Billionaire Bill Gates revealed last week, at the ‘Ask Me Anything’ event with users of the social bookmarking website and news aggregator Reddit, the strategy he follows to continue learning and storing information through reading. It is not the first time that the co-founder of Microsoft explains this technique, since he did it in one of a few years ago.
The trick used by the philanthropist, who has shared through , is to write reflections, summaries or even discrepancies about what he is reading in the margins of the pages. A technique that is supported by science, since more information is retained when it is written by hand instead of with electronic devices. However, Gates said that he only does that in 20% of the books he reads, since reading is slower with this technique.
This isn’t the only advice he’s given in recent years for reading faster and learning more from books. Another recommendation from Gates is that to start learning about a new subject in a self-taught way, you have to start with the first steps that were taken in science, those pioneering researchers in their field or the people who discovered important advances. This will cement the information that is read later and provides a chronological view.
In addition, he also confirmed that he does not continue reading any book that he knows in advance that he will not finish. And that to concentrate on reading you have to remove distractions like your mobile.
One last fact that Bill Gates also revealed in the interview with Quartz is that you have to spend at least an hour, at least, reading. The computer scientist assures that reading should not be understood as an activity to which you can dedicate 10 minutes as if it were a YouTube video or a magazine article. In this sense, Gates shared in his intervention on Reddit that he spends up to three hours reading on vacation. Thus, the millionaire usually makes literary recommendations for the usual vacation periods, those of last summer were the following.
The Five Books for Summer 2020
1. A novel about Auschwitz: The Choice, by Dr. Edith Eva Eger. This book, Gates writes, is a first-person story of life in Auschwitz and a psychological guide to processing trauma. In fact, Edith after leaving the field emigrated to the US and became a therapist.
2. A story that leaves its mark: Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. It is a novel that involves six interrelated stories that serves to read about the worst and the best of humanity. The story Gates liked best is that of a young American doctor in the mid-1800s.
3. The Ride of a Lifetime, by Bob Iger. The Microsoft co-founder writes that this is the best business book he’s ever read because it “explains what it’s really like to be the CEO of a great company.”
4. The Great Flu, by John M. Barry. To learn more about how to deal with a pandemic, Gates recommends reading the book that collects information about the flu from the early 20th century.
5. Good Economics for Hard Times, by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. This book is interesting because it addresses inequality and political divisions by focusing on the policy debates that are in rich countries like the United States.
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