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Possibly a controversial opinion but my belief is that you can effectively measure the usefulness of a non-fiction work (text book, academic paper, article, tutorial, etc) by asking if you learnt anything from it. One. Simple. Thing. Is. Enough. Freedom from the pressure to fully understand everything from a book (or even from a single chapter) has allowed me to learn a lot more in recent years, and in a far more enjoyable manner. So for me, I read the book quickly or academic paper almost as if it is a fiction. Generally not going back or pausing. Sometimes even faster. (I have found this gives me a better overview of the entire content, comapred to meticulously starting slowly at the first chapter and eventually getting stuck.)
I do this until, a particular section stands out and really piques my interest. This is typically either because:
(i) it is coincidentally relevant to something I have been recently working on, or
(ii) the author's description of a topic is written in just the right way that things 'just click' and I have a newer or deeper understanding of the topic.
Often these scenarios give me the intrinsic motivation to spend a longer time on that topic. In this way, I often read the same book/paper many times over, during a period of a few months, and each time I learn something new. In some ways, this strategy is similar to what some people call the wedge approach which is a balance between the debate of being a studying wide or deep. That is, study a lot of things broadly, several things moderately, and a few things very deeply. The corollary to this idea comes from my teaching experience. Teachers know that the best learning comes when the difficulty is just at the edge of a student's ability. Not too easy. Not too hard. This is the power of incremental learning. So it makes sense you only have to find one thing in the text book that is just at the edge of what you already know, and learn about that. So often when I need to do something for work, I apply this +1 technique. I learn what I need to do for my project and then just 'one bit more'. All those 'one bit more' explorations add up to quite a lot over time. Hope that helps. ;) |