Tips to Help You Master Important Skills in Life

About four years ago, I decided to read 100 new books a year. I’ve kept up that habit until recently. I stopped reading two new books a week because I forgot almost everything I learned over a year earlier. And there’s no way you can remember even a quarter of a book you read three years ago. 

I made this discovery this year when I started worrying about random things in my life. I knew I read about these things, and I was right. I’ve read a lot about worrying, I gave coaching to clients about how to confront it, and I wrote a book about worrying. But I’m not a machine,  I’m not immune to the challenges we all face. So, I decided to re-read one of my all-time favorite personal development books, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie.

After that, I remembered how to deal with worry again. Once I realized that knowledge disappears quickly from our minds, I’ve been re-reading and studying at least one good book a week. We must arm ourselves against the challenges of life by repeating the things we learn so often that they become a habit.

If you want to master a particular skill, don’t assume that reading a few books on the topic will help you do that; it requires endless repetition. In his book, The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday said, “When we repeat an action so often, it becomes unconscious behavior, and we can default to it without thinking.”

5 Tips to Help You Master Important Life Skills:

After re-reading close to 40 books this year, I want to share five tips with you that can help you master the skills that you value in life.

First: Put your favorite books at your hand

The books you want to master need to be in a place where you see them every day. Keep them on your desk or on the table. Let the books remind you of what you want to get out of life. A book like On The Shortness Of Life is a constant reminder that life must be lived. That’s why I love to have it on my desk. I do the same with other important books, like On Writing Well by William Zinsser. So, look at your life and ask yourself: What behaviors, characteristics, or skills do you want to make your own? What books are about those things? Keep those books close, but don’t keep a large collection of them. Pick only two books per topic and stick to the best.

Second: Make sure to distinguish important lines in different colors

I always highlight a book when I read it for the first time. Now, when I want to go back and study a book, I don’t need to reread everything. I look at my highlights, but I also read the whole paragraph. Whenever someone tells me they are afraid to highlight books or don’t want to buy books, I question that person’s will to learn. What’s more important? Keeping your books neat? Or improving your life? Highlight your books. Make notes on the pages. Turn the book into something that’s yours.

Third: Review a book within a day or two

I’ve learned that the meaning of a book changes over time. That’s not because of the book changes but because you change. The first time I read The One Thing by Gary Keller, I learned about the power of double impact. The second time I read it, I learned the importance of taking large amounts of time to do meaningful work. And that’s also why you want to read good books more than once.  The great thing about re-reading non-fiction books is that they take little time. If you’ve highlighted a book, you can review the whole book in three to four hours. I can do that in one or two days, and I always learn something new.

Fourth: Make personal notes about the book in your journal

No matter how often you read a good book, you’ll still forget most of the content. It doesn’t matter how good or useful a book is. Over time, we forget a lot of what we’ve learned. But when you note the things you’ve learned from a book, you start internalizing knowledge. Once you write about a topic in your own words, it becomes a part of your memory. That’s why I recommend writing notes to yourself in your journal like Marcus Aurelius did in his journal, which later was published as Meditations. He wrote “do this” and “don’t do that.”

Fifth: Repeat this process every week with a new book- multiple times a year:

It’s better to re-read a good book several times a year compared to reading a decent book only once or twice. So, as you keep rereading books, narrow down your list. I started with about 50 books I wanted to re-read. I’ve cut it down to half by now. I aim to end up with eight books I will skim through once a month, two a week. Once I fully absorb it and save it in my memory, I will read another book.

In Conclusion:

There’s nothing new about this learning principle. It’s the same strategy Bruce Lee used to become one of history's biggest material artists and actors. He said: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” And I don’t admire the person who has read 1,000 books, but I admire the person who has read one book 1,000 times.