Deep Books: My Reading Method

Intro

The Problem

In our age of content abundance, the most important skill that our brains are constantly degrading at is diving deep into what could really make the difference. We are inclined to lean towards the amount of content ingested, not the depth of the ingestion and its impact on our minds and lives.

I think it's mainly because we're subconsciously scared of the opportunities we could have missed if we focused. There is only so much time we have, and everything we learn is constantly getting out-of-date.

So we run, and run, and run towards something new, rather than focus on being really changed by what we've already learned. We're more concerned about sharing what we learned with the others (either to get popular or to somehow influence them) than about sharing it with our own inner self.

How do you find the real treasure?

The truth is, there is indeed a lot of content you consume that is simply not worthy of making any deep impact on you. So it makes sense to go through it quickly, grasp only the essential thoughts or news, and move on.

That's where modern AI technologies help so much. AI summaries are literally being built into reading apps, search engines, web browsers, note-taking apps, practically everywhere you can imagine where you consume content.

Let me emphasize this once again: those AI summary features are not there for you to learn deeper and more quickly. They are there to help you to avoid spending too much time on the content that would not have any impact on your life anyway.

So all those subscriptions, reading apps, AI extensions and stuff help to filter out the content that would be most valuable for you, and then you go through it quickly, grasp the key takeaways, and move on.

But every once in a while, you discover a piece of content that can make a real difference in your life. And if you go through it using AI summary or other "smart quick workflow" then that would be your real missed opportunity.

What do you do with the treasure?

I don't know about you, but when I stumble into something that could make a real difference in me, I desire to dive deep into it. I refuse to move on until the seed is really sowed inside me, and at least starts to grow.

More often than not, the pieces of content that make the most impact on me are books. I used to read paper books, now I tend to prefer digital books. First, they're always with me, regardless of what device I'm holding in my hand. Second, modern technology adds a lot of convenience to the learning process when reading the books.

I cannot boast that I read 10 or 50 books per year. In fact, I only have around 20 books highlighted in my Readwise, and only 10 books that went through the "deep book" process described below, to make a real impact on my life. But again, it's not about quantity, it's about quality of impact.

When I find something that I sense that it could become a foundational block for my life (as a whole, or in the current period of life), I pick that book to focus on it in a specific way. I cannot come up with any other name for this besides "deep book", so I'll stick with this term here.

Method Overview

First and foremost, from my experience, a book cannot have a real impact on your life if you only read it once. The key to digging deeper is to read it again and again.

• I don't mean sit and read it 10 times in a row non-stop. I mean making sure to come back to it over the months or even years.
• Likewise, I don't mean reading it from cover to cover every time. Human associative memory is remarkable, so if you keep key associations at your hand, your brain will cover the gaps.

The most natural way to keep key associations or thoughts from the book at your hand is to highlight them right in the book, to be able to review only the highlights and not the whole book.

• In the paper age, some people left colourful bookmarks or used a highlighter.
• In the digital age, people use innovative software tools. I, personally, use Amazon Kindle, Readwise Reader, and occasionally Apple Books. And then collect the highlights from all of these in Readwise.

But if you just highlight the book, you probably end up with multiple hundreds of the highlights. Moreover, they will be represented as an unstructured flow of quotes in the apps like Readwise — not very productive to review and learn some big life-changing concepts.

So what I do is three-level popping up:

1. Quotes by chapter. Take that flow of quotes from Readwise, export it into your note-taking app (I use Reflect), and then divide them into an outline structured in the same way as the book itself.
2. The heartbeat of each chapter. Make a separate outline that once again represents the book chapter structure, but now try to extract the main themes, key lessons, key thoughts, the "heartbeat" of the chapter.
3. The leitmotif of the book. The main thing (or things) that the author was intended to say that go as a red line through the whole book. These are the main things that should impact my life. This could be either (the easy way) each chapter represented by one sentence or (better) key things that I want to take deep into my heart from the book as a whole.

Method in Practice

Reading

Highlighting key quotes when I'm reading the books has been my long-standing habit. It probably started more than 20 years ago, and back then I was reading paper books and writing every important quote manually in OneNote.

When I'm reading, I like to highlight a lot. Almost every page of the book has something highlighted. I don't limit myself if I find something to be potentially valuable.

As I've mentioned above, nowadays, my reading process happens in various forms:

1. Amazon Kindle. This is probably the gold standard of the digital reading experience, and it's similar on a physical Kindle device and in the Kindle app for iPhone or iPad.
2. Apple Books. Excellent reading experience on Apple devices. But I don't read a lot in this app because I rarely purchase or download ePub books.
3. Readwise Reader. I started using it in 2024, so not yet a long-timer, but it's perfect both for articles and for books as well. It has some issues when displaying PDF or ePUB, so it's not that often that I use it specifically for books. But when it does display the book properly, the reading and highlighting experience is just wonderful.
4. Paper books. Some books are just difficult to find in electronic form, so I still occasionally read paper books. And when I started to use Readwise, I discovered a cool feature in its iPhone app: "Add via photo". It basically allows you to take a picture of the book page, perform OCR, and save a selected part of the text as a digital highlight.

All these highlights are collected in Readwise via integrations that the app provides.

Processing

After I'm done reading a particular book, and thus consider my Readwise highlights to be complete, I export all the highlights from that book into Reflect.

• This can be done using Readwise-Reflect integration, but for books specifically I prefer exporting highlights as markdown and importing them manually into Reflect for the second phase of the "Deep Books" method.
• So I create a new Reflect note, entitled as the book itself, and dump all the markdown quotes from the book under the "Quotes from the book" bullet point.

Then the first organizational step begins: Quotes by chapter.

• A simple trick that simplifies the process is opening Reflect and the original app with highlights (e.g. Amazon Kindle) side-by-side, and then find the last highlight in each chapter in the Kindle app visually, and then find the same quote in Reflect using cmd+F.
• I imagine there is some cool AI-based trick to accelerate this process even further, but I did not bother to find it yet.

After I'm done with the first step, the second one begins: The heartbeat of each chapter. The way I do that:

• Collapse all the "Quotes from the book" in the Reflect note
• Add the "Heartbeat" bullet point to the Reflect note (above "Quotes from the book").
• Expand the chapters one by one, reading the quotes, identifying the most central ones, and copying them into the "Heartbeat" under the corresponding chapter.
• Occasionally, I do some rephrasing of the quotes, to make them concise and as short as possible, while keeping the main line of thought.

And then the final step: The leitmotif of the book.

• Some books are organized so that they help you extract this leitmotif, or key red line that's coming through the whole book. In that case, I might just use what the author provides.
• In other cases, I try to notice or remember common topics or the lessons that the author marks as especially important.
• Finally, sometimes I just sit and think deeply about how I would have explained the key learnings from that book that impacted me the most to another person — and write that down.

Reviewing

I call my book notes "Deep Books" because when I open such a note I can review the book on different kinds of levels, depending on my needs:

1. I review the leitmotif if I want to check whether I practice key learnings from that book in my daily life. This is a time when I mostly reflect on myself, and use the notes as "principles guideline".
2. I review the heartbeat of the chapters when I would like to remember what the author was trying to say or was thinking about. This is a quick way to re-discover the book as a whole, and "read it again without reading it again". It is useful as well to get a brief reminder of the thoughts from a particular chapter of the book that are most relevant for my life right now.
3. I review the quotes from the book when I want to share them with a friend or colleague, or when I would like to dive deeper into the topic. This is almost like reading the original book, but condensed, without losing anything important.
4. Finally, I use Readwise daily review to review random quotes from the books that I have read. This proved to be valuable to think about them, remember them, check whether I practice them (when relevant), and also share them (sharing is essential and valuable, but it's fair only after you applied this to yourself, not before).

Bonus: My Personal Deep Books List

I've mentioned at the beginning that I only have a few books yet that I have turned into "deep books". These are indeed the ones that influenced me deeply over the years, and have become foundational at some point of my life. So, in case you're curious, I thought I would share the list below.

"The Pursuit of God" by Aiden Wilson Tozer

This book has laid a foundation for my own personal pursuit of God around fifteen years ago. It has had such deep influence on my attitude towards God, Jesus Christ and my faith that I can't help but share with you the "leitmotif" of the book:

• Some truths cannot simply be understood or learned; they must be experienced personally — only then can they be truly absorbed.
• I must first and foremost seek God personally, learn to recognize Him on my own, and build a heartfelt relationship with Him. The Church is formed from individuals who each come to know God separately, and thus grow closer to one another when they gather.
• A mature person who deeply knows God is distinguished by quickly getting back on course after straying, and cannot do otherwise — their heart dictates it.
• Exercise is vital for a person: exercise of faith, exercise in godliness, exercise in living for God's Glory… Without exercise, no serious result can be achieved.

"God Is Closer Than You Think" by John Ortberg

This book is truly life-changing, it opens your eyes and teaches you how to seek and find God in every day of your life.

• Every time I read this "deep book" I fall in love with God once again. It's so full of truth about God's heartwarming closeness, and hints and ways to find him personally.
• Every time I look at Waldo pictures, I remember my God who is hiding on every page of my life, ready to be found if you just look for him carefully enough.
• Every time I remember "The Book of Job" from the Bible (the one that tells a story about a man named Job who went through extreme suffering, was blamed for it by his friends, and then faced God himself) I remember how God is not about efficiency but about versatility and abundant generosity, and how world is not indeed human-centred but God-centred.

"The Insider" by Jim Petersen

This book has been foundational for my understanding of Bible study groups, and for sharing my faith in a "non-advertising" manner, through daily life and friendship.

"Church: Why Bother?" by Philip Yancey

Philip Yancey is a deep and honest author who ponders the reality of the church in this book: how it looks like nowadays, what was God's picture of it and plan for it, and the role of it for a Christian in the 21st century.

"Inside Out" by Larry Crabb

Larry Crabb is a Christian psychologist, and in this book he explores the internal world of the human heart, the root cause of its diseases, and the depth of the Gospel that helps the human being to heal its soul.

"Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed" by Marty Cagan and SVPG

This book series has been the latest addition to my library, and as you may have noticed, they are the first ones non-Christian that deserved to become my "deep books".

Until now, I mostly learned everything professionally either from direct practical experience or from various courses (school, university, online and offline courses). This is the first time that I'm actually learning foundational concepts and growing professionally by relying on the books.

• "Inspired" teaches the product operational model key principles through the eyes of a product manager and his/her team. In particular, it teaches such teams how to perform efficient product discovery that would allow them to succeed in achieving serious results with minimal wasted effort and maximal value for the customer and the business.
• "Empowered" teaches product leaders how to build, coach and manage product teams, to help the team and the whole company to be successful.
• "Transformed" teaches executives and product leaders how to transform their organization, come from "where we are now" to "where we want to be".

The product operating model is very different from how most companies (including ours) have been working for years. So I figured that my perspective would need to be changed first, before I even try to introduce these changes to anyone in the company, from the individual contributors to executives.

I wanted my mind to be deeply rooted in the product model. I expected my mindset to be shaped by it. Thus, it became crystal clear that they're going to become the "deep books" for me.

Moreover, this time I combined as much learning techniques as I could, to be able to learn quickly and efficiently. So, on top of the layers described above, I added another one: audiobooks. Therefore, this is how it looked like:

• I've been listening to the audiobooks from Audible everywhere: while driving, while babysitting, while bedtime, etc.
• I've been reading and highlighting the books one-by-one on Amazon Kindle.
• Furthermore, I've been reviewing the highlights daily in my Readwise.
• And I've exported the highlights to Reflect and prepared the "deep books" for further reference and to use while coaching our product teams.

These three books are helping me now to build a new approach to software products development in my team and company, for us to transform into a product-based organization — like Amazon, Google, Apple or Netflix, but for creator economy. Occasionally, we're internally joking that we're building "Amazon for creators". But as you know, every joke has some truth in it.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, I would dare to quote A.W.Tozer once again here.

Some truths cannot simply be understood or learned; they must be experienced personally — only then can they be truly absorbed.

And this one as well:

Exercise is vital for a person: exercise of faith, exercise in godliness, exercise in living for God's Glory… Without exercise, no serious result can be achieved.

While the "Deep Book" method might seem like a lot of work, it is indeed the work worth doing for me. In fact, this is my only chance not to miss the opportunity to become a better person and better professional than I used to be.

In the world of an overwhelming amount of information, I want to use AI and my own intuition to first quickly filter out the things that are not worthy of my attention, and then dive deeply into the ones that are.

I hope the reading method that I've described here would inspire someone who is reading this article to try diving deeper, and change their own heart and mind with a help of life-changing content. If you identify the right content and then shape yourself by diving into it, I can promise you that it's going to be the most long-term rewarding way to spend your time.