This isn’t Miss Johnsons’ Fifth Grade Class Where Your Report Is Due On Friday

Forget Book Summaries: This Note-Taking Method Will Change How You Read Books

Unpopular Opinion: You don’t need to create a book summary from your notes to make them useful.

This isn’t Miss Johnson’s fifth grade class 🤓

Book summaries might (and I stress might) have been a good way to summarise and get the most out of books when we were young & needed an A in English.

But as an adult a book summary is rarely useful (in my humble opinion)

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

Now I don’t doubt there is absolutely benefit from being able to put something into your own words. But reading books as an adult often goes beyond just tyring to understand concepts.

We want to take action from the things we read.

And unfortunately a book or chapter summary isn’t going to do that.

I gave up trying to summarise books a long time ago and instead use my Spark Method to take notes and turn them into action.

Here is how it works:

Step 1: Look Out For & Capture Golden Nuggets