Fractal Reading 2.0: This GPT Helps You Skim Read Dozens Of Rare & Valuable Books In Less Than An Hour
Post Summary
Today’s information age holds incredible promise and peril:
Promise: We can access more, high-quality information for free and instantly.
Peril: Finding those high-quality nuggets is like finding a needle in a casino.
Here’s how I think about the situation…
Right now, somewhere out in the world is a paragraph, chapter, or book that would change your life forever if you read it. I call this kind of information “breakthrough knowledge,” and mastering the ability to find breakthrough knowledge in our era of information overload is one of the most important skills we can develop.
We’ve all had breakthrough experiences. A phrase that a parent, mentor, or teacher said that stuck with us and changed everything. A “quake” book that shook us to our core.
Breakthrough knowledge is rare, but one great nugget is worth a thousand merely good ones. A breakthrough knowledge experience might only last a few minutes, but its effect can last a lifetime. It is the ultimate form of learning leverage.
Now, imagine having a breakthrough knowledge experience once a year rather than once a decade. Or perhaps twice a month rather than once a year. It would change everything, and it’s possible.
Given the power of breakthrough knowledge and the difficulty of finding it, one of the most fundamental questions we all need to ask ourselves is:
How do we use the limited time we have to find breakthrough knowledge in a sea of distraction?
This question is particularly important because 99% of learners just focus on understanding what is in front of them. There is very little content on how to actually find the highest quality information.
This question is particularly timely, because the amount of knowledge in the world is about to explode while our attention span remains the same:
What You Receive Today
Free readers receive the full article:
How I find breakthrough knowledge
Two interview clips from super learners with tactics on how to find knowledge needles in the haystack of the internet.
Access to a GPT that can help you find breakthrough knowledge on the web
Paid readers also receive:
Recording of last Thursday’s 75-minute live session ($150 value)
Fractal Reader GPT prompt you can customize and use forever ($500 value)
Interview Finder prompt you can customize and use forever($500 value)
The Article
Imagine a bustling factory that is the beating heart of a local community.
One day, the critical machine skips a beat and suddenly stops.
Why?
Nobody knew.
In-house engineers came. They poked and swore. But the machine stayed dead. The production line choked. Money burned.
Within days, the machine became a monument to frustration and escalating costs.
The plant manager became a desperate man.
Out of options, he called in a consultant whose reputation preceded him. An old guy, gray, quiet. He wasn't flashy. Didn’t need to be. His expertise was his currency.
With a calm demeanor, he surveyed the machine. Walked a circle, slow. Didn't touch a thing. Just thought.
Made an 'X' on a seemingly random casing. Simple as that.
"Change that part," he said. Voice flat.
Guys on the floor just stared at each other. One blinked in Morse code "WTF??" Then, they looked at the plant manager. His eyes also looked skeptical, but that didn’t stop his mouth from barking, “OK. What are you guys doing? Do what he says.”
So they switched out the part and hit the power button. Much to everyone's amazement and relief., they were met with the whirr of the machine starting.
The line started to move slowly, and then it began to hum. The money faucet was un-clogged.
A week later, the invoice arrived, demanding a million dollars for the service. The manager choked when he saw the extra 0’s. So he demanded a full breakdown.
The consultant wrote back a short note:
"One dollar for the chalk. The rest for knowing."
The Deep Lesson
This story is likely a made-up parable written for a self-help book for managers.
But it keeps on being retold because it teaches two timeless and universal lessons:
Problem identification is just as important as problem-solving. It’s a commentary on value—how society often misjudges it, focusing on complicated solutions rather than deeply understanding problems.
Knowledge is power. The real value lies not in the mechanical act of fixing the machine but in the years of accumulated knowledge, the countless hours of study, observation, and experience that informed a single, decisive action.
Understanding this parable is essential to understanding how to read better in the age of AI…
The Parable Teaches An Essential Lesson About Book Reading
Similar to how we can break down challenges into problems and solutions, we can break down the challenge of reading into exploration and exploitation (explore/exploit as it’s known):
Exploration is about surveying the knowledge landscape to find the most valuable information to learn.
Exploitation is slowly consuming that .00001% of high-value information in order to understand and use the concepts.
And just like one part can fix a factory after the root cause is identified, one small bit of information can change your life after you’ve done a full exploration of the information landscape.
The conventional approach to reading has been brute force, word-by-word, front-to-back. Not wanting to miss anything. Judging progress in pages read. This approach favors understanding what’s in front of you above finding what’s worth understanding in the first place.
The high-leverage “consultant” approach is focused on results. It’s about leverage, not brute force. Therefore, it starts by taking lots of time upfront to understand what’s worth reading (exploration). Then, it ends by deeply and slowly reading that material in order to understand (exploitation).
IMHO, the best overview of this explore/exploit approach with regards to reading comes from philosopher Mortimer Adler’s classic How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, which was originally published in 1940 and is still popular.
In an interview, Adler perfectly captures the nuance between exploration and exploitation when it comes to reading:
The metaphor I use for understanding the balance between explore and exploit with regards to learning is an eagle catching its prey.
First, it surveys the landscape by soaring high in the air so it can see miles in every direction.
Second, it looks for signals in the noise with its superpowered eyesight. The video below shows how an eagle’s eyesight is so good it can immediately see a human waving his arm within a large landscape from 2.5 km (1.6 mi) away. To put this in context, this is like instantly noticing a single grain of sand change color on a vast beach from the top of a towering lighthouse.
Source: BBC Earth
Finally, when it sees its prey, it grabs it.
Source: BBC Nature's Great Events - The Great Salmon Run
These three stages are helpful as metaphors for shaping our reading process into three stages…
Title Skimming
Fractal Reading
Deep Reading
Stage #1: Title Skimming
When first viewing a new information landscape, we should get as high as possible to see as far as possible. As it relates to reading, this means skimming thousands of book titles.
I first learned about title skimming from my friend and super learner Emerson Spartz. Emerson has been full-time reading and learning for the last 10 years after exiting from his venture-backed company in his late 20s. Emerson takes surveying the landscape to the next level and has skimmed the titles and descriptions of tens of thousands of books to get a broader understanding of the fields he wants to learn.
Below is the relevant part of the clip from an interview I did with him:
Stage #2: Fractal Reading
In 2015, I remember seeing an explosion of three types of free, multimedia book derivatives:
Book summaries (text and video)
Interviews (available on podcast players)
Speeches (available on YouTube)
As I started using these more often, I found something surprising that shifted how I view reading. For almost any book, I could find multiple, free book derivatives that gave me the best ideas and the best stories from the book in minutes rather than hours. In other words, consuming these book derivatives was extremely value-dense. I was getting more value per each minute of learning than slowly reading one book front to back.
This realization led me to refine my learning methodology and eventually name my process Fractal Reading. Here’s a quick overview of it:
In short, Fractal Reading is a modern reading method that supercharges how fast and deeply you read while enhancing your enjoyment. It involves three steps:
First, engage with a book's free metadata—such as summaries, reviews, author interviews, and presentations.
Then, skim the key parts of the book—such as the first chapter and last chapter and then the first and last paragraph of each chapter.
Finally, slowly deep dive into the most relevant, high-value parts of the book while taking notes—The best approach I’m aware of for maximizing what you remember and understand is teaching what you learn to yourself and others (Explanation Effect).
This approach is likened to fractals, which maintain self-similarity at various scales, mirroring how book metadata reflects the book's core ideas in a condensed form.
Fractal Reading is contrasted with simply reading a book front-to-back as if every section were equally valuable and relevant to you.
Stage #3: Deep Reading
Deep reading is where we read and take notes slowly and deliberately in order to maximize our understanding.
The video below gives a deeper overview of philosopher Mortimer Adler’s approach and breaks down the last two of his four levels of reading: 1) Elementary Reading, (2) Inspectional Reading, (3) Analytical Reading, and (4) Syntopical Reading.
Author Note: The video above was created by:
Merging together two excerpts from Adler’s book.
Using ElevenLabs to generate the audio of Adler's voice.
Editing it together using the approach I share in Tutorial: How To Turn Any Text Quote Into An Awesome Video In 15 Minutes.
Below is the text of the video:
The third level of reading we will call Analytical Reading. It is both a more complex and a more systematic activity than either of the two levels of reading discussed so far. It is the heart of reading for understanding—the best and most complete reading that is possible given unlimited time. This level of reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding. The analytical reader reads not just to absorb or take in, but to evaluate and comprehend fully. The steps in analytical reading are essentially rules for critical thinking, guiding the reader through detailed questions concerning a book's purpose, structure, and arguments. Analytical reading is characterized by its active engagement with the material, requiring the reader to identify the book's key questions, propositions, and arguments, to evaluate the evidence presented, and to reason through the author's conclusions critically. This process demands not only understanding what an author says but also why, how, and under what principles the argument unfolds. Analytical reading transforms passive absorption of information into an active dialogue between reader and text, fostering a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the material.
The fourth and highest level of reading we will call Syntopical Reading. It is the most complex and systematic type of reading of all. It makes very heavy demands on the reader. Syntopical Reading involves reading multiple books on the same subject and comparing and contrasting their arguments, assumptions, and conclusions. The aim is to understand the subject from various perspectives, not just the viewpoint of a single author. This requires the reader to be actively engaged, identifying and organizing relevant passages from different texts, defining a common terminology even if the authors use different terms, and framing questions that can be answered by the texts. The reader then analyzes the answers to these questions to identify and understand the major and minor issues within the subject area. This process not only deepens the reader's understanding of the subject but also develops critical thinking and analytical skills by comparing different arguments and interpretations.
—Mortimer Adler
Now that we have a deeper understanding of how to break down the learning process, the question becomes, how do we use AI to supercharge this whole process?
In previous posts, I have shared my GPTs for:
Extracting key concepts (e.g., FeynmanGPT)
Synthesizing insights from text (e.g., Become An Experimental Innovator GPT)
Turning nonfiction lessons into educational stories (e.g., EdStory GPT)
In this post, I share two GPTs that help you title skim and fractal read…
Introducing Fractal Reader GPT
In my most recent GPT, I make it possible to supercharge how you Fractal Read.
Here’s how it works. You first answer two questions:
Field of book you want to explore (e.g., creativity)
# of books you’ve read on the topic (helps ChatGPT understand your expertise)
From there, you can do one of two things:
Title Skim: Be recommended 25 books at a time that you can skim through. Keep skimming through more titles by saying ‘More.’ Within minutes, you can see hundreds of high-quality book titles on any topic. It splits books into the following categories:
Mind-Blowing
How To
Framework
Inspirational
Investigative/Exposé
Scientific Exploration
Fractal Read: Get recommended books along with short descriptions. Then go deeper into any of the books, which includes:
Deep explanation
Chapter-by-chapter summary
Amazing rating
Top Keywords
Top excerpts
Context (how it resonates or challenges ideas in other books)
Unfortunately, ChatGPT doesn’t allow you to display links to other websites to prevent phishing. But, Google Gemini does. So, I created another prompt to help you instantly find book summaries, interviews, and speeches related to the book. It’s below…
Bonuses For Paid Subscriber
Full Fractal Reader Prompt
Full Interview Finder Prompt
Recording Of Last’s Week Live Session