On and off this year I’ve debating getting a new computer, and I finally got one ordered. It’s the new MacBook Pro M4 Max with 64 GB of memory.
I debated going to 128 GB of RAM 💸, and even had it in my cart, before my more rational head prevailed and I came back down to Earth.
I’ve spent this year doing personal projects on the family’s five year old iMac. When working with large files I sometimes have to reboot it daily to reset RAM. Applications and programs take forever to run. 🐢
And forget about doing anything with a local LLM; it’s essentially impossible.
So I went ahead and brought myself to the modern era.
The computer will be here in one week. When it arrives, in addition to the improved horsepower, the form factor gives me more mobility.
With the new computer I could theoretically work on projects from a coffee shop, although more likely it’ll be me working from the living room or deck.
How about you? On what machine do you get work done on? Are you rocking something older than my five year old computer? Let me know what you use - and what you'd like to use - at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz.
Kevin 😀💻🐇
A Quote
“
It’s an example that should challenge every talented and brilliant person: You owe it to yourself and to the world to actively engage with the brief moment you have on this planet. You cannot retreat exclusively into ideas. You must contribute.
— Ryan Holiday in "Lives of the Stoics"
Three Things
1 - 📙 “Scaling People” by Claire Hughes Johnson - This is a great operating manual for how to build and run a team, written by the COO of Stripe (and formerly of Google). It’s pretty thorough at over 600 pages, but a fair bit of that page count is worksheets, which you can also print in a single packet off their website. Learn nitty gritty details about hiring, firing, running meetings, setting goals, effective QBRs, and a lot more.
2 - 🐟 Bon Appetite Visited Esté in Austin - Esté is one of the best restaurants in Austin, TX. Bon Appetite recently went behind the scenes to talk with the head chef about buying so much fish in central Texas, and watching how the kitchen prepares for dinner service. It was an interesting behind the scenes look at running a successful restaurant.
3 - 🐀🚘 Custom Build 1930 Model A "Rat Rod" - I have a soft spot in my heart for mechanical marvels and self-directed learning. This guy bought a 1930 Ford Model A. He hired out some work and it was a disaster, so he started to figure out how to do it himself. He bought a cheap welder and spent 100s of hours learning and practicing. In three years he built his dream car; a turbo diesel with large duallys. Also, when he wanted the lady to go fast, he said, “Give her the beans!” What a fun new saying! 🤣
Deep Dive on the Learning and Writing Systems I Use for Reading / Podcasts / Videos
Do you read books and articles? How about listen to podcasts? Do you learn from YouTube?
Do you ever wish you had a better system for retaining and getting value from all that?
Let me help!
I read a lot of books. I’ve even read more than one book on how to read books.
I’ve got robust system to gather information from books, revisit that information, and then use it.
This system is no longer for just books. Over time I’ve extended this process to other forms of information consumption, like podcasts, articles, videos, etc.
I do this because I want to apply my learning.
I’ve got goals and problems to solve, as do you. I don’t trust that somehow my brain will retain information and it’ll be available when I need it.
Reading is fuel, knowledge is power, and time is precious - I didn’t want it to go to waste.
I wanted something a little more sticky. A little more reliable.
Since this system has been really helpful for me, today I want to share it with you!
I hope you find something you can steal for yourself! Let’s dive in.
The Book Process, Start to Finish
Let’s start by going through the core process from start to finish. The most robust process is for reading non-fiction books, so we’ll start there.
Get a Book
Step one is getting a book to read. Since we’re talking about problem solving and applying learning, my advice is to select a book that addresses the problem you’re interested in solving.
Said a different way: Don’t read a book in anticipation of future problems.
If you read a book in advance of a problem, you won’t even know what to pay attention to. You’ll get so much less out of a book than if it’s addressing something you’re dealing with right now.
For example, I was reading a book not too long ago about being an effective CEO. There was a lot that actually applied to me, but then I got to a chapter on dealing with your board. I don’t do anything with a board, so I just noted that this book addressed it, then skipped that chapter entirely.
Read Daily
Habit creation is hard work. I’m mentioning it just in case you don’t already have a reading habit; know that it will take time and intentionality.
But once you’ve got it set, it’s automatic. Using me as an example, per Kindle, I’ve been reading daily for 1708 days (4.7 years), and weekly for 338 weeks (6.5 years). I could break those streaks tomorrow and I wouldn’t lose any sleep; I’m sharing just so you know that building a strong habit is possible.
“Atomic Habits” is of course the best book on habit formation, so I recommend that if you want to go deep on habit formation.
Specific to creating a reading habit, some tips from me are: - Make it easy and obvious: Put the book or your Kindle where you’ll be reading. - Make it interesting: Pick something you want to read, not something you feel like you should read. - Start small: Read one page a day. Once reading one page is consistent, go up to two. - If you miss, start again: Every day is a new day. If you miss a day when building the habit, forgive yourself, and start again.
I place my Kindle on my nightstand. As soon as I get in bed, I grab my Kindle; it’s automatic. Sometimes I read for 5 minutes. Sometimes I read for an hour. A little progress every day turns into large progress over months and years.
Highlight and Annotate
While reading, highlight passages that are interesting or relevant. These are gifts for future you.
What would you want to hear again in the future? What might you want to share with others?
I recommend that you also annotate the highlight for why it’s interesting. What was on your mind when you highlighted it? What idea does it connect to?
Whatever state of mind you’re in while reading will be different than when you review this highlight later. Don’t assume the highlight will make sense to future you even if it feels obvious now.
I’ve read a lot of really bad highlights from past Kevin. I can’t figure out what he was thinking or why he’d highlight that text.
"Bro, what does this even mean?"
Then there are other times where I read a highlight, say “WTF?”, then read a little note from past me below it that makes a ton of sense.
So now, if there’s the slightest chance of giving future me a “WTF?” moment I go ahead and add a little note to future me to explain.
Sometimes I literally start my note with “Hey Kev…” When I read those notes 2-3 years later, I always chuckle - and am thankful for the explanation from myself, to myself.
Book Synthesis on Completion
When I complete a book I give myself a task in a ToDoist project to perform a Book Synthesis.
The task itself has the name of the book, and then in parentheses I mark how many highlights I’ve taken. I do this because sometimes I don’t have the energy for a 150+ highlight monster. 🧌
List of books on my backlog.
What I do during a book synthesis is try to summarize, review, and gather quotes. I’m trying to pull out value, like newsletter ideas, links to other books, and take action.
My book synthesis template.
This book review process is performed in Obsidian, my second brain. Links to other books are literally hyperlinks. I can query all newsletter ideas across the vault in one place.
Curate Thoughts and Store Quotes
This last part is a little more fluid. It’s sort of part of the book synthesis process, but also something that just happens from daily reviews, when something occurs to me while walking, or whatever!
I have something in my vault that I call “concept” pages.
These concept pages are really any key thought I want to elaborate on. For example, there are concept pages for “social proof,” “lateral thinking,” “power,” and “do you want to be an ancestor or a ghost.”
I do two things on these concept pages as part of this process: 1 - I store relevant quotes from across all of my reading. 2 - I add my own thoughts, summary, and anecdotes.
During the book synthesis process, I’m re-reading all of my highlights. I place them in the concept pages where that quote might be helpful. I often add my own thoughts below it, on why I added it to that page, or what it makes me think of.
If the mood strikes me during book synthesis, I’ll add my own thoughts to the concept pages. For example, I might’ve discovered during book synthesis for the book “Contagious” that I didn’t have a concept page for “social proof.”
So I’ll create it, add the quote that got me thinking about it, and then put some of my own thoughts at the time. Where have I noticed social proof at play? What other ideas does it connect to? I’ll link to something like “mimetic desire” and share how I think they’re related.
Use Them
Done over time this process creates a strong web of interconnected thoughts. My own thoughts and ideas are intermingled with quotes from others. One idea links to another and another and another. They’re available for me when I need them.
My current knowledge graph. Obsidian renders how note are connected to each other.
For example, I recently had someone talk to me about compensation at their company. They were wondering what to do about a certain situation.
Thankfully I had started a small “compensation” concept page and was able to grab some helpful thoughts for them, and then go back and add a few more of my own while I was there.
I’m adding, tweaking, revising, and curating these notes consistently. It’s a quote here. A thought there. A connection made.
Again, these are small actions that pay dividends over time.
I’ve not only read 500 books, but I’ve revisited them through their highlights and ideas. I’ve connected the dots. I’ve re-read quotes. I’ve really chewed on them.
The more I do this, the more I recall, and the more they’re available to me when solving problems.
That was the full core process of reading books and getting them into a place where they add value to me!
But it doesn’t stop there, there are a few other types of information, tools, and processes I wanted to share.
Podcasts
Podcasts were always outside of this process until Snipd was created. Snipd is a for-fee app that uses AI to do speech to text processing on all podcasts.
When you listen and hear something important, you can create a “snip” that does an intelligent cut of the audio, then uses AI to create a summary for you.
You can edit the start and stop times. You can tweak the note or make your own. You can tag the snips and share them.
Although I still prefer books, now I can also grab audio quotes and stories for later.
An example snip.
Articles
There are many similar services, but I use a service called Reader for articles and newsletters.
These can be highlighted and annotated just like a book. Any newsletter subscription goes here and I review my feed regularly.
I can also save any article while I’m reading the web and store it in Reader. Once saved with their browser extension, I can also highlight and annotate text right on the website I’m reading.
Capturing a quote from an article in Reader.
YouTube
There are currently two ways to capture YouTube videos with tools I’ve already mentioned today.
The first is with the browser extension for articles from Reader. It can be used on YouTube videos as well. It stores the video and a transcript of the text in the Reader service. This is best when I want to turn things into a quote for later.
The second is with Snipd. You can give it the video link and it’ll turn it into just audio, so you can list to it like a podcast. From there you can create a “snip” just like you would a normal podcast. This is best when I just don’t have time to watch a video and want to make it more portable.
Readwise and Obsidian
Readwise is the center point of this whole process. Everything - books, podcasts, articles, and videos - all gets stored in this service. It’s available for review, tagging, annotating. And Readwise itself can be exported to a variety of tools.
I previously shared how I exported all my notes to Google Drive so I could use them with Google’s NotebookLM and AI.
But the tool I use the most for exporting Readwise is Obsidian. Everything from this whole process is stored offline on my local computer (soon to be new MacBook 🤩🤣) so I can use it forever and not worry about it getting lost in the cloud.
Daily Review
I re-read these quotes and highlights every day. Well, not all - just 10 - but I do it every day.
My daily review is ready every morning when I wake up. I review 10 curated highlights from the 23K+ in the vault every day.
It helps bring ideas top of mind and draw new connections. I’ve highlighted text four years ago and gotten a completely new connection by reviewing it today.
As part of my daily review I also tag, annotate, and store these quotes as needed inside their relevant concept pages. Again, I’m making the web stronger day by day.
By the way, this is the point in the process where past Kevin’s notes to me show up 😁
Application Summary
I’ve mentioned a few tools throughout today’s newsletter, so I thought I’d summarize and link to them here so you had them all in one place.
I use, pay for, and love all five of these major tools. ❤️
Readwise https://readwise.io/ $4.49-$7.99/month A referral link is here if you would like one month free. By the way, let me know if you want me to become an affiliate, because then you can get two months for free. I haven’t done that yet, but will if you’re interested.
This is up to you! I hope you found something in here you can steal for your own purposes.
If you have any questions or need help with anything, just let me know. I’m really happy to help you with anything. Just email me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz and let me know what’s on your mind.
