive reading is an active reading method. Write down your comments on this book in your notes, just like talking to the author. My unified approach now is to put all my comments in square brackets, so that when I browse later, I can see at a glance which ones are from the book and which ones are mine.

Bibliographers think that the neatness of books is the most important, so they don't read books; Low-level readers will draw key lines on the finished book; And a high-level reader will fill the book with comments after reading it. Historically, cattle people like to annotate in the margins of pages when reading. It is said that most people don't like to lend books to Mao Zedong, because he can't stand reading them after reading them, and the books are full of his notes. **

You can't be indifferent to a well-said sentence. You can write down your understanding of this matter, or you can write down your doubts or affirmations about the author. A more advanced annotation is to write down your inspiration for seeing this passage. Every chapter of a good book can inspire more than ten times. Perhaps it has solved the problem you have been paying attention to before-although this problem seems to have nothing to do with this book; Maybe you will want to take the author's theory one step further. These ideas are not necessarily useful, but they are valuable, because if you don't write them down right away, you will soon forget them. Maybe years later, when you look through your notes, you will find that your inspiration is more valuable than the original.

When you read a certain number of books, you will find that there is a connection between books. Especially the books written by modern people, there are few books whose thoughts are completely independent of the world, and the real new knowledge is often based on the old knowledge. What do other books say about this problem? Is there any updated evidence to support or oppose this conclusion? Find out their similarities and differences. A person who is really good at active reading is very sensitive to this connection. I use Ever-note to organize my reading notes now. This tool can generate a link for other notes to click on the reference directly. Such links often appear in my notes, pointing out the connection between books.

When we were young, there was a time when we were very sensitive to new words. For example, you may hear an idiom on TV. Even if you are not sure of its exact meaning, you still think it is a good word. As a result, you will encounter this idiom many times in the next few months or even days! You may wonder why you didn't notice it before. Has this word come to you recently? A scholar can remain so sensitive to new knowledge. Once you find an interesting new topic and read books on it, you will encounter it many times actively or passively. No sooner had you put down the book than you saw an article about it on the Internet. A few days later, you turn on your cell phone and find someone in Weibo discussing it. What should you do at this time? Open your evernote and sort out a note about it!

If you read enough, you will get a more rare experience: feeling the progress of human knowledge. You will find a problem in this book, but a few years later, someone wrote another book, citing stronger evidence and changing the whole conclusion. Sometimes you will agree with this new conclusion, and sometimes you will object. Sometimes you have to judge which one is the most reliable from several different conclusions of several books. Sometimes you think what they say is actually wrong, and the correct answer is only known to you. At this level, you are completely equivalent to the author of the book. You can even look down on them and judge them. What should you do at this time? Write an article for publication!

The most important purpose of reading a good book twice is for these experiences, inspirations and connections. For a book about an unfamiliar field, when we read it for the first time, we often fall into the author's mind. All the bandwidth of our brain is used to understand the author's ideas, and there is no more room to generate other ideas. "Humor is the embodiment of excess wisdom", and ideas will only emerge when there is excess bandwidth. Only by watching it for the second time can you express your opinions calmly. The first reading is to sink in, and the second reading is to jump out.

Taking notes is the greatest respect for a good book. Reading notes are a very personalized writing and an extension of personal knowledge. This is not a book review, it is written entirely for yourself, not for public publication-you can completely concentrate on meaning and not care about writing. Even so, reading other people's well-written reading notes is still a pleasure, and reading notes directly can save a lot of reading time (Douban has a special system for readers to share notes).

If you can't set a strong study note standard, just make a rough study note, which can at least deepen your memory. There was once a study in which subjects were asked to read a scientific article and then divided into three groups: the first group read it several times, the second group drew a "concept map" for the article, and the third group spent ten minutes writing a related article. After a week's test, it was found that the scores of this group of recollections who wrote articles, even at this time, were better than those of the other two groups. The effect of drawing a concept map is worse than watching it several times. Therefore, the sentence "It is better to pass your eyes a thousand times than to pass your hands a thousand times" is correct, and it is really useless to take notes with mind maps.

E-books/e-books/e-books

As we said before, it is good to read slowly. Slow is not necessarily active. If there is something wrong with the reading media-for example, the font is too small, and some words are unclear or unknown-they will force you to slow down, which will have the same good effect. Experiments show that when the printing effect of the test paper is not good, students can take the test paper more seriously and reduce mistakes.

It may be because it is more beautiful, it may be because it feels more solemn and formal when held in your hand, or it may be because the high cost of paper causes the illusion that the value of words is also high. Most people read paper books slower than e-books. Kindle, iPad and various e-readers on mobile phones make the reading experience extremely cheap and convenient, which simply encourages people to read quickly. People usually think that reading paper books is better than reading e-books. In fact, even if we see good articles on the Internet, we sometimes like to print them down and study them carefully. Modify the paper by yourself and print it many times. The key point is that the physical words printed on paper seem to stimulate the brain nerves more and let us read with a more positive attitude.

But e-books also have the advantages of e-books. For me, the most important advantage of e-readers is that they can automatically extract your comments in the book and the key points you draw. Kindle, iBooks and Good Reader all have this function, and the extracted content can be directly saved as a file. You only need to sort out this file directly to get reading notes, instead of flipping through books at any time.

When reading e-books, you must annotate more, and don't waste infinite blanks. If Fermat had read an e-book, he probably wouldn't have given proof of Fermat's last theorem, because the blank space in the book was too small to write. One possible direction for the development of e-books is the socialization of reading. Now the sentences highlighted by readers can be displayed on Kindle, and maybe in the future, every reader's comments on each sentence can be displayed.

Scholar martial arts

There are many things in the world that are more important than reading. Between doing things and reading, doing things takes precedence. But reading is the best way to accumulate knowledge quickly besides practice. Before television appeared, people's main activity when they had nothing to do was reading. Modern people have much more free time every day than in the past because of automatic equipment such as washing machines and dishwashers, but people invest most of their cognitive surplus in TV. Television is basically aimed at as many people as possible, just like group dancing in the square. Literati disdain square dance, what we pursue is martial arts.

Intensive reading requires slow reading, but we know that many famous scholars read fast. Why? This is martial arts. They read fast, because for them, the new things in ordinary books are very limited.

The scholar I admire most is the economist Taylor Cowan. Cowen is a famous economist. He published his views on current economic problems in major newspapers and wrote many books. But perhaps more famous is the speed of his reading! How many books can he read in one night? Anyone who has witnessed his reading will feel a special awe: the speed of turning pages is very fast, and the speed at which he reads a page is almost the speed at which others read a title. You may think that you haven't read anything, but I have been reading his blog all day, and I can say responsibly that he really knows the key points of every book he has read.

What is Kevin's secret? He wrote a blog post to answer this question. He said,

The best way to read quickly is to read a lot. There are many more. It started a long time ago. Then maybe you know what will appear in the current book.

The point is that you have read many books before. You must have started reading a long time ago. In this way, when you read the new book in front of you, you can predict what the author is saying to a considerable extent. Maybe you know the ending of a story at the beginning, or maybe you already know a lot of theories and don't have to listen to the author. You can quickly skip a lot of basic content and go straight to the author's new point of view. A truly experienced reader must read books in the same field faster and faster. They can find new things at a glance, grasp the key points, and know what position this book is in this field and what new contributions it has made.

Most people read novels faster, while reading non-fiction is slower because they always have to stop. But Kevin can read non-fiction faster than novels! Because non-fiction content can jump, fictional plot can't jump, and skipping is boring. Kevin also tends to read paper non-fiction, and e-book readers are only used to read novels: because e-books don't turn pages fast enough!

I haven't read many books, which is far from such skills. But after reading a few books, my reading level seems to have improved a little. One performance is that I try to "read" books with low technical content by listening to audio books. * * Almost every book that has reached a certain sales volume in the English-speaking world has an audio version. I drive for half an hour to and from work every day just to listen to books.

I almost never get off immediately after parking. I opened the evernote app in my mobile phone and put the transcript of the book I just heard into the headphone cable. When I have time, I will arrange the records of these tape recorders into words. **

I'll only listen to it once. For a 30-minute book, my recording usually takes only three to five minutes. Only the essence of the original will be repeated by me in the recording, and the rest are my experiences and comments.

Isn't it a "two-legged bookcase" to study like this all day? If you think I am a "two-legged bookcase", I will be deeply honored, but I think it is far from enough. There is a rumor in Weibo that Bill Gates read 139 books in 20 13. I can't confirm this, but his blog does tell a lot of books, and most of them are non-fiction. Charles Munger and Warren Buffett are bookworms, and Buffett even claims that he spends half his waking hours reading books. Munger said:

All the smart people I have met in my life (smart people from all walks of life) don't read books every day-no, none of them. Warren reads as much as I do, which may surprise you. My children all laugh at me. They think I'm a book with two legs.

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Note: This article is excerpted from the chapter "Learning with Strength" in Wan Weigang's book "Never Imagine".