Sabri Suby answers a viewer (Daniel Tolkach) about how entrepreneurs should read books. He recommends "guided reading"—read primarily to solve a current problem. His workflow: screen books quickly via audiobook (high playback speed) to judge value; if valuable, buy the physical copy, annotate heavily, and synthesize key ideas into a running Google Doc for fast future reference. For urgent problems he extracts and implements actionable ideas immediately (pausing further reading); for general learning he reads the whole book, takes notes, and stores synthesized wisdom for later application.
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Hey, guys. This week on HeySubree, I'm going to be answering Daniel Tolkach question. He said, hey, Sabri, when reading books, should I read until I come across an idea that I would like to implement? Stop reading and come back once I've implemented it? In that case, does it make sense to read every day if I'm still working on turning my current ideas and knowledge into wisdom, or should I take thorough notes on the ideas while reading so I'm implement them after finishing the book and then you've written? What are your best practices when it comes to reading books? Do you take notes, read every day, read in short intervals? How do you effectively use books to grow oneself and your business? This is a very, very great question, and I can see that a lot of thoughts been put into it from somebody who is actually an action taker, which is awesome to see. Great, great question. The way that I approach it is typically I like to read to usually solve a problem that I'm experiencing in some way, shape or form. So it's guided reading. And that means that it's not that I don't read other books that are outside of the problem that I'm gonna solve, but most of the time, 80% of the time, I am reading books to kind of get something out of it, so then I can take it away and, you know, implement it to solve that problem. My process for reading books is typically I like to get the audiobook and crank it up on high speed in the beginning to see that it's worthy of my time and my attention. There are so many sh. Books out there, it's not even funny. And I'm not the kind of person that's like, oh, I've started reading this book, so I must finish it. Like, that's just a complete waste of time. Most books are like six to eight hours on audible. And, you know, a lot of them are just trash. Like, it's just full of fluff that could have been synthesized in like half an hour. So it's like one clear idea that you want to get, and the rest is noise. And a lot of the time, even the title of the book tells you the entitled premise of what it is that author is trying to articulate. And the rest, again, is just filled with fluff. So to really stop myself from wasting a lot of time, I will get it on audible, you know, skim through a few chapters to say, okay, this is worthy. And then I'll either, you know, crank it down to a lower speed, listen to the Entire book. Then if it's really great, I buy the physical copy of the book and I highlight it and I take notes and I dog ear it and I mark it up and I get all of the juice and the wisdom. I synthesize all of the knowledge into wisdom. And then I have a running Google Doc that has my notes on that book and I put it in there. I can access that information now, but I have just spent, you know, eight, 10 hours synthesizing that knowledge into wisdom. And I want it as a fast reference point that I can then go to my Google Docs and go bang, get all the good stuff out of it and apply it. Because I might be applying some of that now, but I might want to revisit that in a year and, and then be applying those things. And the last thing that I want to have to do is then invest another 10 hours in reading a book to find out those ideas. So I write it down like that way and then go and implement it. Now that's kind of like my process of how I go about it. And it all depends. In terms of your question about should I stop reading, execute everything and then come back to the book, it really just comes down to where are you at in your business right now? Right? Do you have more time or do you have more capital? Really? These are the questions that I constantly refer to and I constantly ask myself. And if I've got like, I need to really get something solved right now, and it's a bleeding problem, it's a really pressing problem that needs to be solved. I'm not gonna continue reading that entire book and then implement it. All right, I'm gonna take that stuff out, I'm gonna apply it. Then once I have solved that problem, then I will read the rest of the book, take my notes and move through it that way. Right? So I'm just reading something out of a general, then I'll read the entire books, take the notes and have that as a reference point that I can deploy at a later stage in my business or in my life. So I hope that helps you. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe. We're dropping a video like this almost every single day on YouTube and if you've got any questions, leave them in the comments box below with heysubrey and I'll do my best to get in there and get that answered. Sam.
