Introduction
There is an interview about how Bill Gates reads books from Youtube.
Body
I don't let myself start a book that I'm not gonna finish.
- Take notes in the margins.
You know when you're reading, you have to be careful that you really are concentrating, particularly if it's a non-fiction book. Are you taking the new knowledge and sort of attaching to knowledge you have?
And for me taking notes helps make sure that I'm really thinking hard about what's in there. If I disagree with the book sometimes, it takes a long time to read the book because I'm writing so much in the margin. It's actually kind of frustrating. Oh please say something I agree with. So I can get through to the end of this book.
- Don’t Start what you can’t finish.
So there's this one it's a fiction book called Infinite Jest. I'm trying to decide if I started or not because I watched the movie, the end of the tour, I loved it. David Foster Wallace comes across as a super interesting, broad thinking person. If the book was like two or three-hundred-page book, there's no doubt as soon as I watched that movie, I dive in. But it's quite long and complicated and you know I don't want to make an exception. It's my rule to get to the end.
- Paper books > ebooks.
Over time I will make the switch, but when I'm just sitting there at night, reading often a paper magazine or the book I'm used to that and it's ridiculous because I have whole book bag that goes on my trips with me and it's voluminous and antiquated.
- Block out an hour.
If you're reading books like these, you'd want to be sitting down for an hour at a time because otherwise just getting your mind around. okay what was I reading is not the kind of thing you can do five minutes here ten minutes there. Magazine articles and our short YouTube videos fit into those little slots. And so you know every night I'm reading a little over an hour and so I can take my current book and make some progress.