I just can't believe, by the way, that I'm sitting here watching an artificial intelligence write what would have taken me many, many hours of focused writing to do. Look at it. We live in the future, folks.
If you're new here, hi! My name is Tiago Forte and I'm the author of Building a Second Brain, which is all about how to maximize the value you get from all the content and information you consume every day. In this video, I'll share what I've learned about how to effectively use ChatGPT to summarize books. Then, I'll take you step-by-step through a real example of creating a book summary so you can do it yourself. I used to read 50 books a year, speeding through them like my life depended on it, until one day I realized none of this is sticking.
I'm reading thousands of words every month, but it's just passing in one ear and out the other. I don't know about you, but I want my reading to actually make a difference in my life. So a few years ago, I decided to start reading far fewer books and to summarize them in my own words, so that knowledge really sunk in. These summaries are like building blocks that I've been able to incorporate into my work or share with others to their benefit.
Instead of this vague feeling that I'm forgetting everything I learn, I can see this tangible collection of book summaries as proof of what I've learned. Writing book summaries is extremely time-consuming. It's hard enough to find the time to read a book in the first place, but to then set aside additional hours to summarize it? especially when I became a parent a few years ago.
I suddenly had zero time for that. When ChatGPT came out, I realized this could be a way to create my book summaries in a fraction of the time. The question is, can we get high quality book summaries from ChatGPT? At first, I tried simply asking ChatGPT to write a summary on its own.
But even after trying this multiple times in multiple ways, I found that these summaries are just not good. They're too brief, superficial, cliche. They fail to capture the most unusual, insightful, important ideas from the book. The problem I discovered is that ChatGPT doesn't have direct access to the text of the book itself. It's relying on summaries already written by others, and a summary of a summary is never good.
Luckily, I do have access to the full text, specifically I highlight ebooks as I read and using a service called Readwise, which you can find out more about in this video, I have all my highlights from over 200 books automatically saved right here in my notes app. I found that if I feed my highlights, which include all the points I found most surprising, resonant, thought-provoking, into ChatGPT it produces a far better summary. Step one, read the ebook and export just the highlights to your digital note-taking app. I decided to read the book Where Good Ideas Come From by Stephen Johnson in the Kindle app on my iPad.
As I read, I highlighted the best passages, all of which were automatically saved to my digital notes using Readwise. Step two, go through those highlights and bold the most important, interesting, resonant points. Here's the issue.
Most of the time, the highlights I save from a book are f***ed. far too extensive. As you can see here, this amounts to 8,000 words from just this one book alone, which is about double what ChatGPT allows. So I usually find that I need to do a first pass, selecting only the most important parts. The way I do that first pass is using my progressive summarization technique.
Keep in mind that what you see here in the note is only the highlights that I've already imported from Kindle. So everything that I'm looking at, I've already imported. pre-decided is valuable.
I'm really looking here for the best of the best. The points that I can almost directly see how I'm going to incorporate them into my summary or into other projects that I have. So let's start here at the top. The argument of this book is that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments. That's fantastic.
So anytime the author tells you the main argument of this book or the main message of this book, that is worth a bold. because they've sort of done the work for you of figuring out what the book is about. Ideas are works of bricolage. They're built out of that detritus. We take the ideas we've inherited or that we've stumbled across and we jigger them together into some new shape.
That's a great sentence. He's sort of setting up this argument, I think, that innovation doesn't come all at once. In this brilliant moment of eureka insight, it comes from the slow development and the mixing and matching and recombination of different ideas, which is an idea that I highly resonate with.
I'm going to continue now and bold the rest of the passages in the document that I found interesting and resonant. So what I've done here, in other words, is distill. I've distilled down even the highlights that I had already selected from the book down into just the most important passages from those paragraphs.
Step three, turn the best of those points into an outline format. I found that creating an outline with the major ideas and supporting points beneath them tells ChatGPT which ideas to emphasize, which ones are most important, and which ones are merely supportive. So here's how I'm going to do this. I'll double click the note here, and then I'll change the size of the window to only cover the left half of the screen. Then I will do Command N to create a new note and move that to the right side of the screen.
This is my typical environment that I set up when I am translating one kind of information from the left to a different format on the right. Then I'll create a title, which is simply Outline. for where good ideas come from book summary, hit enter, do shift command U to create a bullet point.
And from this point forward, I'm just going to really copy and paste each of the bolded passages. I don't have to do all of them by any means. In fact, I shouldn't do all of them. I should once again, almost do another stage of deciding, is this truly, truly so good, so valuable that it must be part of my summary. So I'm going to do Command C and copy that.
This seems like quite a good point to lead my summary with kind of the main argument of the book. This is clearly a supporting point for that one. So often it's almost like you are reverse engineering. You are extracting the structure that is already part of the book that the author put there on purpose, but you're extracting it from something that is kind of hidden and not very visible. into something that is highly visible here on the right.
I'm gonna continue on my own now, adding the rest of these bolded points to my outline. And step four, dump that outline into ChatGPT, use a prompt like the one I showed you, and you should be good to go. I'm going to go ahead and click on the note and do select all.
and then command c for copy then i'm going to head over to chat gpt then click on the prompt window and i'm going to use the following prompt that i've developed which is So you don't want it to only use what you're providing. You want it to add or incorporate what you're giving it into other material that it finds on the web, right? I didn't highlight every single good idea in the entire book.
I really highlighted the one that were most important or interesting to me personally. I will add another sentence here, which is. And the reason I do this is, good writing is really all about details.
If you think about it, what makes a piece of writing really compelling? It's not that that uses these poetic turns of phrase, it's does it have interesting, unique, unusual details? So I'll just add a colon, a couple spaces, paste in that entire outline. And then hit return.
I just can't believe, by the way, that I'm sitting here watching an artificial intelligence write what would have taken me many, many hours of focused writing to do. Look at it. This is fantastic. We live in the future, folks.
And there we go. That was by far the fastest step, which took about 30 seconds. Notice that this summary is far superior to the one that we got when we simply asked ChatGPT to write a summary based on its own knowledge.
It's far longer. It's far more detailed. It's more specific. It has way more supporting points, supporting examples.
It's just a better summary on any... dimension that matters. I saved at least 70 or 80 percent of the time it previously took me to summarize books.
If you read, especially if you read books, especially if you read books that have some kind of practical takeaway that you want to apply in your own life or your own work, I really encourage you to give this a try. It's never been easier or more efficient or more accessible to combine the incredible content that we now have access to via the internet and books with the incredible capabilities of artificial intelligence to create something that in the past would have taken 10 times as long. I encourage you to give it a try and to share your ideas and your experiments and the results of those experiments with us in the comments.
Thanks for watching!