Why you forget what you read

I analysed 51 books while building this app. If someone asks me what was in book 30, I have to look it up. That is uncomfortable, but it is normal, and it is not your fault.

On Google, people type exactly this: «why do i always forget what i read», «i read books and forget things», «how to remember what you read in self help books», «is it normal to forget books i've read». The answer to the last one is yes. The more interesting question is why.

The actual reason

Reading feels like learning, but it is mostly recognising. While you read you understand every sentence, and that understanding feels like owning. You own nothing, though. You recognised a thought that somebody else phrased well.

The difference only shows once you close the book and somebody asks: «So, what are you doing differently now?» With novels that does not matter, the point is the time spent reading. With non-fiction it is the entire business. A non-fiction book that does not touch your behaviour was entertainment with footnotes.

And there is a second reason: a non-fiction book typically holds three to five load-bearing ideas spread over two hundred pages. You read two hundred pages and remember nothing in particular for two hundred pages, because nothing stands out. What is left at the end is a feeling instead of a sentence.

What does not help

Highlighting. It feels like work, but it is the cheapest possible way of handling a thought. You are postponing the decision about what matters to a later self who never looks again.
Reading summaries. They solve a different problem, namely time. They barely help you keep anything, because they are even less graspable than the book. The core of the problem is not that you read too much, it is that you did nothing with it.
Starting another book. That is the most common reaction and the one that makes everything worse. The pile grows, and so does the feeling of being behind.

Four things that actually change something

1. One idea per book, in your own words. Not three, not ten. One. And written down in your words, not copied out. The moment you notice you cannot phrase it is the moment you notice you had not understood it.

2. Turn the idea into an action, the same day. «Set priorities» is not an action. «Tonight, write down the three tasks for tomorrow and cross everything else off the list» is one. A method you have carried out once behaves differently in your head than one you have only read.

3. Be asked about it again later. Not looking it up, but having to remember. Retrieving something from memory is the step that fixes it, and it is exactly the step that highlighting and summarising skip. Sensible gaps are after a day, a week, a month.

4. Fewer at the same time. One book, three weeks, one method a day beats five books in parallel. Not because it is more diligent, but because the brain needs repetition pointing the same way.

Why I built an app out of this

Because those four points are easy to understand and hard to keep up. Everyone knows that applying helps. Almost nobody does it, because every evening there is a decision waiting about what exactly to apply today, and that decision is the real hurdle.

Go & Grow takes it off you. This is how it is built:

17 skills, each 21 days. One area at a time, with a beginning and an end.
Three books per skill, 51 in total. Every daily quest names the book its method comes from.
One quest a day: a short story, then two short steps. So not «read this», but «do this, today».
The memory training on the home screen asks you back after a day, a week, a month and three months: «What was your core idea?» That is point 3 above, built in.
A journal with export, so your own sentences do not stay locked inside the app.

The difference to a summary app fits in one sentence: there it ends at the knowledge, here it starts at the action.

What I do not claim

I am not promising you a better memory. I cannot measure what you keep, and any number about it would be invented. What the app does is checkable: it gives you a task from a named book every day and asks you about it later. Whether you do it is up to you.

And three weeks do not build a new life. They give you a handful of methods you have actually applied once. That is more than a read book usually leaves behind, and less than what is printed on most book jackets.

Written by Eluan Zäch, Balgach, Switzerland.