One Mistake I made in How I was Reading Books & How I am Fixing It

5 min readFeb 10, 2024

Focus on “Now, What?”: i.e., on how to apply the takeaways from a book to YOUR situation…

In hindsight, it looked like a silly mistake. But I suspect that, in our busy lives, many of us might be making this mistake.

In this post, I share the story of a mistake I did in how I was reading books, and how I am now fixing it.

My realization when somebody strongly recommended a book I had already read a few years ago

Several years ago, I read a book called Decisive (by Chip and Dan Heath). It describes many practical case studies and frameworks to improve decision making at work and in personal life.

When I was reading it, it all made sense! Over the years, I probably even did a few things subconsciously based on it.

Fast forward to Dec 2023: an executive recommended it to me as “one of the best books they have benefited from to improve their decision making”. When I heard that, I thought to myself — yes, I know that book, and I have even read it! But, but, but:

Am I now able to recall the main takeaways?
Am I now able to provide my own personal case studies of how I applied those learnings and benefited from it?

Unfortunately, the answer to both of the questions above is “No”.

The Key Mistake

This is a huge & missed opportunity.

The key mistake here is that I that didn’t intentionally apply my learnings from it.
Without consciously applying the learnings, I was not getting the full benefits from the book.

How do we fix this? Let’s take a small digression to see a framework for the “fix”:

The “What, So What, Now What” framework

I recently came across a framework called “What, So What, Now What” in a book called “Think Faster, Talk Smarter” by Matt Abrahams. This framework can be used for more concise communication. An example from the book is:

What?: Sales have gone down by 15% in the last month.
So What?: If this continues, we will have to lay off people.
Now What?: To increase revenue, I propose that we launch this campaign.

With the above situation fresh in my mind, I realized that I could create a higher-level abstraction of this framework. Usually, we are focused on learning the “what” and “so what” as we are reading a book, but we don’t spend as much time reflecting or thinking about the “now what” aspect, i.e.:

How do the learnings apply to our situation, and
What specific changes are we going to make in our day-to-day life?

I made the below visual to summarize my shift in thinking:

OK, great, so how do we focus more on the “now what”? Let’s see a possible approach:

How to focus more on “Now What”?

Here is my 5-step framework to achieve more of the “Now, What” when it comes to reading books:

First, consider the opportunity costs

Reading & applying learnings from a book is an opportunity to transform yourself from X to Y. Instead of reading 25 books a year, I would rather read and apply the learnings from 6 great books.

So, pick a few themes on what you want to get better at, and choose one great classic book in that area — e.g., if you want to improve your decision making abilities, you could pick “Decisive”.

But how do you pick the best books? One thing you can do here to sample books is to start with the video summary on YouTube or the Blinkist summary. That way, you will get the benefits of seeing:

Is this book for me?
Do I need the transformation promised by the book?
Do the ideas resonate with me?
If so, you can start applying them immediately without waiting for a month (to read the full book).

Second, once you have selected a book using the above process, ensure that you read and absorb the content slowly

If it passes the above criteria, use either an Audible book (works great during commute) or a regular/e-book. After absorbing the content, make sure to allow time to reflect on it (e.g., during your walks). Follow “Active Recall” to note down the key takeaways.

Third, download the resources from the book

Books usually come with downloadable resources and workbooks (Decisive resources) — these usually give you a concise summary of the key takeaways. Leverage them! They help you reinforce your learnings.

Fourth, apply them to your top problems

Now, you are in a position to evaluate which frameworks / learnings you can apply to your active problems in work/life. Apply them.

Fifth, freely share your learnings

If you stopped with applying your learnings, it will be a mistake. Share the learnings freely with others. Write about them. Teach them to others. All these help in solidifying your understanding of the learnings, retaining those learnings, and making them a habit for future such situations. In addition, you have also helped the people around you to benefit from your learnings. As part of those conversations, you will likely get to see a reinforcing feedback loop: book recommendations from others that you can apply to your step 1 above…

To close the loop here, I am happy to share that I have now applied the above five steps of my framework for the Decisive book: re-reading it, using the resources from the book, applying it for a couple of work and personal decisions, and then sharing the learnings with a few others.

Now, What?

Thanks for reading! Hope you found it useful.

I would like to learn more about your methodology for how you apply learnings from a book — please let me know in the comments!

In addition, I want to leave you with a thought.

Now what?

If at all you found the above post useful in some form, now what? How are you going to apply it in your own life?

P.S.: Update on my writing course

I recently launched this writing course on Maven:

Getting Better at Writing — For Software Engineering & Product Leaders by J. Kalyana Sundaram on Maven

I will be sharing more such stories in the course. Since I launched it last weekend, I have had four enrollments so far:

A product management leader
An engineering director
An engineering manager
A Principal Software Engineer / Architect.

I have 5 spots left (as of the time of this publishing) — if you think (or want to know if) this will be a good fit for you, please feel free to enroll directly or to reach out to me!