Episode 528: Read It. Realized It?
Bradley Hamner argues that reading a book isn't the same as realizing its lessons. He suggests writing chapter takeaways, summarizing books in a note app, and using AI to refine them. Revisiting favorite books over time matters because your perspective changes.
Chapters
Hey everyone. Well, it is 2026. I hope you've all had a great Christmas. Hope you've had a great New Year's. And so as I was beginning to kind of think about some of the episodes that I wanted to come out at the beginning of this year, I'm recording this at the early part of December. I want to— there was this idea that I'd never heard this language before, and I'm calling this episode Read It and Realized It. And I went just this morning, I went to breakfast with someone that hadn't spent a tremendous amount of time on. He, uh, we had communicated over text message for a little while and he wanted to get back together. So we reached out probably a month ago and we went and had a coffee on a Friday morning together and just an incredibly smart person, incredibly brilliant, wise. I had no idea that the background that he had both in business and just in the business community. So it was a fascinating conversation around him. And inevitably, I come to find out he was very well read, has read a lot of the similar books. And so we kind of started exchanging some of the books that we both like. Of course, I asked him if he had read The Goal, and he said, oh, yes, absolutely. It feels like in my line of work that that was almost required reading. And he then ended up sharing with me a couple of books, which the books that he talked about specifically are kind of irrelevant to the bigger thing that I'm wanting to share today. And this episode dropping at the beginning of January is kind of strategic because I know all of you are going to listen to podcasts, watch YouTube videos, you're going to read books in this year, including myself. And I think this is just like one of those comments that gets made that when he said it, I was like, I'll never forget that. And he said that there's a book, I guess I will tell you the book, it's called The Fifth Discipline. And he specifically references, apparently the introduction was written by Deming, Edward Deming, who was famous in the manufacturing world. And so he references this. So he's seen this book, The Fifth Discipline, on the shelves of a lot of leaders that he's spoke to, been around. And he said that, so, you know, sometimes I'll go and I'll ask them, have you read that book? And some of them say yes, and some of them say no. And he said the ones that say yes, I have read it, his next question is, have you realized it? Have you read that book? Yes. Have you realized that book that resonated with me a ton? There are some books that I have read and I, or listened to even, that I don't know even, I think I could tell you maybe The Big Idea, but I couldn't really share with you the broader concepts and how I've implemented those into the business, how they've impacted maybe me personally and how I've maybe tried to do things better or different in business. And there's some that I feel like I keep going back to. The Road Less Stupid is obviously one of those, one of those books that just has a profound impact to me. I read at least once a year, if not reference it multiple times throughout the year. But it really made me think about if I have a book and I read the book and it's impactful, have I realized it? Have I actually taken the idea the concept and improved something, made a change, and started a new habit, improved a system, improved a process because of it. Or if I just read it just in case. Now, there are some times that you'll read a book because somebody recommends it. And it's like, I mean, maybe, maybe I'll pull that out. But it's really helped me to think about just today alone, about the books that I'm currently listening to and reading, that I actually want to make sure that I have realized the takeaways from some of those books. And so specifically, how can we go about doing that? So I'm going to give you a couple things that I personally am going to try to do a much better job of going into this next year. Number 1 is at the end of a chapter, when I Uh, obviously this is easier whenever you're reading a physical book, but at the end of the chapter, I'm going to take a moment, pull out my pen, and I'm going to write, you know, somewhat of a summary or a takeaway from, from that specific chapter. That's number one. And it's really not because I'm going to reference it in the past, it's really— or in the future. It's really because I want to be able to just set it and let that, that idea cement down into my, into my brain. That's number one. Number two is when I finish the book, I want to go into go into Notion or something, some file, Google Doc, you know, Evernote, whatever you want to use. And I'm going to put down some sort of a summary. Now, I think one thing that you could actually do with this is to make it easy, is just talking to AI. So use Claude and talking to AI and say, hey, I just got finished reading, you know, there's a book right here next to me, Willpower Isn't Willpower Doesn't Work. That's a Dr. Ben Hardy book. I see some other books over here. Training Camp is one of them. I see another one, Four Seasons, a book about the Four Seasons Hotel. I mean, whatever the book is that you read, I want to talk into AI for a few minutes and just say, hey, this was some of the big idea. Then I want to take that summary that AI is going to give me, copy that and throw it into something. I think it's just the act of doing that. How much time are we talking? You've probably spent you know, 6 hours listening to it, reading it, something like that, to take 5 or 10 minutes to summarize the book, the takeaway, what can I improve, what was the big idea. Even if it's a book personally, you know, one of Mel Robbins' recent books, uh, uh, Let Them, you know, Let Them. Okay, what's, what's the big idea and how are you going to change things personally? What's something that I can do to actually feel like that I'm improving some aspect, you know, of my life or of my business from reading that. So I loved that idea of have you read it? Yes. Have you realized it? Hmm. One of the books I'm actually, probably by the time this releases that I will have read it that I have not read actually is The Effective Executive by Drucker. I couldn't believe I hadn't read it. And I was like, I actually have not read that book. I need to read that book. So maybe, who knows, I might do a podcast on it at some point of what have I realized from that book? What are some changes specifically that I can make? So anyway, I thought that that was impactful concept to me. Those are some ways that I'm gonna try to do it at the end. Chapter summaries and then a book summary at the very end. I think you can use AI to be able to do that. I think it's that. And then some of the books going back and referencing them, rereading them. You know, another idea I heard from Daniel Pink is that the book hasn't changed, but you have— the person reading it has. You know, it's been years since I read Man's Search for Meaning. And I thought, yeah, boy, last time I read that book, which I'm not sure when it was. It's one thing I like about Amazon, by the way, if you buy you know, even the Kindle or the Audible version or the actual book on Amazon, is you can go back and pull that up and it will tell you last, last purchased. And so you can think back, oh yeah, I read Man's Search for Meaning in 2018. Wow, am I a different person in 2026 if I reread, go and reread that book. So those are my recommendations, is number one, summarize some of the books, okay, so you can actually realize what it is that you read. And number two, consider some of your very favorites, uh, going back and rereading some of those books. And maybe, maybe, uh, they're not as good as, as what you thought the last time that you read them, but maybe in some cases they're— they might even be better and more impactful to you at this point in your life. All right, everyone, hope you had a great 2025, but I hope 2026 is your best year yet. We're here to be able to pull for you. We'd love to invite you to one of our upcoming workshops. If you go to blueprintofwest.com/assets, go down there, you can see some of the upcoming workshops that we're having. We're having 12 Above the Business workshops, one workshop every single month. We'd love to invite you to be able to join us. All right, till next time, lead well and go be great.
