I’ve always loved reading book summaries.
Even if the summary of a book emphasized things that were different from what I thought was important when I read it, I still love seeing someone else’s perspective.
So I’m always thankful of the virtuous people that freely share their book summaries online – and one of the best that I’ve found at it is Blas Moros, who publishes on his site blas.com. I could never read as many books as Blas has. Just as impressive, he seems to always capture the "most important" and wisdom-packed parts of a book; put succinctly - he don't miss much.
Five years ago, I had a lot of free time and wanted to learn as much as I could, so I decided to create a system that would help me digest this mountain of highlighted information. On 2/14/19:
I went through all the books that Blas had reviewed up until that point
Downloaded PDFs of each of their highlights separately
Merged 125 PDFs together into a single, mega-highlight PDF
It can be found here: Link
- Can be found here: Link
- It's from 5/31/19
- I’m sure there is some Blas-induced bias in the original highlights, just like I'm sure that there’s Cory-bias in my Hi^2
- The hashtags here is me trying to organize the highlights of highlights better into topics
I would normally stop there since that's more enough to organize and ultimately understand; yet in this case, I still had over 100 pages of information! So I decided to dive a little deeper:
Made a Hi^3 version (highlights of highlights of highlights) which groups them by book then by tagged topic
Can be found here: Link
It's from 6/4/19 and is 81 pages long
The tags here are more specific and tried to be more accurate within each book for each Hi^3 (but still has some errors obviously)
Made a Hi^4 version (you get the picture) which groups the highlights by tagged topic across books
Can be found here: Link
It's from 6/5/19 and is 79 pages long
The network graph at the top is what I used to decide the story, as these meta topics ended up being the “most important” (central) when graphed, as evidenced by their bubble size and text size
For the graph, the nodes are topics and the connections are highlights of the same topic within the same book (Node A (highlight topic A) and Node B (highlight topic B) are connected by connection C (are in the same book C) - not a perfect reason but a way to connect topics (nodes) across books (connections)
You can kind of see the shape of the story in the How 3 (EQ, character, and leadership) - What 2 (learning and lifehacks) - How 1 (simplicity) - Why 1 (love)
Influenced by Simon Sinek’s “Why-How-What” framework, I made a variation that starts and ends with why – why 5, how 3, what 2, how 1, why 1
1, 1, 2, 3, 5... Fibonacci-hive assemble!
Finally I made a Hi^5 version but IMO it was a step too far and I should’ve just stopped at the highlights grouped by tagged topic (the Hi^3 version)
Not sharing it, as there was nothing really new
It's from 12/2/20 and is 85 pages long
Gets too lost in the thick of things
…and that's mostly where the research stopped.
In the end, I didn’t do much with all that glorious highlighted information. Yeah I revisited the Hi^4 version a couple of times and shared it with Blas (he thought it was cool), but I didn't do much else with it. I do love the network graph of the topics and have looked at it a bunch of random times – I find it beautiful.
Recently, I asked Blas if he minded if I shared the project with others, provided he is fine with it. At the very least, I feel like I learned a ton from the research project and hope others can as well.
Have fun getting lost in The Rabbit Hole.