 Let's say you just read an amazing book on dating. You know what the worst part is? The worst part is you just read 300 pages, which might have been a tough goal for you, but now you don't remember literally anything. So how do you take knowledge? Like you're reading a book because you want to not be single anymore. You want to find love. How do you take that knowledge into habits and rituals and information that can then be applied and most of all that you remember? In this video, I want to share a three-part system that I've used for years as someone who reads one or two books a week and then wants to apply that into living and improving my life. Hey guys, it's Alexine here, little side note. I put together a free journaling worksheet, which is one of the best ways that I've found to figure out what you want in your life and then make a plan to actually make that happen. So this journaling worksheet is very similar to the method I'm going to talk about today, which is that you take a little bit of the vision of what you want. In this case, it might be a book and then you break it down into certain key pillars and each pillar, you turn into an action step. So you can check it out. It's the first link below this video. So the first thing that I want to talk about here is the dot method. So the dot method is a really simple and unsexy way of harvesting all the key points you're picking up when you're either reading a book for personal gain or you're going through a textbook or something that you actually want to learn that's technical. So say for example, right now I'm reading the biography of Benjamin Franklin. Now it's a tomb, you know, it is a absolute massive tomb. Most of that is just random biographical details about his life that aren't particularly very interesting. But I want to read the book and I want to read the whole book and I want to learn whatever I take away that I find useful. So as I'm reading his biography, he and I go through one chapter and oh, this is an interesting anecdote of he began using the Socratic method because he found himself being a very argumentative kid. So what I do with my pencil or pen, I put a little black dot next to the paragraph so that me, this book nerd, I'm not ruining the book and I'm not ruining the aesthetic. So as I finish that book at the end, all I have to do is very briefly flip through that book and look for those little black dots and those dots are showing me the key takeaways that I want to put into phase two of this learning system. Now phase two is what I call the pillar or one page summary method. Now within the one page summary method, what I do for every single book I read, every single one is I pull up a little folder in Evernote, a little file and basically what I do is I type key point and elaboration. Now key point on the left is let's say for example, if you read a book on personal finance, they say if you want to be wealthy, then leave on let's say 50% of your income or they say you need to save 15% of your income long-term and invest it in these ways. So that is the key point and the elaboration may be, well, okay, here's what you do with that 15% you save. You put 10% in long-term savings, you don't touch it. You put another 5% to 10% in long-term investments like stocks or bonds or whatever. And then if you have more, you put that towards your student debt and whatever. So the key point is I want to be able to just scan and be like, oh yeah, that book talked about this concept. And then if I want to get more details, I put a little paragraph explaining exactly what that is on the right side and part of that is because it really sells me on the concept a little more. Benjamin Franklin argues with the Socratic method where he just asks people questions instead of chopping off and biting their head off. Why? The elaboration then says this famous story about him dealing with a man named Cotton Mather and why this story affected him so deeply and why he should really be better and more skilled at arguments. That's what makes it memorable. Now the third phase of this is that I have an Evernote Playbook for each of my goals or each of my strategic things I'm working on, right? So let's say for example, one of my main hobbies right now is bachata dancing, like Latin dance. The reason why this video applies to bachata dancing is that think about how hard it is for a new lead, the guy leading the dance. You have to think, okay, one, two, three, five, six, seven, one, two, three, five, six, seven as the bachata music is playing and you need to be holding a woman's hands thinking, okay, I need to turn her now and then I need to turn me now and then I need to move my hips now and then I need to do this body motion now. It's an incredible amount of memorization. So how do you actually turn this? How do we use the system for remembering what I've learned in a bachata class? What I do is I create a giant document in Evernote and within Evernote I put down these were the last patterns I learned in my bachata class and these were the last skills that I was trying to work on. I'm trying to work on timing. I'm trying to work on a certain kind of turn. I'm trying to work on a certain kind of body movement and I use the Evernote Playbook to track long-term and sequential goals. In other words, the more I can remind myself what are the basics? Do these three things every single dance or every single song and then these three things are the things you have to work on. Those help me create an ironclad system that helps my memory remember, what am I good at? What do I have to work on? And these are the exact videos or links linking to my class lessons for what I have to work on. So when it's material that's written, I use the dot method. I put it into an Evernote file with a key point and the elaboration and then if it's a longer term goal that requires long-term learning like building a business, being good on YouTube, et cetera. What I tend to focus on primarily is a sequential way of keeping it all in one file and for me that is Evernote. So that journaling worksheet I've included here the companion worksheet will help you figure out how to implement a lot of this in your life, whether it's from the macro 10,000 foot view of your life, like how to improve your life, how to work on yourself, how to figure out what you even want and then how to make that happen that can help you there. And also you can utilize these three methods here in this video. All right guys, so check out the journaling link and the other related videos right there.