Using the app Headway

15 minute summaries of non-fiction books

I am personally much more inclined to read a fiction book than non-fiction. In my (probably incorrect) opinion, most non-fiction books can probably be summarised into a 2 page infodoc to get the gist. I think that with non-fiction information, a lot of the pages and paragraphs are mostly attributed to studies and I think that if you assume they are indeed doing their research before getting published then it’s presumably safe to skip to their conclusions, no need to convince me twice. So far I have re-read the books 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (still a star), I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi (useful) and the 4 Hour Body (I’m not sure I buy the message, but I did learn some new exercises).

I think Headway does a good job of having a large list of books that are trendy and popular in the Bestsellers lists so there’s always a title you’d be interested in or have heard of. It is also much better than mindless scrolling so if I could choose between scrolling through videos or listening to Headway, it would obviously be preferable to listen to Headway summaries. I am not convinced they are quite replaceable, however. When I scroll through social media, it’s usually when my brain has been saturated with information and I am trying to numb it (not a good thing, I would be better meditating I’m sure) and listening to Headway could be a more productive use of my time and probably much healthier but in practice, I find myself rewinding the audio multiple times so the 15 minute summary is usually 30 minutes long as my mind wanders. If a book is particularly interesting, I do find myself reading the summary instead which is still better than scrolling through social media in my opinion.

Another criticism I have of the app is whether I am truly absorbing the ideas of a book from just a 15 minute summary. I am contradicting myself by stating above that a non-fiction doesn’t need to be a long book but I think the value of a book being long is not the many studies and proofs provided but rather, reading a book with 400 pages vs it’s short summary is that the long form has persuasive writing and reading it over a longer period of time and getting deeper into the ideas would result into buying into it. To put it simply, the 15 minute summary, no matter how efficient, is not effective in convincing my to change anything, which is a shame since most of the books are non-fiction self help books.

I type this while listening to Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The summary is accurate, I’m sure, but not very impactful and diminishes the message of the book. I’m curious to get insight from others which books are better in summary form vs which are just better read in long form. This is better than nothing or mindless scrolling at least.