Not all readers are leaders. But all leaders are readers. They have to be. Not to impress other people, but for themselves, to get better, to use acquired knowledge, to improve lives.
How productive reading should look like? This should be a process, that leads to practice. Acquired information should be processed, analyzed, applied. Without application, the information is not only useless, but also harmful, as it burdens our brain.
As my Silence Experiment has proven - the thinking process is much clearer when it is opposed by reasonable amount of useful information. The brain is more focused when the path is cleaner. When there are as less distractions as possible.
My notetaking system, called Arkane, is maintained for 3 years now. I’ve started very unproductive - my notes were full of copy-pasted information, low-digested. There are a lot of notes i’ve never comeback to, preferring googling it again. If a piece of information can be retrieved from an external source, there is no place for it in notetaking system.
Writing should take much lesser part than reading. We take into information that we consider useful, we don’t copy-paste it, we process, we digest. By this process, we accumulate personal thoughts - this is gold, that needs to be written. It’s not a big volume, compared to the amount of our reading.
We sift out the incoming information, and add our experience and reflections to it. This converts information to knowledge. To be a part of your world understanding.