Reading 50+ books per year is a bad goal. Instead, focus on applying the insights and acting on them.

One way to move faster from consumption to implementation is by writing concise and actionable book summaries.

Here's Tiago Fortes advice on exactly how to do that:

1. Highlight key passages in the Kindle book

If you use, Readwise.io, your highlights will sync directly to your note-taking appplication. For example Obsidian, Reflect or Evernote.

2. Go through "progressive summarization"

Open your highlights in your notes app and go through them. Bold the most insightful bits while looking for the book's main message and key points. Refine your highlights.

3. Write an outline of main ideas

Open a new text file and write an outline based on your bolded bits. List out the main ideas and supporting points from your bolded highlights. Distill them into an outline of just the essential ideas and golden nuggets.

4. Paste and run the outline in Chat GPT using this prompt to summarize it

Here's Tiago's simple prompt:

Incorporate the following excerpts from the book [NAME OF THE BOOK], which I've selected based on their relevance and importance, into a summary of the book that also draws on external sources on the web. Please use as many details from the excerpts I've provided as possible: [PASTE YOUR OWN OUTLINE/HIGHLIGHTS]".

Tiago recommends using an AI with internet access (like ChatGPT, WriteSonic or Perplexity) for this step. Because that allows extra information from web searches to be included in the output.

Step 5. Go through and edit to your heart's content

You can go though it and ask ChatGPT to make changes if you want. Then manually rewrite the last 5-10% of the book summary, to really make it your own.

This 4-step process uses your key ideas and AI writing to efficiently create focused, polished summaries. Saves hours of manual writing time.