How can I get a book full of good ideas to change my behavior?

Answer: Try these ideas:

Step 1. When you’ve finished reading the book,  skim through it again, searching for up to 20  key ideas you’d like to incorporate  into your life.

For example, here are the 20 key ideas from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that I’d like to incorporate into my life:

  1. Be proactive
  2. Begin with the end in mind
  3. Put first things first
  4. Think win/win
  5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood
  6. Synergize
  7. Spend one hour/day sharpening the saw
  8. Watch the P/PC balance
  9. Make deposits into emotional bank account
  10. Focus on my circle of influence
  11. Use the  space between stimulus and response
  12. Develop a strong inner core of guiding principles
  13. Love is a doing word
  14. Trigger upward spirals
  15. Explore interdependence
  16. Keep promise to self and others
  17. Write and follow personal mission statement
  18. Do Quadrant 2 (important but not urgent) things
  19. Adopt abundance mentality
  20. Value the differences

(Note: Because I read the book carefully, these seemingly vague abstractions are rich in meaning for me now. Therefore, I only need to use a few words  to remind myself of these content-rich ideas.)

Step 2. Now memorize your list.

Once you’ve finished reading a book, you’ll probably not look at it again for a long, long time, if at all.  If these 20 key ideas are going to have any chance of changing your behavior, you’re going to have to plant them safely into your long-term memory.  If you can’t remember what they are, they can’t change your life!

What is the best way to memorize these 20 key ideas? Rote-learn them! Test yourself each day, maybe even test yourself several times a day to start with. It only takes a couple of minutes to whizz through 20 items in your mind.

Identify the items you usually forget and spend extra time learning these. Use whatever rote-learning methods work  for you.  I find the  peg method works brilliantly for me  in this instance. This is how I do it:

  1. For each letter of the alphabet, I think of a person I know well whose name begins with that letter.  For instance:
    A = Alice
    B = Bruce
    C = Christian
    D = Dad
    E = Eleanor, etc
  2. Each of my 20 key ideas gets paired to the  person corresponding to the idea’s number ranking (e.g. idea 1 gets A=Alice).   I form a rich mental picture in my mind that somehow combines each idea to its person.

    For instance, the idea “Be proactive” gets paired with Alice.  I form a rich mental picture of my daughter Alice being very proactive in lots of ways. (This one’s easy as Alice is naturally proactive.)

    Similarly, the next idea “Begin with end in mind” gets Bruce, my Father-in-Law. Bruce is prone to being pessimistic so I imagine him coming up with  gloomy, bad endings to everything.The idea “First things first” gets paired  with Christian.

    Christian travels a lot so would be often packing his suitcase; I imagine him putting the  most important things in his case first… and so on.

    To recall my 20 key ideas, I simply recall each person and wait to see what image flashes into my mind.  If all goes well,  I will see Alice being amazingly proactive and Bruce imagining bad endings and Christian putting important things into his suitcase first. And then it’s an easy step from that recalled image to the actual key idea  represented by that image.

    This peg technique is fun, easy to do  and almost miraculous is its effectiveness. It’s so much easier than trying to drag 20 unrelated items out of my memory randomly. I’ve tried that enough times, and it hurts!

Step 3. There are lots more steps to getting good ideas in a book to change our lives forever. I’ll talk about those ideas  soon.