In university, I had very good notes. My study process consisted of summarising my notes, and then producing an even shorter, 1-page ‘skeleton’ for each course. If I had time, I’d attempt practice questions from previous tests and exams. But I always prioritised my summaries.
As was common in university, my friends and I would exchanges notes, making sure we got the key points even if we occasionally missed a class. My summarised notes for one particular course were very popular, getting passed down for several semesters to people I didn’t even know. Exams were open-book, and friends who received my notes thought they had a ticket to an easy ‘A’.
They were wrong.
In fact, many ended up doing worse than usual in that course.
I don’t think the problem was with my notes (I could be biased, but I did well in that course after all). Rather, I believe my notes instilled in my friends a false sense of confidence. They tried to use my notes as a shortcut for actually learning the material. Equipped with my notes, they didn’t bother writing their own summaries for that course.
Common mistakes in using book summaries
In my opinion, reading summaries are poor substitutes for actually reading a book. You can’t learn from a summary in the same way you can learn from a book. And caution is needed even when you’re just using a summary to decide what to read.
Book summaries are not that effective for learning
Some people use summaries as a shortcut to gain insights from books more quickly. Why spend hours reading a book when you can just get the key takeaways in a fraction of the time?
But there’s evidence to show that passive reading is not a very effective way to learn something. Learning takes time, and many ideas take a while to digest. A great example comes from a recent EconTalk podcast with Kevin Kelly discussing his book, Excellent Advice for Living. The book is full of short, pithy life lessons that Kelly wants to pass on to his children. During the podcast, Russ Roberts (the host) asks Kelly whether people can really internalise advice that they merely read, without learning it “the hard way”.
Kelly’s response is illuminating:
So, I think you’re onto something. … I want to imagine that, in a certain sense, the advice works best not when you’re introducing an entirely new concept. Because, I think that is very hard to convey this entire amount of wisdom in this little sentence.
But, it works best when you have already kind of learned the lesson but haven’t articulated it yet and don’t have a way to handle it. You might not have even processed it. You may be leaning in that direction, and this is something that comes along and crystallizes it, or coats it, or gives you a handle, or in some ways activates it.
Now, reading a self-improvement book is still a far cry from learning a life lesson “the hard way”. But the book will provide context and examples that a summary cannot. The key takeaways for many books (particularly self-improvement books) often sound generic and banal without such context. Moreover, when you read a book over several days or weeks, you allow much more time for its ideas to sink in, increasing the chance that one of them resonates. Perhaps it will “click” when you go about your life and see something you’ve just read about occurring in practice.
So, although learning from merely reading a book is still not a perfect substitute for learning from “real life”, it seems a heck of a lot better than learning from a summary.
Be careful when relying on book summaries to choose what to read
Summaries can be extremely helpful in deciding what books to read — I frequently use them this way myself. Instead of expecting to learn from summaries, you could use them to identify books that seem interesting or relevant for what you want to learn and commit to reading those.
I think this is a great way to use summaries, as long as you’re aware of their limitations. The primary ones are that summaries can miss nuances, and they can be biased.
Summaries miss nuances
We all know that summaries can miss nuances — it’s inevitable given the nature of a summary. However, it’s easy to forget just how important details and nuances can be.
Summaries typically focus on a book’s conclusions, without telling you how they got there. (I try to share more of the journey, but my summaries are unusually detailed as a result.) Conclusions can sound so obvious that it makes it easy to dismiss a book as not being worth reading. For example, Range‘s conclusion is that “there are benefits to being a generalist that we often overlook”. Evicted‘s conclusion is that “being evicted really sucks”. It can be tempting to think, “well, I already knew that”, and cross the book off your reading list. Yet, in many cases, the journey is more important than the destination.
Conversely, it can be equally tempting to dismiss a book that you disagree with based on its summary. Just beware of confirmation bias. You might read a summary and think you’ve understood the author’s point, but the summariser may have oversimplified it. I firmly believe that you should never criticise a person’s argument until you’ve actually read or heard it as expressed by them.
You have to trust the summariser
When you rely on someone else’s summary, you place a lot of trust in the summariser. You have to trust that they’ve correctly identified the key points and represented them fairly. But what if they glossed over parts they found overly complex or didn’t agree with? Or focused excessively just on the parts that they liked?
One way to ward against this is to check summaries from several different sources. Another is to get to know your summariser. Check their summaries of books you have read in full and consider how fair and balanced they are. Make sure that they clearly indicate when they are expressing their view instead of the author’s. If someone has a good track record, you may feel more comfortable relying on their summaries.
Final thoughts
Despite all these caveats, I still believe there is a lot of value in reading book summaries. Just make sure that, before you rely on a book summary (including, of course, any summary on this site), you think about what you’re using the summary for, and whether you trust the summariser.
How do you use book summaries? Share your thoughts in the comments below!