Last year I decided to read more. I had been an avid reader as a kid and enjoyed reading during my years of school. But after university I sort of just stopped reading and now found myself missing the immersion and inspiration that books provide so well.
Being a daily commuter with about two hours of driving each day, I wanted to use my transit time for reading, and since I was doing the driving myself, audiobooks was the obvious solution. I wanted to be efficient and "read" as many books as possible to get the most out of my driving time.
So, I made a list of books mainly consisting of professional litterature and non-fiction. Nearly every morning and afternoon drive, I spend churning through audiobooks, sometimes attentively and clear-headed, other times tired and distracted. When one book ended, another was queued up. It was great. It really gave me a sense of putting the many hours in transit to good use. By the end of the year, I had completed about 18 books. It was quite satisfying to look upon my reading list and see the crossed over titles.
However, a frustration slowly grew, looking at the titles. When I tried to recall specific information or even the overall message of some of the titles, i came up short. Quite a lot of the information i simply could not remember. While I clearly recalled core ideas from certain books, these were mostly about subjects that I had prior knowledge about, or otherwise really interested me. But quite a lot of the material in general just didn’t stick, making the entire reading project somewhat unsatisfying.
Reading on repeat
Being frustrated with my brains limited retention of the books I read, a book title one day caught my eye in the comment section of a Travis Media YouTube video. The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking it was called. Little did I know, that this book should greatly influence my thoughts on my learning process in the months to come.
The book is written by Michael Burger and Edward Starbird and presents their views on learning strategies, informed by many years as university math professors. It's a somewhat short book (audiobook version is abut three hours) that outlines five approaches to effective thinking, each of which is associated with one of the four elements: earth, fire, air, and water (as well as the quintessential element change - more on that later)
In the introduction of the book, the authors suggest reading the book three times in a row. The first read-through should be casual, just to get an overview of the content. The second read should be more careful, with pauses for reflection and and engagement in the sporadic exercise that appear in the book. The third read should be focused on "making it your own". While I wasn’t entirely sure what that last bit meant at first, I got the gist of the authors suggestion: reading the book three times over with gradually deeper engagement.
This method intrigued me. Could this seemingly redundant approach help me retain the information I read better? So I gave it a try. The following three sections aim to cover:
- Some of the book’s core ideas
- How each read-through added to my reflections on both the material and my learning process
First Read: Global Scope
The book is structured into five main chapters, each focusing on an "element of effective thinking." The main chapters of the book is as follows:
- Earth: Grounding your thinking
- Fire: Igniting insights through mistakes
- Air: Creating questions out of thin air
- Water: Seeing the flow of ideas
- The Quintessential Element: Engagig change
During the initial read, I followed the instructions from the introduction and listened casually, with the simple goal of grasping the overall scope of the book. This is a short description of each element of thinking:
The first chapter emphasizes the importance of understanding material deeply, to master basic concepts before moving on to more complex ideas, revisiting fundamentals later for a deeper understanding, breaking down subjects into essential parts, and teaching others as a method to identify gaps in ones own knowledge. The authors associate this chapter with the element of earth, as deep understanding serves as the ground upon which all other knowledge is built.
The second chapter is all about learning through making mistakes and encourages embracing failure as an inevitable and effective way to progress. It suggests methods such as investigating if a failed problem solving attempt may be the correct solution to a different problem, and deliberately failing as a tool to kickstart a creative process. This chapter is associated with fire, as failure is volatile and sometimes painful, yet immensely powerful.
The third chapter discusses the value of asking questions. The process of asking questions serves multiple purposes. On the one hand, asking questions allow you to extract information from others. But the very action of making a question and communicating it, forces you to process the material, in a way that makes you not only retain information better but makes you more engaged with the topic. Questions not only is a product of curiosity but also creates curiosity. The chapter continues to define "good questions" as those that are clear, actionable, and capable of exposing biases in your own understanding. Asking questions is associated with air, because it gives us a "breath of inspiration and insight". (I guess the this is the weakest point of the elements-metaphor...)
The fourth chapter revolves around understanding ideas within the context of other ideas. The main point of the chapter is that every idea is the result of prior ones and that it will eventually give rise to new ones. Understanding the predecessors to an idea provides nuances and context. Reflection upon potential future successors, can kickstart idea generation. It also stresses that one should accept the constant evolving of things as a norm, and not count on anything to reach a final static state. The chapter is associated with water, as the flow of ideas through time is analogous to a stream of water.
The fifth and final chapter addresses the so-called "quintessential element" change as a shared, fundamental component of all the other elements. Learning and thinking are impossible without change, which makes it an integral part of every process. They also stress that a person capable of change, should never worry about not being sufficient. They are after all able to change this. As a bonus note the chapter also points out that the difference between an expert and an amateur is not simply a matter of skill but rather of approach. To Starbird and Burger an expert and a amateur engages in two separate activities, rather than the same one at different skill levels. The trick is to learn how to do the thing the expert is doing.
Second Read: Web of Ideas
This would normally be where I pressed play on the next book in the queue, but not this time. And I was kind of looking forward to replaying the book. I was curious if I would gain a different understanding of the concepts second time around, or if I would be bored throughout the reread.
I didn’t take notes or pause to reflect during the first read. However, the second time around, I went for a more actively engaging approach, pausing to reflect, recording my thoughts on voice memos, which I transcribed and organized in writing after each commute.
During this second reading, the nature of the structure of the five elements started to shift for me. Initially, the concepts seemed like separate ideas in distinct compartments. But as I read again, I recognized that they were quite interconnected. For example, it occurred to me that the "deep understanding of the basics" in the earth-chapter couldn’t truly be achieved when learning about at topic initially. Understanding basics requires revisiting the material from time to time with new knowledge of more complex concepts, that shines light on nuances of the basics that are not available at first glance.
In other words, deep understanding of basic concepts demands the same iterative process, that is integral to the making mistakes-chapter, as well as the shifts in perspective described in the flow of ideas chapter.
This process of finding connections between concepts from different elements continued through out the second reading. Underneath the easy to understand mnemonic structure of four separate elements, a coherent web of interconnected ideas revealed itself.
Moreover, all of the techniques on learning and thinking seemed to rest on an underlying structure of basic concepts. They all seemed to relate to either
- Iterative processes (revisiting and broadening understanding, making mistakes, flow of ideas etc.)
- Active engagement (asking questions, teaching, reformulating etc.)
- Isolating essentials (zooming in core elements of ideas and asking the right question etc.) and
- Understanding concepts in larger contexts (compare to older ideas, revisiting basic concepts with new knowledge as context etc.).
If the book examines the topic of learning, with each chapter representing a vertical segment of that topic, then the four themes above appear to serve as a cross-section of the subject, evident in every chapter.
Third Read: Cross-pollination
When I pressed play on Five Elements of Effective Thinking for the third time the narrator’s voice had become familiar, almost comforting. I knew what to expect from each chapter, and knew how the concepts related to each other. Hearing the introductory chapter the authors reminded me to this time "make the material my own".
Not knowing exactly how to engage with the material more actively than I did the second read, I decided to edit my notes after each chapter, refining my formulations, adding examples, and bringing in nuances I hadn’t captured in earlier drafts.
If the second read revealed the internal connections within the book, the third read was characterized by how the content related to other ideas I had already internalized. For example, I noticed that the concept of learning through communication—teaching and asking questions—resonated perfectly with a description from Scott Belsky's Build, where he explains how Steve Jobs refined his narratives by constantly pitching an idea.
Additionally, the notion of isolating an idea's essence and discarding the details reminded me of advice from Robert Martin's Clean Architecture. He suggests waiting as long as possible to make choices about implementation, focusing instead on core functionality.
Another instance is the strategy of applying solutions that fail in one context to solve a different problem. This aligns with David Epstein’s descriptions of generalists who transfer ideas across knowledge domains in his book Range.
On a more fundamental level, many concepts presented in Five Elements seem to share a phenomenological approach. This is particularly apparent regarding efforts to bypass ones biases and blind spots. The goal of uncovering hidden perspectives brought to mind the work of phenomenologists from my university curriculum, such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.
By the end of the third read, I realized that maybe this relating new ideas to known concepts was what the authors meant by "making it your own". To me, this process seemed to expand both sets of ideas, making them 1) more nuanced and 2) more integrated. I see now that this "cross-pollination" between known and new ideas happens all the time, but during the third readthrough this became clearer for me than ever before.
Conclusion
I think, what has been special about this reading experience, is that it has provided two layers of simultaneous learning. On the one level I understand the contents of the book (techniques to learn better), but on another level I have experienced the effect rereading provides in understanding the content at a deeper level. The themes of this particular book is also embedded in the process of rereading it, making it a delightful meta experience to navigate.
Ernest Hemingway is said to have stated that “the only kind of writing is rewriting.” I suppose what he means is that, to refine text into something worth reading, it has to evolve through multiple iterations. Perhaps reading follows a similar pattern: to truly grasp the core of a text and apply oneself to it, reading must also be done iteratively. Perhaps, in essence, “the only kind of reading is rereading.”
Learnings
So, what did I learn from all this repetitive reading? I’ve tried to summarize my takeaways here. Writing them now, they seem simple, maybe even banal, but nonetheless, the experiment has given me a much deeper appreciation for these simple truths.
Iterative reading uncovers more For one, I learned that "redundant" is not an apt word for the process of rereading. Each new read picks up more information, as well as changes the perception of the content and inspires new thoughts. The content becomes as new, when rereading it with a greater context.
Active learning helps internalization
I strongly suspect that recording voice memos and taking notes were largely responsible for much of my reflection and, consequently, my internalization of the concepts. Often, a realization hit me while listening, but I believe it was the act of verbalizing during memo recording and the subsequent structuring of the thoughts during note-taking that helped embed the realization in my memory. The idea had to be actively transformed from abstract thought to spoken words and then into a more organized written form.
Scope switching provides clearer understanding
Regularly alternating between a global view of the material—focusing on understanding the overall message or concepts—and diving into the finer details can greatly enhance comprehension and coherence. I recently experienced this again when I first read an online summary of a book chapter before reading the full chapter. The summary provided a clear overview of the chapter's main argument, which gave my detailed reading a stronger sense of direction.
Ideas latch onto ideas
Another takeaway from this experiment is how knowledge connects to other knowledge. During the third reading, it became especially apparent how one idea latches onto another. This process reshapes both pieces of knowledge, adding nuances that weren’t there before. Given that internalizing knowledge depends on its connection to preexisting knowledge, a broad base of knowledge is an advantage because it provides more "hooks" for new ideas to latch onto or relate to. This underscores the strength of generalism and having a wide field of reference. This realization also made me feel better about the list of books that initially sparked the experiment. While I may not recall all the content, the connections I naturally made while reading The Five Elements were primarily to books from my previous reading list. Some of those ideas seem to have stuck after all.
Learning is frictional The biggest takeaway from this experiment may be that no learning comes without effort. Every new realization I had was the result of focused reflection and active participation. This has made me less inclined to expect meaningful learning from "quick and dirty" sources like online book summaries or podcasts played at double speed—it simply doesn’t allow for deep internalization of knowledge. What does help me integrate knowledge is the friction involved in contemplation, iteration, and applying active learning strategies.