Eight years after first talking about it, I still 100% believe in intuitive highlighting.
For a while, I tried creating a more sophisticated system for myself. I used markers in different colors to highlight in multiple tiers. Blue was a new concept or original idea. Green was a more common point that was still a good reminder. Yellow meant something else, and so on. It didn’t work. Too much hassle.
Anything that makes reading feel like a chore must go. It’s more important to enjoy reading—so you’ll maintain the habit—than to perfectly capture every detail. Therefore, intuitive highlighting it is. That doesn’t mean your highlights are meaningless, by the way.
Just because you don’t consciously decide doesn’t mean you won’t have a good reason for every line you mark in a book. Yesterday, I talked to a friend about this. We came up with five on the spot:
- Reaffirming a belief. You read a line and go, “Yes, absolutely!” You connect with the author and find a mutual point of agreement. This is powerful. A universal yet special kind of attraction. As you run your highlighter over such lines, you’ll shape your character together.
- Grasping aspirations. There are the beliefs we hold and the people we’d like to be in order to live in accordance with those beliefs. Books don’t just remind us of the former. They can also show us the latter—and even if we’re not perfect, we can always strive for better. Highlighting descriptions of better helps us cement it in our souls.
- Capturing aha moments. Did the writer convince you of the opposite side of an argument with their unique take on it? Or did you discover a new perspective you’d never even considered? Epiphanies will automatically jump at you, so it’s no wonder you’ll pick them up with your marker.
- Tracking arguments for understanding. Some books will make your brain sweat. For me, The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus was a mental jungle gym. In hindsight, most of my highlights were me trying to go from one logical monkey bar to the next—and I didn’t have to be conscious of this process for it to work.
- Preserving important seeds for whenever they’ll blossom. Your subconscious knows more than the active thinking machine that runs permanently while you’re awake. Intuitive highlighting allows the former to do its job. “I don’t know why this sentence feels important, but it does.” When revisiting such highlights later, you might be able to file them into one of the above categories. Or entirely new ones. Or none at all still. Given enough space, stars align in their own time. Let them.
Don’t be a surgeon when you’re reading. Be a graffiti artist. Spray your colors widely. Generously. Allow your mind to expand. Like in a stunning mural, different shapes will fit together in the end. These are just five of many kinds of highlights—and you won’t have to think about any of them in the moment for them to become part of your big picture.
