Hacking Forgetting
4 Reading Lifehacks for “Wisdom Retention”
Can you think of a non-fiction book that you enjoyed reading about 10 years ago?
I can think of a few, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, for example, which a rapper friend of mine recommended to me. What do you remember from books that you read a decade ago?
Not much, right? Isn’t reading dense non-fiction kind of a waste of time if you don’t remember much from what you read? Reading is, of course, a better pastime than TV or browsing social media, but if you are only going to remember one or two factoids from a book that takes you 10–20 hours to read that’s not a great way to spend the limited time you have to devote towards intellectual growth.
So I’ll share four reading lifehacks for optimizing your metabolism of the knowledge in these pages into wisdom…
The SuperMemo app
You should be highlighting and taking notes as you’re reading. When you come across something that you want to commit to memory, highlight it, hit copy, and add it as a flashcard in the Supermemo app (on your smartphone or computer). This app is the best tool I’ve found for hacking forgetting and for high-leverage learning. Its algorithm will prompt you to review what you’ve learned at specific intervals optimal for you.
When you add a flashcard, you’ll need to add a question or hint that will prompt you to remember. This well-designed software has helped me learn two languages, it’s worth a download (and it’s free).
Let your working memory consolidate what you’ve read
I’d encourage you to read in the evenings before bed, dwell on the ideas as you drift off to sleep, or go for a walk without your smartphone after reading and contemplate it. Listen to the audio chapters of audiobooks repeatedly. Using social media or your smartphone after reading will scramble your working memory, and you’ll lose some of the knowledge that you paid for!
Rearticulate to retain
As you’re reading keep a little “diary” of your thoughts and what you’re learning. You could do this the old fashioned way with pen and pad, but I contend that vlogging or even making voice notes is better, this engages your verbal memory. All you need is a webcam or smartphone to vlog. Your vlogs don’t have to be public. Your vlogs or voice notes don’t have to be scripted or look or sound good. What you take a few minutes to verbally articulate will remain all the more concrete in your mind — This is why I record lengthy and detailed podcasts reviewing some of the great books that I read.
Super speed read with Spritz
Spritz is a very cool app that allows you to read up to 1000 words-per-minute. Your reading comprehension does take a hit reading at this velocity, so I’d suggest using it for knowledge retention; to review the notes and highlights that you’ve taken from books. How you would use it is copy/paste the passages of books that stood out to you into a Google doc or Evernote, then Spritz it with the Spritzlet web browser app or A Faster Reader for Android. And you can re-visit the impactful passages of a book in the amount of time it takes to go to the bathroom.
I hope you’ll implement these wisdom retention lifehacks, especially if you read my new book for men…
As you can see it’s a dating/relationship book, the 19 chapters total over 500 pages (the audiobook is 18 hours) which is huge! Most dating/self-help books are 150–200 pages, mine is longer because I get really detailed on some of the advanced social dynamics strategies, sex hacks, and do a lot of storytelling. It’s self-published, so I don’t have a publisher telling me to cut content or water down the message.
This flowchart visually breaks the chapters of the book.
- The Inevitable Uncondoming
- Playing with Fire
- I Was Promised a Sex Slave
- Dating in the Post-COVID-19 Era
- The Secret Society Infiltration Model for “Networking”
- Dating and Marrying Exotic Foreign Women
- How I met the love of my life and why I took the ultimate risk
- The Siren Song of Online Dating
- Sex and Dating Hacks
- Lifehacking Your Looks
- Seducing a Virgin
- How to Lose Your Virginity
- The Hero’s Journey from No Fap to Tantric Sex
- Tantric Sex Techniques
- Choose Youth (and Yin) over Beauty
- The Worst Part of Being Married
- The One Thing I Regret
- My Wedding Night with my Beloved Bride
- A Respite from the Shoddiness of Life
Please order the book today
On LimitlessMindset.com for $8.99. You’ll receive an immediate download of the Mobi and Epub versions of the book, so you can read it on an e-reader device or on your smartphone.
- Includes the audiobook version of the book. Some of the chapters you’ll want to listen to multiple times to absorb the knowledge.
- And you’ll also get access to a private accountability community, The League of Limitless Gentlemen on Minds.com, where you’ll be able to get feedback and encouragement from me and other likeminded guys.
You can pre-order it here on Amazon, I realize that their Kindle platform makes reading very convenient, but you getting it direct from me allows me to build a community around the book which is why it’s a dollar cheaper on LimitlessMindset.com. Mobi import instructions are included so you can read it like any other Kindle book.
As a reward to those who pre-order it before it drops on September 21, 2020, I’ll include the audiobook if you send me an email with your order receipt.
The length means that I’ll have to list it on Audible for $20-$25, of which I only get a 20% royalty — so I’d rather reward those who pre-order with the audiobook!
If you want to test drive the audiobook, give a listen to the podcast below…
New Podcasts
D’Artagnan’s half-truth — from “Playing with Fire” chapter 2 of my new book — There’s a line from the classic movie The Man in the Iron Mask, that the noble musketeer, D’Artagnan tells King Louis XIV, “I think it is possible for one man to love one woman all his life and be the better for it.”
September Biohacking Q&A #32 Will an $89 EMF-Blocking Beanie help you pick up Colombian girls? + Jonathan’s top “Hair Hacks” — We haven’t dropped a podcast in a while as I’ve been deep in monk-mode working on a new book which drops on September 21st (please pre-order it!) The wife and I are back from a little weekend get-away, I dropped 200 milligrams of Phenylpiracetam from RUPharma, she put her clothes back on, and we recorded this exceedingly chipper podcast.
New Book Review
Why fish don’t get cancer… [Book Review of Bath Bombs & Balneotherapy] — The most recent title from Mark Sloan delves into the science of water’s healing properties, something I didn’t know much about previously.
I was interviewed…
“Today’s expert is Jonathan Roseland, the proprietor of Limitless Mindset. He has been experimenting with nootropics for nearly a decade now and has probably tried more of them than anyone else I’ve ever spoken to.”
— From an interview I did w/Better Humans on Medium
Please Respond
What is something that you’ve learned from a book that you wish you could impart to the whole world?
Consolidating and reconsolidating even the most salubrious of semantic memory,
Jonathan Roseland
