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Hi friends,

We hand-picked 3 good pieces of content to inspire and motivate you now and in the future. Keep track of the insights that resonate with you by highlighting them with Glasp💡

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

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📚 3 Good Recommendations

Agent swarms and the new model economics
by Wilson Lin (17 mins)

• Coordination is the real cost: On the same task, the old swarm sprawled to 54 crates and generated 70,000 merge conflicts before it had to be paused. The redesigned one settled on nine crates early and logged under 1,000 in four hours.

• Not every step needs a frontier model: Opus 4.8 planning with Composer 2.5 doing the work came to $1,339. GPT-5.5 in both roles came to $10,565. Very few moments in a large task genuinely require the most expensive intelligence.

• Less code, same result: Both swarms passed the same test suite for a SQLite implementation. The old one needed 64,305 lines of engine code. The new one needed 9,908.

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How to Apply Tiny Experiments: A Field Guide to Curiosity-Driven Learning
by Glasp (12 mins)

• A PACT replaces the goal: Instead of “get 1,000 subscribers,” you commit to “I will publish one short essay every week for eight weeks.” Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable, and entirely inside your control.

• Outcomes become data, not verdicts: A missed goal arrives labeled as failure. A finished experiment just produces findings, and that reframe lowers the stakes enough that you actually start the next one.

• Plus Minus Next: What went well, what drained you, what you will try next. Run weekly, this is what turns a string of experiments into a direction instead of a random walk.

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This is AGI: Sequoia AI Ascent 2026 Keynote
by Sequoia Capital (32 mins)

• A revolution in computation, not communication: The internet, the cloud, and mobile were all about how information gets distributed. AI is the first wave about how information gets processed, and that is why it behaves differently from every platform shift before it.

• Build toward your customers, not toward the capabilities: The counterintuitive part of their MAD framework (Moats, Affordance, Diffusion). New model capabilities arrive constantly and what you build on them may be irrelevant tomorrow. Your customers change far more slowly, so wrapping yourself around them is the more durable moat.

• The diffusion gap is the opportunity: Capabilities spread into the market far slower than they are created, and every day the frontier models move faster than the average Fortune 500, that gap widens. That gap is where application-layer companies get built.

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📣 Community Updates

• 🟦 75,000 Books and 80,000 Posts:

  The community has now brought over 75,000 Kindle books into Glasp and published more than 80,000 Posts. Highlights are where reading starts, and Posts are where it turns into something worth sharing. Import your books here.

• 🟨 13 Ways In, 8 Ways Out:

  Glasp now imports from 13 sources, including Kindle, Pocket, Matter, Wallabag, Instapaper, and plain CSV, and exports to 8, including Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Tana, Workflowy, and Zotero. Your highlights should not be trapped inside any one tool, ours included. Set yours up here.

  

• 🟥 Turn Your Highlights Into Flashcards:

  Anki Export is new. Send a passage you highlighted straight into Anki and it becomes a spaced repetition card, so the thing you thought was worth marking is still with you in six months. Try it here.

  

• 🟩 Automate Glasp With Zapier:

  Glasp on Zapier now covers four triggers and two actions: New Bookmark, New Document, New Highlight, New Summary, plus Create Bookmark and Create Highlight. Log every highlight to a spreadsheet, file summaries into Notion as they appear, or push links in from wherever you find them, with no code. Browse the workflows here. If you would rather build directly, the API docs are here.

🤝 Ask

Two small favors, and both take about a minute. Reviews are how new readers decide whether to trust us, and rating counts weigh heavily in how these stores rank and recommend.

• 🟥 Review the Chrome Extension:

  Hubros wrote this in June without us asking for it. Reviews like this are the main reason someone new decides to try Glasp at all, and they take about a minute. Leave yours here.

  

• 🟨 Rate the Mobile App:

  The iOS and Android apps are far newer than the extension, so each rating counts for much more there. Rate it on iOS here and on Android here.

❤️ Gratitude

Thank you for sharing and mentioning us on X, LinkedIn, and/or your blogs. 🙂 We appreciate your support! Please don’t hesitate to ask us anything at any time. Also, feel free to join our Reddit Community ;)

• Glasp AI Writing: AI-Powered Research & Content Creation Tool on AiToza

  

• Glasp on Your Trusted AI

  

• YouTube Summary & ChatGPT by Glasp on Chrome-Stats

  

• Glasp: A Review of the Social Web Highlighter on Dir2AI

  

• Glasp Web Highlighter: PDF & Web Highlight on EXTPOSE

  

• Glasp on Aona AI

  

• My browser was destroying my focus — these AI extensions fixed it on inkl

• 생산성 개선 (Productivity improvement) on GitHub (kodingwarrior)

• Quais são as ferramentas baseadas em IA generativa, como o ChatGPT, e os principais plugins? (What are the generative AI-based tools, such as ChatGPT, and the key plugins?) on Betheme

• YouTube Summary & ChatGPT by Glasp 2.1.1 for Google Chrome 擴充功能 on 軟體王 Softking

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter!

See you next week ;)

Best,
Kei and Kazuki

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If you highlight on the web every day, you have probably felt the small frictions: a highlight that will not stick on a stubborn page, a sidebar that takes a moment too long, an interface that only speaks English.

Glasp Extension v2.0.0 is our answer to all three. It is the biggest rewrite since we launched, and it is rolling out now.

What is new

• A new highlighting engine. Faster and more reliable highlighting, everywhere.

• A redesigned sidebar. Cleaner, quicker, and easier to live in.

• Suggested Highlights. AI picks the key sentences, you accept with one click.

• AI Overview. Get the shape of a page before you read it.

• A better Community experience. Discover what others highlighted on the same page.

• 7 languages, Dark and Light themes. Make the sidebar yours.

Two quick notes before you dive in.

1. Do you already have v2? Look at the extension. If the UI looks new, you are on v2. Another sure sign: if the update page opened by itself for you recently, that only happens after the extension updates, so you are already on it.

2. You will be signed out once. The upgrade signs you out of the extension a single time. Nothing is lost. Just click Sign in inside the extension and you are back, with every highlight where you left it.

1. Highlighting that just works

The engine underneath the extension has been rebuilt. Pages that used to fight back, long articles, heavy web apps, oddly structured layouts, now behave. Highlights land where you put them and save faster.

Nothing changes in how you use it. Select text, highlight, done. It simply stops getting in your way.

2. Suggested Highlights: let AI do the first pass

Open the sidebar on any article and Glasp will suggest the sentences worth keeping. Skim them, click the ones you agree with, and they become your highlights.

This is not a summary that replaces your reading. It is a first pass that respects it. You stay the editor, and the AI just does the pointing.

3. AI Overview before you commit

Not every article deserves twenty minutes. AI Overview gives you the shape of a page up front, so you can decide whether to read closely, skim, or move on. It pairs naturally with Suggested Highlights: get the overview, then keep the lines that matter.

4. See what others highlighted

The Community experience in the sidebar has been improved. On many pages you can now see what other readers marked as important, which is often the fastest way to find the part of an article people actually remember.

This has always been the idea behind Glasp: learning is better when it is not done alone.

5. Your language, your theme

Glasp now speaks English, Español, Français, Português (BR), Tiếng Việt, 日本語, and 한국어. There are two separate settings for it, and you will find both in Preferences:

• Interface Language. The language of Glasp itself, menus, buttons, the sidebar.

• Summary Language. The language your AI summaries come back in.

They are separate on purpose. Plenty of people want the interface in their own language while still reading source material in English, or the exact opposite: an English interface with summaries in their mother tongue. Now you can have either.

Both are saved to your account and synced to the browser extension and the mobile app, so you set them once. Summarize an English article and the summary comes back in your language, without asking for it every time.

Both default to Auto, which follows your system, so if you have never touched these settings you may already be seeing Glasp in your language. If you want to pin one, pick it from the list instead of Auto.

One honest note: only synced surfaces are translated for now, so you may still meet English in a few corners. We are working through them.

Theme lives right below, with System, Light, and Dark. Unlike language, theme is saved per device, so you can run Light on the laptop and Dark on the desktop.

How to make sure you are on v2

Browsers roll out extension updates on their own schedule, so most of you will get v2 within a day or two without doing anything.

How to tell you already have it: open the extension and look at it. The redesigned sidebar is unmistakable. And if the release notes page opened by itself in a tab recently, that only happens right after the extension updates, so that is proof too.

Curious what else has shipped? The full version history is at glasp.co/extension-update. It is a changelog to read, not a button that updates anything.

If you want v2 right now: go to the Glasp page on the Chrome Web Store, uninstall, then install again. That is the one method that updates you for certain. Your highlights live in your account, not in the extension, so nothing is lost.

Pro tips

• Try Suggested Highlights on a long read first. That is where the time saved is most obvious.

• Pick your theme before you forget. Sidebar settings, Dark or Light, takes five seconds.

• Signed out after the update? That is expected, and it happens only once. Click Sign in inside the extension.

• Kindle readers: auto-sync arrived in v1.3.0. Extension Settings, then Kindle Integration, and your Kindle highlights sync on their own.

v2 took a long time to build, and it exists because of what people told us was annoying. If something feels off, or something feels great, reply to this email. We read every reply.

Happy highlighting,
The Glasp Team

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Hi, I’m Bobby Powers! I run the Leader & Learner publication, where I share two posts per week that will help you become a more curious leader and learner.

I read 70+ books per year, and I’ve been doing that for the past decade. Each year of reading has brought new favorites that I share near and far with friends, family, and online readers.

In an earlier post, I shared the 30 best fiction books I’ve read in the past decade. Since then, I’ve wanted to expand that list to my 100 favorites of all time, including some absolute faves I read much longer than 10 years ago.

This list contains a bit of everything: new novels and classic literature, standard prose and graphic novels, YA fiction and mature books, and bestsellers alongside books you’ve never heard of.

Reading recs are inherently subjective, so I know you’ll disagree with some of the books I’ve included. (Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.) But I also know several on this list will catch your eye and join your TBR list.

Here’s my Top 100 list, alphabetized by author’s last name. I included a 3-4 sentence summary for each one.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

For years, I pre-judged this book,  thinking I wasn’t part of the target market for a coming-of-age story about four sisters. I was 100 percent wrong. Alcott’s classic about Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy Marsh is meaningful, fun, and inspiring.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

I appreciated The Handmaid’s Tale even more when I learned that Atwood tried to ensure every crazy event in the book was derived from real events from prior totalitarian regimes. That makes the storyline even crazier (and more depressing). Follow along as the handmaid Offred rebels against the oppressive patriarchal regime of the Republic of Gilead.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Remarkably, it took me until my mid-30s to read Austen. Now I know why her books have a prominent place on nearly every Top 100 list ever written. (And yeah, I’m now a fan of Mr. Darcy.) Pride and Prejudice delves into social classes, outdated gender roles, family, vanity, gossip, and psychology.

The Compound by S.A. Bodeen

This was one of my favorites I stumbled upon during my young adult (YA) fiction binge years ago. It follows a boy named Eli who’s lived underground for six years. His family has sheltered to avoid some unknown, horrible thing, but you’re left wondering what that is for the majority of this fast-paced read.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 is one of the first books that taught me classic literature can be fun. I was immediately sucked into Bradbury’s dystopian world that turns the role of “firefighter” on its head. In the bleak world of this story, the government has banned all books, and society’s firefighters are government agents tasked with burning any books they discover.

Red Rising (#1) by Pierce Brown

Just like everyone else in the country, I jumped on the YA bandwagon after reading books like The Hunger Games. Red Rising was the best series I found to scratch that itch, and the first book of the series is one of the most unputdownable books of all time. I’m usually able to predict where a book is headed, but this one fooled me multiple times.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Bulgakov’s classic novel served as a scathing critique of the political and religious oppression in Stalinist Russia. The devil comes to earth and wreaks havoc in Russia alongside his motley crew, which includes a black cat, a tall man with broken glasses, and a hitman. I’m still trying to process the allegorical layers of this book because there’s so much to unpack.

If On a Winter’s Night, A Traveler by Italo Calvino

Speaking of tons to unpack, this book is a mind trip. I read it with a book club, and I’m thankful I did because it’s one of the most complex books I’ve read. In this postmodern narrative, Calvino weaves 10 separate storylines together to explore how reading shapes our lives.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

This “non-fiction novel” is arguably the most famous true crime novel of all time. But rather than reporting the mere facts of the case, Capote injects a unique blend of subjectivity and emotion into this true story about the brutal killing of four people in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote’s writing format influenced many future nonfiction authors.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Mostly because I didn’t enjoy reading in junior high and high school, I didn’t read this book until I was an adult. It still packed a wallop. The plot centers around precocious Ender Wiggin, who’s enrolled in a military school and pitted against fellow students and otherworldly foes in this fast-paced sci-fi novel.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Carroll’s story is weird, entertaining, and creative. It’s also super short: 110 pages. I mainly read this because it’s on the Top 200 list I’m working through, but I enjoyed it enough that I pressed on and also read the sequel Through the Looking-Glass.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Authors like Chuck Palahniuk recommend using a “clock” to drive your story forward and build suspense. This book’s title serves that purpose: As one character after another bites the dust, you know how close you are to the ultimate conclusion. The book’s final reveal remains one of my favorites in fiction.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The year is 2045, and the world has been ravaged by poverty, climate change, and war. The majority of humanity copes with the world’s destitution by immersing themselves in the virtual reality of the OASIS — the brainchild of computer scientist James Halliday. Halliday has decided to bequeath his fortune to whoever can find the Easter egg hidden inside the OASIS, and teenage gamer Wade Watts thinks he’s up to the challenge.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist follows the story of a young shepherd boy who yearns to travel the world and become rich. The lessons he learns on his journey show him that he may very well be focused on the wrong things in life. Just like many readers, I found Coelho’s book to be inspiring, magical, and well-written.

The Hunger Games (#1) by Suzanne Collins

This series kicked off my multi-year reading binge of YA fiction when I was in grad school. Collins’s conclusions of books leave something to be desired, but she sure knows how to craft a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter. After reading this series, bow-shooting badass Katniss Everdeen became one of my favorite fictional characters.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

In this short book with tons of depth, sailor Charles Marlow joins an ivory trading firm, where he keeps hearing stories about a powerful and enigmatic man named Kurtz. Marlow’s obsession with Kurtz grows until he finally meets the man. That fateful meeting occurs much later in the book than I expected, and the story’s conclusion brilliantly connects back to the story’s title in multiple ways.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

I’m guessing you’ve watched the movie but never read the book. If so, check out the book because it’s a fun way to re-live this larger-than-life story. Plus, Crichton is enough of a nerd to make the science believable. (He began his career as a doctor.)

Pines (Wayward Pines I) by Blake Crouch

It’s hard to express exactly how good (and underrated) this book really is. Two federal agents go missing in Wayward Pines, Idaho, and the Secret Service agent who’s sent to find them realizes a lot is going on behind the scenes in this spooky town. I flew through this book and immediately read the rest of the trilogy.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Growing up, I watched the old Gene Wilder movie multiple times, but reading the book gave me the chance to experience the joy anew when Charlie unwraps the chocolate bar containing that glorious golden ticket. Dahl is one of the best children’s authors of all time, and this book is a must-read for both kids and adults. It’ll help you rediscover your childlike wonder and whimsy.

The Maze Runner (#1) by James Dashner

Sixteen-year-old Thomas wakes up in a maze, surrounded by a bunch of boys whose memories are gone. The rest of the trilogy follows Thomas as he tries to discover where he came from and what happened to his society. Dashner also wrote multiple prequels to this story, and I enjoy some of them as much as the original trilogy (which is quite rare).

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I debated whether I wanted to read this because I already knew the story, but I’m glad I did. It’s a quick read (~100 pages), well worth an hour or two of your time. Dickens’s visceral storytelling will induce you to hate Scrooge before his conversion and make you want to hug him afterward. A Christmas Carol is so iconic because it captures the powers of gratitude, selflessness, and kindness—all qualities we could use more in the world today.

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Similar to some of its classic lit peers, Oliver Twist can be slow at times, but it’s also packed with social criticism and depth. Dickens is brilliant at creating memorable characters like Fagin and the Artful Dodger. Having experienced poverty and child labor himself growing up, Dickens was able to write about those topics from personal experience, and they became themes in much of his work.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

What a fun ride! After disaster strikes the planet, Carl & his ex-girlfriend’s cat Princess Donut struggle to survive while the universe watches on intergalactic TV. Thanks to my friends Rob and Ashlie for recommending the audiobook version. The narrator Jeff Hays is 10/10.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Doerr rocketed to popularity with his Pulitzer-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See. The story depicts a fragile WWII-era friendship between a blind French girl and a young German boy. It’s one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Cloud Cuckoo Land swirls through the lives of five fictional characters throughout history, from 15th-century Constantinople to present-day Idaho and not-so-distant interstellar space. (I grew up in Idaho, and I don’t often see my state reflected in literature, so that made me smile.) Doerr artfully connects all five threads in this heartfelt and thought-provoking story.

Room by Emma Donoghue

Donoghue’s disturbing novel will stick with you. The protagonist and her son are kept in an 11’ x 11’ room for seven years. The room functions as their entire world until they finally get a glimpse of a different life.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky’s work deserves a spot on any list of top novels. The most memorable thing about Crime and Punishment is the sense of guilt that haunts the protagonist Raskolnikov. The book explores the psychological burden that follows every action we take.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

I’ve never read anything else like Rebecca. The entire novel swirls around the absence of a person: the deceased and mysterious Rebecca de Winter. When a new woman marries de Winter’s husband, she quickly realizes that everything in the de Winter mansion still revolves around Rebecca. Throughout the entire novel, the reader and protagonist breathlessly wonder...who was this Rebecca??

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Simply put: my favorite novel and the most epic revenge story of all time. It’s girthy but so worth the time that I’ve actually read it twice. Everyman Edmond Dantès is condemned to prison for a crime he didn’t commit—a plan masterminded by two men Dantès thought were friends. When Dantès emerges from prison, he cannot wait to enact his vengeance.

The Circle by Dave Eggers

Eggers erects a Black Mirror-esque world in which a social media company slowly dominates every aspect of life. As the tentacles of the billion-dollar behemoth wrap around more aspects of their users’ lives, the reader begins to wonder: Is this book maybe a little too real? The book made me a huge fan of Eggers, prompting me to check out his other work as well.

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

Ellis weaves elements from his own life (he’s the protagonist) into a fictionalized story about a serial killer terrorizing Los Angeles. Throughout the book, I wondered what was true and what wasn’t, which was a fun and unusual sensation. (Note: This book contains quite a bit of explicit content. No surprise, given that it’s written by the same guy who penned American Psycho.)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby relays the emptiness of fortune and the pangs of love better than any novel I’ve found. It’s also a lurid portrayal of the Roaring Twenties that will make you want to suit up and talk your way into one of Gatsby’s lavish parties. At roughly 200 pages, this is a quick read and one of my top 10 favorites of all time.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Every one of Flynn’s books is dark and twisted, and this one is my favorite. A woman named Amy Dunne disappears, and passages from her diary indicate her husband Nick may not be the gentleman he seems. Not only is this book an incredible psychological thriller, it’s also told in a unique storytelling technique that inspired emulation from multiple other authors.

Limitless (fka The Dark Fields) by Alan Glynn

Copywriter Eddie Spinola starts taking an experimental drug called MDT-48 that turns him into a cerebral superhero. Once his brain starts firing on all cylinders, he begins making tons of money as a day trader. But then, he realizes that MDT-48 has a few dangerous side effects that propel him on a roller coaster for the rest of the story. (Btw, the 2011 movie adaptation starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro has one of the biggest differences between book versus movie ending I can remember.)

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Such a fascinating premise: A group of boys turns Darwinian after getting marooned on a small island. Their time away from their mommies and daddies originally seems fun, but things turn violent after factions divide the group. This 1954 book seems to have spawned many other stories of children placed in horrible situations, such as the 1999 book Battle Royale (and its 2008 American copycat The Hunger Games), along with TV series like The Wilds (2020–2022).

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Taking another wild guess here: you’ve probably seen the movie but not read the book. The Princess Bride is a fun romp through piracy, romance, intrigue, murder, and revenge. You’ll leave the book with an even deeper love for Westley, Buttercup, and gang.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls #1) by Hank Green

Green’s book is one of the deepest, most thought-provoking novels I’ve read in years. He wrestles with soooo many big topics like social media, technology, fame, and equality, while telling a killer story along the way. Thanks to my buddy Alex for this recommendation.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

This is one of the only books from my high school required reading that made the list. It’s an influential story that’s inspired many other works, and it’s also an incisive investigation of hypocrisy, gossip, and public shaming. I wish I could have appreciated the book’s full meaning when I read it as a teen.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I read this book back in 2018 while gearing up for a trip to Spain, and it was a great precursor for the trip. Hemingway’s classic novel tells the story of a group of American and British expats who vacation to Spain to take in the sights and watch the Running of the Bulls. The group fragments as tensions arise among the vacationers.

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

If you love suspense and you’ve never read Patricia Highsmith, stop reading my article and go pick up this novel. Tom Ripley is many things: con man…genius…sociopath. After Tom reconnects with his old friend Dickie in Europe, Tom decides he’s too jealous of Dickie’s life to go back to his own boring old life in America, so he comes up with a unique way to live the life he’s always wanted.

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The Odyssey by Homer

Like many people, I had read excerpts of this novel previously, but never the full thing. To prepare for Christopher Nolan’s new movie, I read it, and it did not disappoint. I was impressed by the number of memorable scenes: the Cyclops, the Sirens, the bow-and-arrow challenge, Odysseus’s revenge on the suitors, etc.

Wool (Silo #1) by Hugh Howey

This story takes place in a dystopian universe where thousands of people live underground in a massive silo, and they’re not allowed to talk about what’s outside the silo. If they do, the punishment is to be sent out to die in the toxic atmosphere that surrounds the silo. When I first started reading Wool, I thought I knew where the story was going, but I was proven wrong several times. (I love that!)

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Although Les Misérables is massive and took me forever to read, it became one of my top 10 novels of all time. The biggest reason is that it contains several of the best examples of unconditional love I’ve ever read. It’s also a great primer on the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris, shortly after the French Revolution.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Huxley paints a dystopian world of genetic engineering and social stratification. My friends Tim and Whitney recommended this book to me, and when I heard they even named their dog after the author, I thought, “Wow, that book must be really damn good.” It was.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Definitely a slow burn, but such a great book. The protagonist is a butler (Stevens) who served his boss honorably for 30+ years. He’s also an unreliable narrator, which was my favorite aspect of the book. As Stevens looks back on his career, he begins questioning whether the boss he served was such a great man after all.

The Will of the Many (Hierarchy #1) by James Islington

I’m not normally a big fantasy guy. While I’ve read classics like LOTR, Narnia, etc., I rarely read many modern fantasy series. But dang, this book may make me reassess! What pulled me in was the dystopian social hierarchy and magical system Islington creates in his fantasy world.

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

My book club read this novel in 2024, and it became my hidden gem of that year. After a vivid nightmare, the protagonist awakens with a dead crow in her hand, and she realizes that her dreams are impacting her reality. Bad Cree is a gripping story of love, loss, friendship, and sisterhood.

The Green Mile by Stephen King

King originally released The Green Mile as a serial novel in six segments, but you can now purchase it as a single book. You’ll find some of King’s most emotional scenes and memorable characters in this book, including several inspiring acts of kindness. It quickly became one of my top 10 novels.

Misery by Stephen King

Author Paul Sheldon comes face-to-face with his biggest fan in this creepy novel. When Sheldon’s car crashes in the middle of nowhere, a woman named Annie Wilkes nurses him back to health. But then Wilkes decides to hold Sheldon hostage until he writes a new story about her favorite character from his books: Misery Chastain.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

I don’t enjoy many time travel stories because they tend to be confusing and overly sentimental, so when a couple of my friends recommended Stephen King’s time travel book 11/22/63, I was skeptical. Thankfully, King proved me wrong with a brilliant story that’s packed with compelling characters and hateable villains. What made me love this book is that it’s so much more than a “go back in time to prevent a bad thing” story. It’s a tale about love, loss, nostalgia, and sacrifice.

The Dead Zone by Stephen King

I’ve now read 32 of King’s books, and The Dead Zone is one of his best. I was amazed by his ability to foreshadow plotlines early in the book, then deftly connect back to them later in the story. Protagonist Johnny Smith develops the ability to see the future of any person he touches, and he doesn’t like what he sees when he comes into contact with ambitious politician Greg Stillson.

It by Stephen King

This 1,100-page monster of a book contains one of the most iconic villains in pop culture: Pennywise the Clown. Pennywise is horrifying, but so is the town of Derry, Maine, where the story is set. The plot revolves around a group of seven kids haunted by Pennywise who return to Derry as adults (28 years later) to try to take him down.

The Walking Dead (#1) by Robert Kirkman

The Walking Dead TV series is one of my all-time favorites, so I naturally wanted to check out the graphic novels. The series is quite long, but I’ve now finished almost the entire thing because the storyline has been so propulsive and fun. The books have been awesome, and they’ve kept me on my toes because there are some big differences between the graphic novels and the TV version.

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Washed-up writer Jake Bonner is working as a professor when he meets brilliant and arrogant student Evan Parker. Parker tells Bonner the plot of a story he’s writing, then dies before he can publish it. So Bonner takes things into his own hands, only to discover there’s a dark underbelly to Parker’s story.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Easily one of the most heartbreaking books I’ve ever read. I assume you’re familiar with this story by now and have likely at least watched the award-winning movie, but even so, you should read the book. It’s a powerful depiction of racism in 1930s America with a few sprinkles of optimism and hope mixed in.

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

One recent Halloween, I decided to read the classic horror book Rosemary’s Baby. Levin’s foreshadowing and storytelling were so dazzling that I immediately ordered two of his other books: The Stepford Wives and A Kiss Before Dying. Together, those three books cemented Levin as one of my favorite authors of all time.

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

Walter and Joanna Eberhart move to the beautiful town of Stepford, where every family seems picture-perfect: young, gorgeous, and deeply in love. But when Joanna’s friends begin acting strange, she starts to wonder if there’s something ominous hiding behind the town’s peaceful veneer. The Stepford Wives is a well-written, unnerving story with a surprising conclusion.

A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin

The storytelling mechanism used in this book makes it one of the most interesting novels I’ve ever read. As a little teaser, here’s what Stephen King has to say about it: “[The novel’s] real screeching bombshell is neatly tucked away about one hundred pages into the story. If you should happen upon this moment while thumbing randomly through the book, it means nothing to you. If you have read everything faithfully up to that point, it means...everything.”

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

Theologian and Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis penned this fascinating allegory about a dead man exploring the afterlife. I first read this book back in 2009, then re-read it a decade later, and it was every bit as good the second time. The Great Divorce offers one of the most interesting takes on heaven and hell you’ll ever read.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia #1) by C.S. Lewis

In this classic story, siblings Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy discover that their caretaker’s old wardrobe contains way more than just dust. They stumble into the magical world of Narnia, where snow covers the earth, winter is everlasting, and good battles evil. As with many fantasy stories, this one is fun for both kids and adults.

The Giver by Lois Lowry

Similar to many of my favorite novels, The Giver is set in a dystopian community. Citizens generally do what they’re told and don’t ask questions—that is, except for 12-year-old Jonas. Jonas begins to unravel the community’s dark secrets and takes on an impossible challenge.

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

Bird Box is one of the best thrillers I’ve read. Malerman does an amazing job building suspense around an unseen entity that causes millions of people across the world to kill themselves. Scattered survivors live in fear, cowering behind blindfolds and shuttered windows.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

This is one of the most modern books on the Top 200 Books list I’ve been chipping through. It’s a haunting story of a young 13-year-old girl who makes a mistake that she regrets for the rest of her life. McEwan explores love, war, sadness, social classes, and forgiveness in this unforgettable book.

The Housemaid by Freida McFadden

Twisty, mysterious, and fun—this book is for people who love thrillers with dark plotlines. Movie adaptations always polarize readers, but I thought the 2025 adaptation was well-cast and did justice to the source material. As always, if you haven’t seen the movie, read the book first. But the movie is worth a watch too.

The Chain by Adrian McKinty

As soon as I read the synopsis of this book, I immediately wanted to buy it: a woman named Rachel gets a phone call saying her daughter has been kidnapped. In addition to paying a $25,000 ransom, Rachel must select and kidnap another kid to keep “The Chain” going. The request is the ultimate test of a mother’s love, and Rachel learns that her love goes deep.

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

Michaelides’s rookie novel is a thriller about a woman who murders her husband, then refuses to speak for six years. This book kept me guessing until the end. Apparently, it did the same for thousands of other readers too because The Silent Patient spent months on the bestseller list.

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

The illustrations for V for Vendetta are amazing, and the storytelling is up there with any book I’ve ever read. The book’s political undertones sound oddly similar to some events that have happened in America in the past several years. Alan Moore’s work helped convert me to reading more graphic novels.

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

This graphic novel not only ascended to the heights of pop culture but also to literary greatness. It’s on countless “Top Books” lists, including the Uber-List of the Top 200 Books I compiled. Watchmen is a masterfully written and illustrated story about what happens when power gets into the wrong hands.

Death Note: Black Edition, Vol. 1 by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

A teenager finds a random black notebook that he learns has the power to kill anyone in the world. When I first heard that synopsis, I thought this graphic novel sounded interesting but perhaps corny. Then I read it and realized it’s way deeper than the summary implies. It delves into the nature of good and evil, capital punishment, and even game theory.

1984 by George Orwell

Orwell’s classic novel lives up to the hype. It was also the origin of the phrase “Big Brother,” the name Orwell gave to the fictional dictator in Oceania. Just like any good dystopian fiction, 1984 holds up a magnifying glass to our present day, questioning any form of government surveillance, censorship, and propaganda.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Orwell certainly spooked the American public about the perils of Communism. Not only did he deliver the dystopian gem 1984, but he also wrote the allegorical classic Animal Farm. If you’re like most people, you read this novel in school. If you didn’t, it’s worth the read.

Akira 1 by Katsuhiro Otomo

I sometimes unfairly judge things I don’t understand. For years, I did that with manga (Japanese comics and graphic novels). Then my brother Trevor recommended this book, and I decided to give it a shot. Akira shattered my ignorance and gave me a deeper appreciation for this art form.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

I knew Palahniuk was dark, but holy crap, this book is intense! Regardless, I tend to enjoy dark books, so Fight Club was my jam. Palahniuk did a great job of jealously protecting the book’s secret until the end.

The Street by Ann Petry

The Street was published back in 1946, and few of my bookish friends seem to have heard of it. Petry offers a view into the experience of a poor, Black, single mom trying to make her way in Harlem. The story is simultaneously poignant yet page-turning, gritty yet beautiful, and depressing yet somehow still hopeful. This was also the first novel by an African-American woman to sell over one million copies.

Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield

In this epic novel, Pressfield tells how King Leonidas led 300 Spartans against the massive Persian army in the Battle of Thermopylae. Pressfield’s imagery is so realistic that West Point, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Marine Corps assign Gates of Fire to their young cadets. This book is one of my top ten favorite novels of all time.

The Prestige by Christopher Priest

You’re probably familiar with the movie (starring Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johansson, and Michael Caine), but I’m guessing you’re not familiar with the book. As with most book/movie duos, the story is a bit different, but both are fulfilling in their own way. If you’re a fan of the movie, a lover of magic, or simply a connoisseur of fiction, you’ll enjoy the story of this battle between dueling magicians who fight for supremacy in 1800s England.

The Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicle #1) by Patrick Rothfuss

I’m immensely grateful to my friends Cris, Cary, and Alex for recommending this book. The Name of the Wind was mind-blowingly good. It’s the first book in The Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy, but Rothfuss has been slow-pedaling the third book of the series for over a decade.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (HP #1) by J.K. Rowling

Having never read the Harry Potter books as a child, my Aunt Shannon recommended them to me when I was in college, and I asked, “Isn’t that just a kids’ series?” Shannon (rightfully) put me in my place. I gave them a shot, and they became my favorite series I’ve ever read. I’ve now turned many other adults onto Harry Potter because it’s exceptionally well-written and one of the best-plotted series I’ve ever seen.

Holes by Louis Sachar

This is another “kids book” that is so much more than a kids book. Regardless of the intended audience, I love well-told stories, and Sachar’s book about the “cursed” boy Stanley Yelnats hits the mark. Stanley and the other boys at Camp Green Lake detention center are required to dig holes all day, and when he figures out the camp warden is looking for something special, Stanley foils the plot.

What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg

Schulberg’s 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? follows the budding career of Sammy Glick, a ruthlessly ambitious kid trying to become a Hollywood star. You won’t always like Sammy, but you’ll always find him entertaining. Schulberg’s writing is poignant, and the book became one of my all-time favorites.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

Addie LaRue is a heart-wrenchingly beautiful, modern-day Faustian story about a girl who makes a deal to live forever. The catch? Everyone she meets immediately forgets her…until she meets a guy named Henry Strauss.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

This book was much different than I expected. Shelley’s portrayal of the monster as a humane and loving creature was meaningful and moving in a way few monster stories can achieve. As soon as I finished the book, I kicked myself for not having read it sooner.

Maus I by Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman tells the story of the Holocaust in graphic novel form, using mice as Jews and cats as Germans. This true story follows Art’s parents living through the horrors of Nazi rule. Maus is the most inventive retelling of WWII you’ll ever read.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

Told from the perspective of a dog named Enzo, this book is a tale of family, heartbreak, hard work, and redemption. I love when writers come up with new ways to tell stories, and Stein’s decision to tell this story from the dog’s perspective was clever. The book is a tear-jerker, but it’s worth the read.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

East of Eden was my introduction to Steinbeck. It felt like a slog in some sections (it’s ~650 pages), but it’s also beautifully written and worth the time if you can maintain patience. I read this in a book club, which helped me process the book’s layers and historical context with friends.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

“Jekyll and Hyde” is such a popular concept these days that I didn’t realize how late in the book Stevenson reveals the truth about those two characters. It was fun to read the story with today’s knowledge and consider how shocked UK readers must have been in 1886 when they read Stevenson’s epic reveal. I also love short books, and this one is ~120 pages.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Stoker uses journal entries, letters, and newspaper clippings to tell this iconic story. The local peasants of Transylvania are leery of Count Dracula, who owns a creepy castle atop a hill. And when English lawyer Jonathan Harker stays in the castle, he realizes there’s good cause for the peasants’ concerns.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

This book came out in 2004 and became an international sensation shortly thereafter, but it took me a long time to hear about it. I’m glad I finally did because I’m a sucker for dark academia fiction, and this is one of the best books in that genre. It’s a story about a group of college students who follow a charismatic liberal arts professor to dangerous places—in both mind and body.

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis

You’re probably familiar with the Netflix series based on this book (if not, go watch it). I grew up playing competitive chess, so this one was especially fun and nostalgic for me. I loved the strong female protagonist and her titanic struggle against the male-dominated field of chess (and her inner demons).

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Bilbo Baggins gets more than he bargained for when he opens his door to find a wizard and a collection of dwarves. He leaves his slow-paced life in the Shire to set out on a mythical quest with his new retinue, kicking off arguably the most famous fantasy series of all time. I loved the characters and the entire epic world that Tolkien paints. Read this one first, and if you like it, you should definitely read the entire Lord of the Rings series (next up on the list).

The Fellowship of the Ring (LOTR #1) by J.R.R. Tolkien

I often struggle with the long, mythical names of places and characters in fantasy books, so it takes an exceptional series to get me interested. This one did the trick. It took me about 100 pages until I really started to get into the story, but then I was hooked.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to stay in a Moscow hotel for the rest of his life, and nearly the entire novel takes place within the hotel’s four walls. Despite his challenging situation, Rostov’s wit, charm, and indefatigable spirit inject hope and energy into this book. The fact that Towles could overcome such a severe limitation and craft a compelling story within a single building shows off his writing prowess.

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain

Did you know Mark Twain was obsessed with the story of Joan of Arc and spent 12 years researching her life? In this biographical novel, Twain puts you right into the action of Joan’s life from the perspective of her page and secretary, Sieur Louis de Conté. I didn’t know much about Joan’s story before this, and it helped me understand how inspiring and heroic she really was.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut’s novels are nothing if not inventive and weird. Few people are brave enough or absurd enough to write an anti-war novel infused with a sci-fi story about a man traveling through time and meeting creatures from another planet. And yet, that’s exactly what Vonnegut did in Slaughterhouse-Five. (Btw, if you’re looking for amazing writing tips, check out his little-known writing advice book Pity the Reader.)

The Martian by Andy Weir

This book put Weir on the map, and he’s been a literary superstar ever since. His protagonist Mark Watney is one of the funnest and funniest characters you’ll ever find. Even though The Martian contains some intense science, Weir makes every page readable and interesting.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Weir provides another science-y and whimsical romp through space in Project Hail Mary. When the book begins, Ryland Grace finds himself on a spaceship light-years away from Earth. His two fellow astronauts are dead, and Ryland doesn’t remember who he is or why he’s there.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells broke new literary ground with this book, which popularized the concept of time travel and became the first modern-day science fiction novel. He explores fascinating questions about the potential future of humanity as the gap between the rich and the poor expands. I loved this prescient book.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Whitehead reimagines the Underground Railroad as an actual, physical railroad. Even though it’s a work of fiction, you can feel the truth of the story and characters on every page. From the courageous protagonist Cora to the brutal plantation owner Terrance Randall, it’s a glimpse into life as a slave in the pre-Civil War American South.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The youthful Dorian Gray sells his soul for eternal youth, but his portrait continues to age, revealing Gray’s physical (and moral) deterioration. But the book is also a story of forbidden love in a society that disallowed homosexuality. Tragically, Wilde’s novel was even used in court as evidence against him in an indecency lawsuit.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

Zusak introduces the most unique narrator in fictional history: Death. Death tells the story of a young foster girl named Liesel who resorts to stealing books because she loves them so much. (I can relate.) This story is set in Nazi Germany in 1939, and it carries all of the emotional heft you’d expect from a story in that setting.

For each book above, I included an affiliate link from Bookshop.org. (If you purchase a book, you’ll support me and local bookstores. Win-win!)

What am I missing? What should I check out next? Leave a comment below.

Looking for more book recs? You’ll enjoy these:

7 Incredible Novels You’ve (Probably) Never Heard About

15 Books That Tangibly Improved My Life

📣 Community Updates by Glasp

• 🟥 Glasp Talk with Bobby Powers:

  Glasp Talk features intimate interviews with luminaries, revealing their emotions, experiences, and stories. The guest, Bobby Powers, is a dedicated learner passionate about leadership and personal development. With over a decade of experience managing teams, leading onboarding, and Learning and Development programs at various startups and SMBs, Bobby is also an avid reader, having read over a thousand books in the last 15 years.

  ✨ Want a concise summary before diving in? Install the YouTube Summary with ChatGPT extension by Glasp for instant video summaries!

• 🟥 YouTube Summaries on Mobile:
  We made a major update to YouTube summarization in the Glasp mobile app. Summarize any video faster, all inside the app, with no switching between tools. See the updated tutorial here.

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“No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hi friends,

We hand-picked 3 good pieces of content to inspire and motivate you now and in the future. Keep track of the insights that resonate with you by highlighting them with Glasp💡

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

Save to Glasp

📚 3 Good Recommendations

Understanding is the new bottleneck
by Geoffrey Litt (10 mins)

• Understanding code is about participation, not verification. As agents improve at self-checking, the real reason to understand what they build is to remain a creative contributor across many iterations. Without that fluency, your ability to evolve the system is limited.

• Three education-inspired techniques help. Structured explanations with quizzes, interactive “micro-worlds” (custom debuggers, step-by-step command centers), and shared team spaces for building common mental models.

• The goal is augmentation, not automation. AI’s greatest potential is helping humans understand better. Agents can generate tools that accelerate our learning, keeping us deeper in the loop rather than out of it.

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Control the ideas, not the code
by Salvatore Sanfilippo (6 mins)

• Control ideas, not code: With AI generating thousands of lines daily, reviewing code line-by-line is pointless. Focus on design and architecture instead.

• Reallocate time: Skip code review to spend more time on QA, new features, and writing DESIGN.md files that explain ideas in human language.

• Juniors still need fundamentals: New programmers should learn by building small projects (interpreters, databases) from scratch, not by reviewing AI output.

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How to Apply A Mind for Numbers: Learn Anything Faster With Your Brain’s Two Modes
by Glasp (13 mins)

• Two brain modes: Focused mode is deliberate concentration; diffuse mode is the relaxed state (walks, showers) where insights emerge. Effective learning means alternating between them.

• Recall beats rereading: Highlighted text feels familiar, but that’s an illusion. Close the source and reconstruct ideas from memory to build real understanding.

• Process over product: Procrastination comes from dreading the outcome. Commit to 25 minutes of effort (Pomodoro), not finishing, and the dread disappears.

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📣 Community Updates

• 🟩 Choose Your Language:
  You can now set your Interface Language and Summary Language in Preferences. Pick once and it applies everywhere: the web app, the browser extension, and the mobile app. Update it here.

  

• 🟦 Diigo & Raindrop.io Import:

  You can now bring your highlights from Diigo and Raindrop.io into Glasp. Along with Kindle, Snipd, Readwise, Medium, Instapaper, and Hypothesis, your highlights can now live in one place. Connect them here.

  

• 🟥 80,000+ Audio Files Transcribed:
  Our Audio Transcriber has now processed over 80,000 audio files. We’re excited to see how the community is using Glasp to capture insights from conversations, lectures, and recordings.

• 🟨 Discover Popular Books:

  See which books Glasp readers are highlighting the most. The new Book Discovery page ranks the most popular titles imported from Kindle, so you can find your next read from what the community is actually reading. Browse them here.

  

❤️ Gratitude

Thank you for sharing and mentioning us on X, LinkedIn, and/or your blogs. 🙂 We appreciate your support! Please don’t hesitate to ask us anything at any time. Also, feel free to join our Reddit Community ;)

• Glasp YouTube Summarizer on FutureTools

  

• Glasp on SoftwareWorld

• Glasp on AIxploria

• YouTube Summary with ChatGPT & Claude on CHIP

  

• Layering Book: Build and Use a Second Brain on Read Medium

• Glasp on Aitoolsdirectory.com

• ＜徹底解説>拡張機能『YouTube Summary with ChatGPT』 の使い方と安全性！(<In-Depth Guide> How to Use and Safety of the “YouTube Summary with ChatGPT” Extension!) on AITech

• Quais são as ferramentas baseadas em IA generativa, como o ChatGPT, e os principais plugins? (What are the generative AI-based tools, such as ChatGPT, and the key plugins?) on SAPO

• Come riassumere un video YouTube in pochi secondi con l’AI (How to summarize a YouTube video in a few seconds using AI) on CeoGeek

• General Writing on Notion (500+ Best AI Tools (duplica esta lista))

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter!

See you next week ;)

Best,
Kei and Kazuki

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We’re excited to announce a new tutorial on Glasp: How to Import Your Medium, Snipd, Instapaper & Hypothesis Highlights into Glasp.

If you’ve been highlighting for a while, your best ideas are probably scattered across four or five apps. A quote saved in Medium, a podcast snip in Snipd, an article in Instapaper, a research annotation in Hypothesis. Each one useful, but none of them talking to each other. Scattered highlights are dead highlights: they only start working for you once they live in one place.

With Glasp’s import integrations, you can pull all of them into one library in a few clicks, and then actually put them to work.

Once your highlights are all in Glasp, you can:

• Plug them into any AI tool: the Glasp MCP Connector exposes your library to Claude and other AI clients, so they answer using what you’ve actually read, not the whole internet

• Feed your AI Clone: every highlight trains a personal AI built on your own thinking, so it can summarize, recall, and write in your voice

• Send them anywhere: export to Notion, Obsidian, and Roam, or as Markdown, CSV, and JSON, your data stays yours

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through importing from Medium, Instapaper, Hypothesis, and Snipd, one by one.

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

Save to Glasp

✍️ How It Works

Step 1: Open Settings → Integrations

Three of these (Medium, Instapaper, and Hypothesis) start from the same place. On your Highlights page, click + Import Highlights at the top to open the Integrations page, where you’ll find every import source under the Import section. (Snipd works a little differently, we’ll cover it last.)

Step 2: Import from Medium

Click Sync Now on the Medium card. In the modal, enter your public Medium username (e.g. @username) and click Connect. No integration token needed. Glasp syncs automatically (you can close the tab while it runs), and when it's done, click Go to My Highlights.

Full walkthrough: How to Import Highlights from Medium into Glasp

Step 3: Import from Instapaper

Click Import on the Instapaper card, then sign in to Instapaper. (We don’t store your login, it’s only used to authenticate.) Click Continue to Connect, and your highlights import right away.

Full walkthrough: How to Import Highlights from Instapaper into Glasp

Step 4: Import from Hypothesis

Click Sync Now on the Hypothesis card to open the Connect with Hypothesis modal. Click the Hypothesis API token link to get your token, paste it into the Hypothesis API Token field, and click Save API Token. Glasp syncs your highlights automatically.

NOTE: If the Hypothesis API token link shows a “Page Not Found” error, go to hypothes.is/login instead, log in, and copy your API token from there.

Full walkthrough: How to Import Highlights from Hypothesis into Glasp

Step 5: Import from Snipd (Mobile)

Snipd is an AI podcast player that saves any insight with a tap of your headphones, and it syncs to Glasp from its own app. Open the Snipd app, go to the Account tab (bottom-right), tap Settings at the top, then tap Export & Sync and choose Glasp Integration.

Tap Find your Glasp Access Token to grab your token from Glasp settings, then tap Connect. Done.

Tip: Each import is manual, not automatic. Whenever you add new highlights in one of these apps, just run the import again to bring them over.

Full walkthrough: How to Sync Your Snipd Highlights with Glasp

NOTE: Imported highlights are public by default. If you’d rather keep them private, adjust your visibility settings or upgrade to a Pro plan before you sync.

Everything you’ve ever highlighted, finally in one library, ready to be searched, exported, and handed to your AI.

If you haven’t already, sign up for Glasp and start bringing your highlights home.

👉 Sign up for Glasp

💡 Pro Tips

Now that your highlights live in one place, put them to work:

👉 Connect Glasp to Claude & ChatGPT with the MCP Connector: Let AI answer using what you’ve actually read

👉 Ask Your AI Clone: Turn your highlights into a personal AI you can chat with

👉 How to Chat with PDF on Glasp: Upload any PDF and ask questions, get summaries, keep highlights

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Here’s something we noticed while pulling this month’s most-imported books.

Read them in order and a quiet argument starts to form, one that none of these authors coordinated, and that this month’s highlighters seem to have arrived at independently:

Building anything real begins with deciding what you’re willing to stop caring about.

Mark Manson opens and closes the argument: care about fewer things, and pick them well. In between, an entire founder’s bookshelf shows what that focus buys you. Naval’s leverage, Tiago Forte’s second brain, Chris Voss’s ruthless attention to what the other side actually needs, Ray Dalio’s uncorrelated bets, and Ben Horowitz’s refusal to even look at the odds. Subtraction first, then systems.

So this month we’re not just sharing what got imported. For every book, we’re showing you the single line that the most readers stopped to highlight, what we’re calling Reader Consensus. It’s the closest thing we have to a room full of strangers nodding at the same sentence.

Here are June’s top 10.

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

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1. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Mark Manson, blogger-turned-author whose profanity-laced case for caring about less made counterintuitive self-help a genre of its own.

“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.”

Reader Consensus: 26 of 55 highlighters underlined this exact line (47%), the highest agreement of any book on this list.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Português (14) · Español (4)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

2. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Eric Jorgenson, who distilled a decade of Naval Ravikant’s tweets, interviews, and essays into a free guide to wealth and happiness.

“Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”

Reader Consensus: 25 of 64 highlighters (39%).

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (24) · Português (2)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

3. Building a Second Brain

Tiago Forte, productivity teacher whose CODE method turned personal knowledge management from a niche habit into a movement.

“For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.”

Reader Consensus: 22 of 52 highlighters (42%).

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (16) · Português (15) · Español (5)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

4. Never Split the Difference

Chris Voss, former lead FBI hostage negotiator who brought tactical empathy from life-or-death standoffs to the boardroom.

“Great negotiators are able to question the assumptions that the rest of the involved players accept on faith or in arrogance, and thus remain more emotionally open to all possibilities, and more intellectually agile to a fluid situation.”

Reader Consensus: 17 of 45 highlighters (38%).

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

5. Principles: Life and Work

Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, who codified forty years of investing and management into an operating system for decisions.

“Making a handful of good uncorrelated bets that are balanced and leveraged well is the surest way of having a lot of upside without being exposed to unacceptable downside.”

Reader Consensus: 13 of 44 highlighters (30%).

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (12) · Português (5)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

6. The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, writing the management book for the moments when there is no playbook.

“Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.”

Reader Consensus: 14 of 33 highlighters (42%).

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (36)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

7. Zero to One

Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and first outside investor in Facebook, on why the next great company won’t be built by copying anyone.

“The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”

Reader Consensus: 14 of 32 highlighters (44%).

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (51) · Español (3) · Português (3) · Français (1)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

8. The Lean Startup

Eric Ries, entrepreneur whose build-measure-learn loop gave a generation of founders a vocabulary for learning faster than they fail.

“A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”

Reader Consensus: 9 of 32 highlighters (28%).

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (11) · Español (8) · Português (4) · Italiano (2)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

9. Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

Mark Manson, back for a second appearance this month, turning from what to ignore toward what’s still worth hoping for.

“To build and maintain hope, we need three things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and a community.”

Reader Consensus: 4 of 12 highlighters (33%).

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

10. Tools of Titans

Tim Ferriss, podcaster and author who spent years extracting the routines of world-class performers, then shipped the field notes.

“More than 80% of the interviewees have some form of daily mindfulness or meditation practice”

Reader Consensus: 13 of 57 highlighters (23%).

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Español (4)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

📈 Discovered in June

The top 10 measures volume. This section measures momentum: books whose June arrivals make up an outsized share of everyone who has ever imported them. The first sits at #9 above; the other two tied the #10 book at three June imports each and missed the list only on the tiebreaker.

• Everything Is F*cked: 4 of its 13 all-time importers (31%) arrived this month. Manson’s 2019 sequel is having its moment seven years on.

• The 5 Types of Wealth: 3 of 10 all-time importers (30%). Sahil Bloom’s reframing of wealth beyond money is climbing fast.

• A System for Writing: 3 of 10 all-time importers (30%). Bob Doto’s zettelkasten guide, riding the same current as Building a Second Brain at #3.

❤️ Before you go

Every line above came from someone who took the time to mark it. That’s the whole idea: when you highlight on Glasp, you’re not just saving a sentence for yourself — you’re leaving it for the next reader.

If any of these books are on your shelf, import your highlights and add your own underline to the count. Next month’s consensus is being written right now.

See you in the margins,
The Glasp Team

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This month was all about taking Glasp with you. YouTube summaries, PDFs, and your highlights now travel better on mobile than ever before. Wherever you read, your learning follows.

Here’s what’s new.

📣 Community Updates

📌 Community Milestones

• Kindle highlights imported: 72,000+ unique books

• Bookmarks saved: 80,000+

• YouTube Channels Tracking: 3,100+

🔧 Feature Updates

• YouTube Summaries on Mobile: We made a major update to YouTube summarization in the Glasp mobile app. Summarize any video faster, all inside the app, with no switching between tools. See the updated tutorial here.

• PDFs on Mobile: You can now open, read, and highlight PDFs directly in the Glasp mobile app. Your PDF library and notes go wherever you go. Download the app here.

  

• Download PDFs with Your Highlights: You can now download a PDF with your highlights embedded right in the document. Your marked-up copy is yours to keep and share. Try it here.

  

• Speaker View for Audio Transcripts: Audio transcripts now support a speaker-switching view, so you can follow who said what at a glance. Check it out here.

  

📖 New Tutorials & Posts

• Top 3 Most-Highlighted Kindle Books in June

  • Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

  • Educated

  • Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

  • Full breakdown coming in a separate post.

• Glasp Research: Now on arXiv: We’ve been publishing research papers on arXiv. They cover how Glasp grew its ChatGPT referral traffic (separating real AEO gains from the answer engines’ own growth) and what millions of highlights reveal about how people read. Browse them all here.

• How to Summarize YouTube Videos on Mobile

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• Glasp on HuntScreens

  

• Every YouTuber Should Be Using Claude Instead of ChatGPT on Lori Ballen’s YouTube

• Glasp: Detailed Company Information & Corporate Profile on SignalHire

• How to Transcribe YouTube Podcasts or Videos for Obsidian Notes on Read Medium

• Glasp on Futurepedia

  

• Glasp on Toolbox AI

• 🚀 Stop Wasting Time: The AI Browser Plugins That Actually Changed My Productivity in 2026 by

• AI Isn’t Just Changing Social Media and Search. It Just Walked Into Your Inbox Too. by on

• 【YouTube要約】YouTube summary with chatGPTとは何？どうやって使うか徹底解説！ ([YouTube Summaries] What is “YouTube summary with ChatGPT”? A comprehensive guide on how to use it!) on ムービス

• YouTube Summary with ChatGPTの使い方を教えて (Please explain how to use “YouTube Summary with ChatGPT.”) on note

✍️ Write for Glasp

Do you write about learning, reading, or AI? We occasionally feature guest contributors. Share a link to something you’ve written in the comments — we’ll reach out if it’s a good fit.

→ Past guest posts

💛 Did you know?

Did you know you can turn any highlight into a beautiful quote card? Share what you’re reading on social media in one click, with the source attached. Please check this tutorial.

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter!

See you next week ;)

Best,
Kei and Kazuki

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We’re excited to announce a new tutorial on Glasp: How to Summarize YouTube Videos on Mobile.

YouTube is full of talks, interviews, and tutorials worth learning from, but sitting through a 30-minute video to find one insight isn’t always worth it. Until now, summarizing a video on your phone meant juggling apps: open YouTube, tap Share, switch to Glasp. Not anymore.

With the latest mobile update, you can summarize any YouTube video entirely inside the Glasp app. Find it, watch it, and summarize it in one place.

Once you’re set up, Glasp will:

• Summarize any video: get the key points in seconds, no app-switching

• Add timestamps: every summary is timestamped, so you can jump to the moments that matter

• Show the full transcript: switch to the Transcript tab anytime

• Copy or save: keep the summary or transcript wherever you need it

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through how to summarize a YouTube video on mobile, start to finish, without ever leaving Glasp.

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

Save to Glasp

✍️ How It Works

Step 1: Download and Install the Glasp App

If you haven’t already, download the Glasp app from the App Store (for iOS) or Google Play Store (for Android). Once installed, log in to your Glasp account or sign up if you’re a new user.

Step 2: Open a YouTube Video Inside the Glasp App

Tap “Feed” in the bottom navigation bar. If you’ve just signed up, your Feed will be empty.

Tap “Add a Channel” and add the YouTube channel you want to follow.

Tap “Add” after you’ve typed the channel’s handle.

Step 3: Open a Video and Tap “Summary”

Once you’ve added a channel, its videos appear in your Feed. Tap any video you want to summarize.

With the video open, tap “Summary” in the bottom toolbar. Within seconds, Glasp generates a concise, AI-generated summary with timestamps, so you can jump straight to the moments that matter.

Tap Copy to save the summary anywhere, or switch to the Transcript tab to read or copy the full transcript.

NOTE: You can summarize and copy a few videos for free. For unlimited summaries, upgrade to a Pro plan on the pricing page.

Tip: Don’t know a channel’s @handle? Just add any channel to start (for example, @glasp), open one of its videos from your Feed, and use the YouTube search bar at the top to find any other video on YouTube.

(Optional) Step 4: Reformat the Summary with AI

Want the summary in a different format? Tap Copy, then paste the summary or transcript into your favorite AI chat tool and ask for exactly what you need, like “Summarize this in 5 bullets” or “List the key takeaways.”

(Optional) Step 5: Find Your Summaries Anytime

Every video you summarize is saved to your profile. Tap “Profile” in the bottom navigation bar, then open the “Summaries” tab to revisit everything you’ve summarized, all in one place.

Great videos shouldn’t stay stuck in your watch-later queue.

With Glasp on mobile, you can summarize any YouTube video, pull out the key moments, and keep what’s useful, all from your phone, in one app.

If you haven’t already, sign up for Glasp and start learning faster from everything you watch.

👉 Sign up for Glasp

💡 Pro Tips

Go further with these resources:

👉 How to Bulk Download YouTube Transcripts: Turn YouTube videos into reusable text in seconds
👉 How to Chat with PDF on Glasp: Upload any PDF and ask questions, get summaries, keep highlights
👉 How to Import Kindle Highlights into NotebookLM with Glasp: Use your book highlights as sources for AI-powered research

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Look at the sentences that struck you most. The ones you underlined, dog-eared, or quietly returned to. Then ask yourself a strange question: who read those sentences before you?

Not the author. The other readers. The dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of strangers who, before the book reached you, had already stopped at those exact lines, felt their breath change a little, and decided this — this — was worth marking.

You did not arrive at that page alone. You arrived in a long file of readers, most of them dead, who had been there before you and had quietly left signs.

This is not a metaphor.

In 1789, Thomas Jefferson sat in his library at Monticello and read John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. The book was already a century old. Locke had been dead for eighty-five years. But the margins of Jefferson’s copy still hold his pencil marks — liberty here, consent there, government’s purpose underlined twice. He was not reading Locke. He was answering him.

Locke himself had read Francis Bacon the same way, eighty years earlier. Bacon’s margins, in turn, were filled with notes on Aristotle. Aristotle had taught Plato’s school in Athens, where Plato had once recorded the conversations of Socrates, who never wrote a word himself but had been read for two and a half thousand years anyway — through the marks his students left in scrolls that were copied, annotated, copied again, and passed forward, one set of margins at a time.

When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he was not having an original thought. He was completing a sentence that Socrates had begun, that Plato had carried, that Aristotle had argued with, that Bacon had reframed, that Locke had refined, and that Jefferson, holding the same pencil his predecessors had held in some figurative sense, finally wrote out in a form the world would remember.

The Declaration of Independence is a marginal note in a 2,000-year-old book.

This is how knowledge has always moved. Not in textbooks. Not in summaries. Through the hands of readers who marked the pages and gave them, eventually, to other readers.

For most of the history of the written word, this was understood without anyone having to say it.

In medieval Europe, the most valuable books in any monastery were not the rare ones. They were the annotated ones — the manuscripts whose margins were dense with notes from earlier monks, who had read the same lines a hundred years before and left behind the questions they had not been able to answer. A young reader, opening such a book, was not encountering a text. He was entering a conversation already in progress.

This practice had a name: marginalia. The marks in the margin. Latin and Arabic scholars used the same word for the same impulse — hashiya, “edge-writing,” the reader’s contribution to the text. In Japan, the equivalent practice — 書き込み — was so common in samurai-era libraries that an unmarked book was considered slightly suspect: had anyone serious actually read it?

Across every literate tradition, in every century before our own, a book was understood to be a vehicle for a long, slow conversation among readers. The text was the starting point. The marginalia was where thinking actually happened. To inherit a marked book was to inherit a teacher you had never met.

Then we lost it.

Glasp Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The chain of readers did not break suddenly. It thinned, slowly, over about three generations.

Cheap mass-market paperbacks made books disposable; you no longer marked a book because the next reader was probably going to throw it away. Libraries forbade marking, for understandable reasons that nevertheless cut every reader off from every reader who had come before. The shift to digital reading completed what print disposability had begun: a Kindle highlight sits in a private cloud, visible to its owner and to Amazon’s recommendation algorithm, and to absolutely no one else who will ever read that book.

Today, you can read the same sentence in Meditations that Thomas Jefferson read, that John Stuart Mill read, that Hannah Arendt read, that millions of careful readers have stopped at across two thousand years — and you will read it as if no one has ever read it before. The page is blank around the line. The conversation has gone silent. You are alone with a text that, for most of its history, no serious reader was ever alone with.

This is one of the great unmarked losses of the digital era. Not just that we read alone. That we have forgotten reading was once a kind of company.

But the chain is still there. It is only invisible.

You felt it the last time a friend handed you a book and said here, read this — the third chapter especially. You felt it the last time a writer you trust mentioned, in passing, that they had recently been working their way through someone unfashionable, and you immediately added the book to your list. You felt it every time you discovered that a sentence you found electric had also been the sentence that, fifty years earlier, had changed the life of someone you admire.

You are already part of the chain. You always were. The books you have read were chosen, ultimately, because someone before you noticed them — and someone before them, and someone before them, back through the years until you reach a name no one remembers anymore, a reader who simply marked a passage and passed the book forward.

You did not assemble your reading life by yourself. It was assembled, in advance, by every reader who came before you and decided what was worth keeping.

What this means is quietly remarkable.

You are not just a reader. You are a link — a small, specific, irreplaceable link — in a chain that has been carrying certain ideas, certain sentences, certain ways of seeing, through hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. The chain runs through you, whether you notice it or not, the moment you decide a passage is worth stopping at. Someone before you stopped here. Someone after you will, too, if the chain holds.

The chain holds because individual readers, mostly without thinking about it, kept marking the pages.

This is, in the end, what we forgot.

We forgot that to mark a book is not a private act. It is the smallest possible contribution to a tradition older than any of us — the slow human project of deciding, line by line, which thoughts are worth carrying forward. Every underlined sentence is a vote. Every margin note is a footnote in a footnote in a footnote, stretching back to a reader who once thought, in the half-light of a cell or a study or a train car, this. yes. someone should remember this.

This is, we have come to believe, what Glasp is quietly for.

Not to digitize highlighting. Not to make notes searchable. Those are features, not the point. The point is to repair the chain.

The name itself, Greatest Legacy Accumulated as Shared Proof, turned out to be a description of the chain we did not fully realize we were naming when we chose it.

When you mark a passage on Glasp, you are not entering data. You are doing the same thing the monk in his scriptorium did, the same thing Jefferson did at Monticello, the same thing the samurai scholar did in his study: you are leaving a small sign, in the margin of a shared text, for the readers who will come after you. They may be three months away or three decades away. They may speak your language or some language that does not exist yet. But when they reach the page, they will see your mark — and they will know, the way readers have always known, that someone serious has been here.

The chain is repaired one highlight at a time.

You did not need to plan to participate in it. You only needed to read, honestly, the way you were already going to read, and to leave the small evidence of your attention where the next reader could find it.

A reader two hundred years from now will pick up a book you marked. She will read your annotation, the way Jefferson once read Locke’s. She will not know your name. She will not need to. She will only know — the way every reader before her has known — that she is not alone in the text. That a long line of readers has been here. That she is, simply by reading carefully, joining them.

You are, today, reading a book that has already been read.

Two hundred years from now, someone will be reading a book that you are reading right now.

Mark it the way the readers before you marked it. Not for legacy. Not for posterity. Just because, for two thousand years, that is what serious readers have done.

The chain runs through you.

You are its link for today.

Have you ever found, in a used book or a library copy, a note left by an earlier reader that changed how you read the book? Or held a book that had been marked by someone you loved? We’d love to hear about it. Share your story with us in the comments — we read every one.

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“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

― Martin Luther King Jr.

Hi friends,

We hand-picked 3 good pieces of content to inspire and motivate you now and in the future. Keep track of the insights that resonate with you by highlighting them with Glasp💡

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

Save to Glasp

📚 3 Good Recommendations

How to Apply Mindset: Using Growth Mindset to Actually Learn Better
by Glasp (12 mins)

• Mindset shapes action: Fixed mindset treats struggle as proof you lack ability, prompting avoidance. Growth mindset treats it as normal learning, prompting next steps. Swap “I’m bad at this” for “I’m a beginner at this.”

• “Yet” forces a plan: Adding “yet” to being stuck (”I don’t understand this yet“) naturally leads to asking what to do next—find another explanation, work an example, teach it back.

• Research is modest but real: Growth-mindset effects are small on average, strongest for struggling students in supportive settings. It keeps you in the seat long enough for real techniques (active recall, spaced practice) to work—the door, not the room.

Save to Glasp

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
by and (18 mins)

• AI is automating coding, not software engineering. Software development consists of deciding what to build, implementing it, and verifying/delivering it. AI has greatly improved the implementation (”execute”) stage, but the decision-making and accountability stages still require humans.

• Claims of AI-driven mass layoffs are not supported by the evidence. Many highly publicized layoffs attributed to AI were actually driven by financial pressures, restructuring, or cost-cutting. Research suggests AI’s labor-market impact is more likely to slow hiring growth than to cause widespread firing.

• AI may increase demand for software engineers rather than eliminate them. As software becomes cheaper and faster to create, organizations and individuals are likely to build much more of it. Engineers’ roles will shift toward supervising AI systems, defining requirements, making decisions, and ensuring quality rather than writing every line of code themselves.

Save to Glasp

Building a Good Vertical Agent
by Peter Wang (14 mins)

• Thesis: A good agent is a “faithful compression of its task distribution” — with the model fixed, accuracy depends on placing each capability at the tier that minimizes context cost across a long tail of tasks.

• The hierarchy: Structure context like CPU memory — L1 for the bread-and-butter ~80% (always in the prompt, heavily compressed), L2 for occasional capabilities (curated English specs fetched on demand), L3 for the raw API tome (on disk, mined via a short skill).

• Takeaways: Use one execute_code tool not thirty, spend disproportionate effort on the common operations, and expect the tiers to slide down as models improve — though “the right thing at the right time” always matters.

Save to Glasp

📣 Community Updates

• 🟨 Glasp Research — Now on arXiv:
  We’ve been publishing research papers on arXiv. They cover how Glasp grew its ChatGPT referral traffic (separating real AEO gains from the answer engines’ own growth) and what millions of highlights reveal about how people read. Browse them all here.

• 🟦 Kindle Highlights Milestone:
  Glasp users have now imported over 71,000 Kindle highlights. Bring your own library in here.

• 🟥 YouTube Channel Tracking:
  Over 3,100 YouTube channels are now being tracked on Glasp, so you never miss a new video worth highlighting. Start tracking here.

• 🟩 Guest post on Growth with Sean Ellis:
  We wrote a guest post for Sean Ellis, who coined the term “growth hacking,” on how Glasp grew ChatGPT traffic ~37x — from about 500 to 19,000 daily sessions in four months — by reading our own server logs instead of querying LLMs from the outside. Read it here.

❤️ Gratitude

Thank you for sharing and mentioning us on X, LinkedIn, and/or your blogs. 🙂 We appreciate your support! Please don’t hesitate to ask us anything at any time. Also, feel free to join our Reddit Community ;)

• Highlight & Summarize: PDF Companion on HuntScreens

  

• Glasp on Flaex.ai

  

• Best AI Tools for Literature Review and Thesis Writing 2026 on iLovePhD

• Youtube Video Summary on Creati.ai

  

• Vous produisez de l’or. Et vous le jetez. (You produce gold. And you throw it away.) on by on

• 🔎 Personne ne connaît cette astuce (🔎 No one knows this trick) by on

• MAG7 | La nouvelle norme humaine (MAG7 | The new human standard) on

• Claude Opus 4.7 + Claude Design: la guida pratica per usarli nel tuo lavoro (Claude Opus 4.7 + Claude Design: a practical guide to using them in your work) by

• Come creo un ecosistema di contenuti qualitativi con l’AI (metodo semplice) (How to create a high-quality content ecosystem with AI (simple method)) by

• La Mappa Personale di Chi Ha Cambiato il Mio Modo di Pensare alla Curation - #74 by on

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter!

See you next week ;)

Best,
Kei and Kazuki

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If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

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Hi, I’m Bobby Powers! I run the Leader & Learner publication, where I share two posts per week that will help you become a more curious leader and learner.

Unlike most people, I didn’t get addicted to reading because it’s fun (even though it is). I got hooked when I realized books could help me improve many aspects of my life.

Countless times, I’ve read about a topic one day, only to have that knowledge immediately help me solve a problem a day or two later. That immediate feedback loop is invigorating, and it’s kept me coming back for more.

That’s one of the biggest reasons why I read much more nonfiction than fiction. I love learning new principles I can apply to my life and work. But the only way to harness those kinds of meaningful insights is to read deeply, which is the purpose of this post.

Here are 10 tactics to get more out of what you read:

1. Read with a pen in your hand

“A great reader respects the book by NOT respecting the book.” -Ryan Holiday

I used to treat my books no differently than a library book. It felt wrong to deflower the pages with my scribbles, so each margin remained milky white. But then I heard that many of the top readers throughout history took copious margin notes, so I gave it a shot. My reading comprehension skyrocketed. Writing in the book helps you fully immerse yourself in the text and signals to your brain what’s important.

2. Use the book’s back cover to create a one-page cheat sheet

“Never read without taking extracts.” -Pliny the Elder

After I started underlining books and writing in the margins, I took it a step further. Now, for the past decade, I’ve also been writing notes in the back cover. I jot down my top takeaways, along with their respective page numbers (as depicted below). This creates a powerful one-page cheat sheet I can reference later whenever I want to refresh my memory about that book. Now, whenever I want a two-minute refresher on a book, I just pull it off the shelf and open the back cover. Voilà!

3. Write timelines to put events in context

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of the lessons that history has to teach us.” -Aldous Huxley

In many nonfiction books like biographies and historical books, it’s helpful to write a short timeline in the back cover so you can keep track of what happened when. This can also help you memorize a few important dates, in case you want to reference those later. (For example, in the picture above, you can see that I boxed a few of the critical dates I want to remember in the timeline.)

4. Argue with the author

“Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who’ll argue with you.” -John Wooden

As an intellectually independent and curious person, it should be uncommon for you to agree with every single thing an author says. Approach everything with healthy skepticism and critical thinking. When you find yourself disagreeing with an author’s point, jot a note in the margins. Engage in literary discourse with the author through your marginalia.

5. Choose at least one idea to put into practice immediately

“Action without information is chaos, but information without action is a waste. The key to unlocking our full potential lies in finding the perfect balance between the two.” -Pat Flynn

Effective reading is like breathing: you must breathe in and breathe out. You inhale ideas and exhale action. Just like in real life, it doesn’t work to only inhale and never exhale. You must enact what you learn so it doesn’t leave you bloated with unapplied knowledge and facts. Pick at least one practical idea from each book that you can immediately apply in your life.

6. Don’t read while lying down

“…the feel and appearance of a book when combined with a literate person in a straight chair can create a spiritual condition of priceless depth and meaning. This form of meditation…may be the greatest treasure at the core of our civilization.” -Kurt Vonnegut

In college, I fell asleep every time I read my assigned books. My persistent napping convinced me that books must be boring. Like an idiot, it took me years to realize that I was only falling asleep because I was reading while laying on my bed. After I kicked that habit and began reading at my desk, I stopped napping. (Btw, sitting at a desk also helps enable better note-taking. Win-win.)

7. Physical books > e-Books

“Though many people find they can read faster on a device, the distractions, like social media scrolling, advertisements, and email notifications, often hinder memory retention. Physical books provide an immersive experience, resulting in readers who absorb and recall the content more effectively.” -Heather Rose Artushin MSW, LISW-CP

As a big Barnes & Noble fan, I remember excitedly buying the Nook Color e-reader as soon as it launched. I joyfully downloaded a few books and pounded through them, thankful to have avoided adding more tomes to my already-cramped bookshelves. But shortly afterward, a couple of friends asked me what I had been reading lately, and I realized that I couldn’t remember a lick of what I had read. Sure enough, a 2024 article in Psychology Today cites research that indicates reading comprehension is 6-8 times better when reading physical books compared to e-books. If you’re hoping to remember what you read, trust paper.

8. Summarize what you’re reading

“While we teach, we learn.” -Seneca

Almost every day, my wife and I discuss what we’re each reading. I’ve noticed that my first synopsis of whatever I’m reading is often clumsy and disorganized. It takes me a while to distill the book’s themes and takeaways in my own head, so the ideas come out jumbled. But then, a few days later, friends or colleagues will ask me what I’m reading, and each successive synopsis gets more crisp. This act of discussing and synthesizing book takeaways is helpful for the learning process. Look for more opportunities to discuss what you’re reading to crystallize your takeaways.

9. Save quotes and stories in a commonplace book

“Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters — just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, ‘commonplacing,’ as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations.” -Steven Johnson

A commonplace book is a collection of ideas, quotations, or anything else you want to reference later. You can collect such information in a journal, second brain app, or even a box of notecards. Especially if you’re someone who frequently creates presentations, speeches, articles, books, sermons, lessons, or anything else that depends on saved knowledge, I highly recommend starting a commonplace book.

10. Experiment with new genres

“It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.” -Joseph Brodsky

It’s healthy to peruse other genres beyond your favorite genre. Doing so helps you develop a well-rounded perspective on the world—and it also can help you make connections between disparate worlds. More times than I can count, I’ve accidentally stumbled across the same person or event in multiple books around the same time, and the experience gave me a fuller understanding of that topic.

Example: President Lyndon B. Johnson came up in a book I read about social justice (because he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act), then he also popped up in a U.S. history book, then I read an entire biography about him, then he came up again in a historical novel. The result was a latticework of information about LBJ that helped me understand him from multiple angles.

It’s okay if you don’t remember a bunch of facts after finishing a book. After all, the purpose of reading isn’t memorization, it’s osmosis. The concepts later ooze out of you in unexpected ways—taking the form of ideas, philosophical perspectives, or even changes in character.

The ten practices above will improve this osmosis process while also aiding your overall reading comprehension. Give them a shot to see which tips help you most!

📣 Community Updates by Glasp

• 🟥 Glasp Talk with Bobby Powers:

  Glasp Talk features intimate interviews with luminaries, revealing their emotions, experiences, and stories. The guest, Bobby Powers, is a dedicated learner passionate about leadership and personal development. With over a decade of experience managing teams, leading onboarding, and Learning and Development programs at various startups and SMBs, Bobby is also an avid reader, having read over a thousand books in the last 15 years.

  ✨ Want a concise summary before diving in? Install the YouTube Summary with ChatGPT extension by Glasp for instant video summaries!

• 🟦 70,000+ Unique Kindle Books’ Highlights Imported to Glasp:
  Glasp users have now imported Kindle Highlights from over 70,000 unique books 🎉 This milestone shows how quickly our shared knowledge base is growing. If you’d like to import your Kindle Highlights, please see the tutorial here.

  

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Here’s something we noticed while pulling this month’s most-imported books.

Read them in order and a quiet argument starts to form — one that none of these authors coordinated, and that this month’s highlighters seem to have arrived at independently:

Ability isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you build.

Carol Dweck calls it a growth mindset. James Clear says to forget your goals and trust your systems. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans tell you to stop planning your way forward and start building your way forward. Three different decades, three different fields — and our highlighters underlined the same idea in each.

So this month we’re not just sharing what got imported. For every book, we’re showing you the single line that the most readers stopped to highlight — what we’re calling Reader Consensus. It’s the closest thing we have to a room full of strangers nodding at the same sentence.

Here are May’s top 10.

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

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📚 The Top 10

1. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Carol S. Dweck — Stanford psychologist whose decades of research on motivation gave us the “fixed vs. growth mindset” framework.

“Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?”

Reader Consensus: 11 of 25 highlighters underlined this exact line — 44% of everyone who marked the book.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (14) · Português (12) · Deutsch (1)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

2. Educated

Tara Westover — historian and memoirist who left an isolated survivalist upbringing in rural Idaho and didn’t set foot in a classroom until 17.

“You can’t be a person without a birthday.”

Reader Consensus: 2 of 12 highlighters — 17%.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Deutsch (1)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

3. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Greg McKeown — writer and speaker on focus and priority; “essentialism” is his name for doing less, but better.

“...only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution.”

Reader Consensus: 12 of 35 highlighters — 34%.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (59) · Português (12) · Español (5)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

4. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari — historian whose sweeping account of how Homo sapiens came to run the planet became a global phenomenon.

“Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in.”

Reader Consensus: 14 of 53 highlighters — 26%.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Español (11) · Português (5) · 日本語 (1)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

5. Meditations

Marcus Aurelius — Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher who wrote these notes to himself, never meaning for anyone else to read them.

“...it is not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem.”

Reader Consensus: 10 of 22 highlighters — 45%.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (13)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

6. Designing Your Life

Bill Burnett & Dave Evans — Stanford design professors behind the wildly popular life-design course. Burnett directs Stanford's Design Program; Evans is a co-founder of Electronic Arts who once led product on the first Apple mouse.

“The five mind-sets you need: curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, and radical collaboration.”

Reader Consensus: 10 of 25 highlighters — 40%.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (7) · Português (3)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

7. Atomic Habits

James Clear — writer on habits and decision-making whose framework for tiny, compounding changes has sold millions of copies.

“A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.”

Reader Consensus: 25 of 73 highlighters — 34%.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (44) · Español (3) · Deutsch (2) · Français (2)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

8. The Dark Forest

Cixin Liu — China’s most celebrated science-fiction author; this is the second novel in his Hugo-winning Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy.

“For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination.”

Reader Consensus: 5 of 9 highlighters — 56%.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (2)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

9. The 5 Types of Wealth

Sahil Bloom — writer and investor whose framework reframes wealth as five dimensions: time, social, mental, physical, and financial.

“Your wealthy life may be enabled by money, but in the end, it will be defined by everything else.”

Reader Consensus: 6 of 10 highlighters — 60%.

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

10. Supercommunicators

Charles Duhigg — Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of The Power of Habit, here on the science of connection and conversation.

“To communicate with someone, we must connect with them.”

Reader Consensus: 9 of 13 highlighters — 69%, the highest agreement of any book on this list.

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

📈 Discovered in May

A different cut: three books where this month wasn’t just a good month — it was the month most of their all-time highlighters arrived.

• The 5 Types of Wealth — nearly half of everyone who has ever highlighted it (43%) did so in May.

• The Dark Forest — a third of its highlighters (30%) landed this month.

• Supercommunicators — a quarter of its highlighters (25%) arrived in May — and it still posted the single highest Reader Consensus in the whole top 10 (69%).

New books don’t usually agree with their readers this fast. These three did.

❤️ Before you go

Every line above came from someone who took the time to mark it. That’s the whole idea: when you highlight on Glasp, you’re not just saving a sentence for yourself — you’re leaving it for the next reader.

If any of these books are on your shelf, import your highlights and add your own underline to the count. Next month’s consensus is being written right now.

See you in the margins, The Glasp Team

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If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

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Here’s a question that sounds philosophical but turns out to be empirically testable:

When you highlight a sentence in an article, how much of that decision is you — and how much is just... what any reader would do?

We’ve been sitting on this question at Glasp for a while. We have millions of highlights from hundreds of thousands of readers. And recently, we decided to stop speculating and start measuring.

The answer surprised us. And it has implications for how we think about personalization, AI, and the future of reading itself.

The Experiment

We designed what researchers call a “co-readership identity control.” The setup is simple:

Take a document that multiple Glasp users have highlighted. Now ask: given a user’s highlighting history, can we predict which highlights in that document are theirs versus someone else’s?

If highlighting is deeply personal — a fingerprint of your mind — then yes, your history should predict your marks. If highlighting is mostly shared (we all find the same things important), then one reader’s history should predict another reader’s highlights just as well.

We ran this experiment at two “altitudes”:

1. Document selection: Which articles do you choose to read?

2. Sentence selection: Within an article, which sentences do you highlight?

The results were asymmetric — and fascinating.

Finding #1: Your Individuality Lives in Selection

At the document level, your reading history does predict what you’ll read next. We measured an “identity gap” of +0.12 to +0.17 — meaning your own history is a meaningfully better predictor of your future reads than another reader’s history.

This signal is real. It survived every robustness check we threw at it. And it held up even when we used “hard negatives” — documents on the same topic that you didn’t read, making the test much stricter.

But here’s the nuance: the signal is modest and topic-dominated. Most of what makes your reading history predictive is your interests — the topics you return to. Not some deeper stylistic fingerprint. Not a unique cognitive signature. Just... what you’re curious about.

This aligns with something Austin Kleon writes in Show Your Work!: “You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life.” Your reading selections are a form of self-expression — but it’s expression through curation, not creation.

What Is This “Individuality” Made Of?

We wanted to go deeper. If your reading history predicts your future reads, what exactly is doing the predicting? Is it some deep cognitive style — a preference for conclusions over introductions, for quantitative claims over anecdotes? Or is it simply... your interests?

To find out, we ran a “topic decomposition.” Instead of comparing you to a random other reader, we compared you to your topically-nearest peer — someone whose reading history overlaps most with yours in subject matter.

The result was striking: the identity gap shrank by about 8x when the comparison peer was topic-matched.

In other words, most of what makes your reading history “yours” is the topics you return to. Not a unique highlighting style. Not a cognitive fingerprint. Just... what you’re curious about.

This might sound deflating — “I’m just my interests?” — but we think it’s actually liberating. Your curiosity is your signature. The rabbit holes you go down, the questions you keep asking, the threads you keep pulling — that’s the individuality that shows up in your data.

A thin residual does survive even against a near-topic-twin (about +0.026 in our measurement). We can’t tell if this is a genuine “style” signal or just finer-grained topic we couldn’t capture. But either way, it’s small. The main story is clear: your individuality in selection is mostly stable thematic preference.

Finding #2: Within a Document, We’re All the Same

Here’s where it gets humbling.

At the sentence level — which sentences you highlight within an article — the personal signal nearly vanishes. The identity gap drops to +0.017. That’s almost nothing.

What does this mean? It means that when two people read the same article, they highlight remarkably similar sentences. The “salience” — what feels important, what deserves a yellow mark — is shared.

This isn’t a flaw in the data. It’s a feature of human cognition. We are social animals. We evolved to attend to similar things. When a sentence contains a key insight, a surprising claim, or a memorable turn of phrase, most readers notice it.

David Perell calls writing a “Serendipity Vehicle” — a way to send ideas into the world and see who resonates. Our data suggests the reverse is also true: reading is a convergence vehicle. We converge on what matters.

Finding #3: Personalized AI Doesn’t Beat the Basics

We didn’t stop at measurement. We also tested whether personalization could be useful.

Imagine a feature: you open a new article, and an AI pre-highlights the sentences you would probably mark, based on your history. A personalized auto-highlight. Sounds useful, right?

We built a two-stage system to test this:

• Stage 1: An impersonal model proposes candidate sentences (the ones “a typical reader” would highlight).

• Stage 2: A personal model re-ranks those candidates based on your highlighting history.

The result? Personal re-ranking didn’t help. In fact, it performed worse than just trusting the impersonal Stage 1 order.

And here’s the kicker: the Stage 1 model — a state-of-the-art LLM, including frontier models like GPT-5.5 — couldn’t even beat a trivial “lead baseline.” That’s just ranking sentences by their position in the document: first sentences first.

Let that sink in. A frontier AI model, asked to predict what humans would highlight, performed worse than “just read the beginning of each paragraph.”

We tested this carefully. The lead baseline — simply ranking earlier sentences higher — achieved an average precision of 0.237. The LLM? Around 0.22–0.25, depending on the model. The lead baseline also beat the user’s own highlighting history as a predictor (0.185). Knowing which sentences come first in each paragraph predicts what you’ll highlight better than knowing your entire reading history.

But here’s what’s interesting: the crowd still beats the lead baseline decisively (+0.103 in average precision). So the crowd isn’t just picking up on document structure — it’s capturing something more. Real human attention, aggregated.

This isn’t a failure of AI. It’s a revelation about salience. Human attention is governed by structural cues — position, paragraph breaks, topic sentences — that are so fundamental they’re hard to beat. LLMs can summarize, but they don’t see documents the way readers do. They don’t have the embodied experience of scanning a page, of eyes drawn to the opening line of a section, of attention flagging in the middle and reviving at the end.

Finding #4: A Few Dozen Highlights Is Enough

One practical question: how much history do you need before your “individuality” becomes visible?

We ran a scaling analysis, varying the number of past highlights used to build a user’s profile from 1 to 100. The answer: a few dozen highlights is enough. After that, more history doesn’t help.

At K=1 (just one past highlight), the model’s predictive power is already above chance. By K=20, you’ve captured about two-thirds of the maximum signal. By K=60, the curve plateaus — adding more highlights from 60 to 100 makes no measurable difference.

This is good news for new users: you don’t need years of history to have a meaningful profile. A month of active highlighting is probably enough.

But it’s also a ceiling. Unlike the crowd — whose predictive accuracy keeps rising as more readers contribute — your individual signal maxes out quickly. The crowd is data-hungry; your individuality is data-cheap.

This asymmetry reinforces our main finding: the path to better predictions isn’t deeper individual modeling. It’s broader aggregation.

Why This Matters for Glasp

At Glasp, we’ve always believed in the power of social highlighting. This research gives us the science behind the intuition.

1. Popular Highlights aren’t noise. They’re signal.

When you see “87 people highlighted this sentence,” you’re not seeing groupthink. You’re seeing collective salience — the distilled attention of many minds. Our data shows that this shared layer is the layer. It’s where the information lives.

This is why we invested in Popular Highlights as a core feature. It’s not a popularity contest. It’s a knowledge primitive.

2. Personalization has a ceiling.

The tech industry has spent a decade promising hyper-personalization: feeds tailored to you, recommendations that know you better than you know yourself. Our research suggests this promise has limits — at least in reading.

Your “you-ness” shows up in what you choose to read. But once you’re inside a document, you’re not that different from other readers. The personal residual is a whisper.

This doesn’t mean personalization is useless. It means it belongs at the selection layer — helping you discover what to read next — not at the salience layer, trying to guess which sentences you’d mark.

3. Aggregation beats personalization.

If individual signals are modest and salience is shared, then the path to better reading tools isn’t deeper models of you. It’s better aggregation of everyone.

This is the Glasp thesis in a nutshell: your highlights, combined with millions of others, create something no individual can produce alone. A collectively annotated web. A living marginalia. What we call the “Chain of Readers.”

swyx talks about “learning exhaust” — the byproduct of learning in public. Highlights are reading exhaust. And when you aggregate reading exhaust at scale, you get a map of human attention.

The Limits of What We Found

A few caveats, because intellectual honesty matters:

• Our population is self-selected. Glasp users are not “readers in general.” They’re people who install a highlighting tool. The results describe social highlighting on a co-readership platform.

• Topic dominates the signal. Most of the predictive power in your reading history is your interests, not some deeper cognitive style. We couldn’t cleanly separate “topic” from “non-thematic style.”

• The LLM result is zero-shot. We didn’t fine-tune or prompt-engineer. A heavily optimized model might do better. But the point stands: off-the-shelf AI isn’t a shortcut to human salience.

What This Means for You

If you’re a Glasp user, here’s the practical takeaway:

Trust the crowd. When you see a sentence that dozens of people highlighted, it’s probably worth your attention. That’s not conformity — it’s signal.

Your selections matter. The articles you choose, the topics you return to, the rabbit holes you go down — that’s where your individuality expresses itself. Your Glasp profile isn’t just a log. It’s a portrait.

Highlight freely. Don’t worry about whether your highlights are “unique.” They don’t need to be. They’re your contribution to a collective layer that benefits everyone.

And if you’re building AI tools for reading? Our research suggests a counterintuitive direction: don’t personalize harder. Aggregate better.

Conclusion

We set out to measure where individuality lives in reading. The answer: it lives in selection, not salience.

What you read is personal. Which sentences you highlight is shared. And the path to smarter reading isn’t deeper personalization — it’s better aggregation of the collective.

This is what Glasp is for. Not to build a mirror of you, but to weave your highlights into a tapestry of us.

📄 Read the full paper: Selection, Not Salience: The Shape and Limits of Personalization in Social Highlighting

📄 Background reading: This paper builds on our earlier work, Personal Salience: Highlighting Is Social, but Individuality Lives in Selection, which first identified where individuality surfaces in highlighting behavior.

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The room is quiet. The people you love are nearby, or have already gone ahead of you. You have weeks, maybe days. You are clear enough to think but tired enough to be honest. And in that quiet, you begin to do what almost everyone, at this stage of a life, ends up doing: you look back, and you ask whether it meant anything.

This is the question every philosophy, every religion, every spiritual tradition has tried to prepare us for. It is the question that knowledge work, modern productivity, and most of how we spend our days do almost nothing to help us answer. And it is the only question that, in the end, will matter to you.

What will be the answer?

For eight years, the Australian palliative nurse Bronnie Ware sat with people exactly in that room. She kept a quiet record of what they said. Her book — The Top Five Regrets of the Dying — has now been translated into more than thirty languages, because the pattern she found turned out to be the same everywhere.

People nearing death rarely regret what they failed to achieve. They regret what they failed to express, who they failed to stay close to, what they failed to give. They wished they had been honest while there was still time. They wished they had let themselves be known.

But Ware’s quieter observation came from the other side of her work. Not everyone she sat with died in regret. Some — without fanfare, without drama — died at peace. And what they had in common was not wealth, or completed ambitions, or anything the world would call success. It was something stranger and simpler.

They could trace, from their lives into other lives, small lines of inheritance. A daughter carrying forward a kindness. A friend who had been changed by knowing them. A student who would remember the lesson. They had, somewhere along the way, given something to someone — and they knew it.

The people who reach the end at peace, Ware noticed, are the ones who can quietly answer yes to one question:

Did something of me reach somebody else?

This isn’t a soft observation. It is one of the most consistent findings in the psychology of adult development.

Erik Erikson, studying how human beings change across the entire lifespan, identified what he called generativity — the deep human need, especially in the second half of life, to feel we have given something to those who come after us. Without it, he warned, the final stage of life is despair. With it, we arrive at what he called integrity — the quiet ability to look back and accept that one’s life was, in fact, one’s own.

Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz and watched others around him decide to live or die, came to the same conclusion through darker means. What separated those who endured from those who gave up was not strength. The people who survived were the ones who, even in hell, could still picture themselves as the kind of person they wanted to be on the other side.

Other researchers — studying centenarians, ordinary retirees, people who reach old age in good spirits across vastly different cultures — keep returning to the same finding: those who live longest, and die most peacefully, have a quiet, durable sense of being needed.

The pattern is everywhere. It does not depend on accomplishment, or income, or whether anyone outside your immediate orbit ever knew your name. At ninety, looking back, the question is not what you built. The question is whether anything of you traveled.

Glasp Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This presents a quiet problem for people who live mostly inside their own minds.

You read constantly. You think constantly. You learn things that, in another century, would have made you a scholar. But almost none of it leaves your head. The book you found life-changing in March is a vague impression by November. The careful thinking you did this week will reach almost no one outside the room you did it in. You are deeply generative by nature — but you cannot see your generativity.

And so a particular kind of reader arrives at sixty, at seventy, at eighty, with a strange and specific dread: I read a thousand books. I thought a thousand thoughts. I cannot point to a single one that lives in another person.

This is, we think, one of the silent griefs of intellectual life today. And it is exactly the grief that Bronnie Ware’s peaceful patients had managed to avoid.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about marking a page as a small act of fidelity to your future self — proof that you were here, paying attention.

But the same mark, without your intending it, also makes something else visible to anyone who happens to see it. It shows the way you read.

Not just what you read. Not just what you thought of it. How you read — what made you stop, what you went back to, what you couldn’t quite let go of, what you came at slowly. The texture and seriousness of your attention. The shape of your curiosity, sustained over years.

You were not performing this. You were just reading. But what your reading looked like — the patience, the consistency, the quiet care — is, in the end, often far more interesting to other readers than the books themselves.

This is, in Uchimura Kanzō’s framework, the noble life part. The way you lived as a reader, made plain by the marks you left without performing, for no one in particular.

The peaceful patients Bronnie Ware sat with were not strategic about their lives. They had simply followed what called them, paid attention as it called, stayed honest about what moved them. None of it was done for posterity. None of it was even done for any specific person who might one day need it. It was just how they lived.

What they discovered, slowly, was that how they had lived had been useful to other people.

Their kindness was useful. Their seriousness was useful. The texture of their attention was useful. People around them — and sometimes strangers — would say things like the way you read that book changed how I read it. The way you kept asking questions about that subject made me want to ask. The way you stayed patient with that difficult writer taught me to stay patient. These reports came back, unsolicited, over years.

They were not being told that they had given the right gift, or said the right thing, or made the right contribution. They were being told that their way of being had been good for somebody else.

That is the report a person can carry into their final weeks without flinching.

This is, we think, what Glasp is quietly for.

The acronym we sometimes spell out — Greatest Legacy Accumulated as Shared Proof — was never about engineering a legacy. A legacy you engineer is the kind Uchimura warned us about: bequests of money, monuments to oneself, displays of accomplishment. He thought the most universal legacy — the one available to anyone, regardless of station — was something far quieter: a life well lived, made visible.

What Glasp holds is the small evidence of such a life. Not the work you composed for the world. Not the things you achieved. Just what you marked when nobody was watching, over years, because something held your attention.

When that record becomes visible — when another reader finds the line you once stopped at and uses it to find her own line — she is not learning a fact from you. She is encountering a way of reading. She is inheriting a posture. And sometimes, slowly, something of that posture becomes part of how she lives, too.

You did not do this for her. You did it because the sentence held you. But it reached her anyway. And the way you had been living your reading life — patiently, curiously, honestly, year after year — turned out, without your having planned any of it, to have been useful.

Some of the time, you will hear about it.

A reader will write to say your notes carried her through a difficult chapter. A friend will mention that the way you paid attention to a particular writer changed how she paid attention. A student will, years later, say the way you read that book made me want to read more carefully.

When that arrives, it is not the satisfaction of having helped. It is something rarer and more precise.

It is the report that the way you lived your reading life was a way of living worth inheriting.

The peaceful patients had received this report, over decades, in small doses. They had not lived for the purpose of receiving it. They had just lived — paid attention, stayed curious, taken books and people seriously. And the living, it turned out, had reached people. And the people, sometimes, had let them know.

That is how a life comes to feel like it had meaning.

Not because of what you built.

Because of how you lived — made visible, here and there, through the small honest things you noticed along the way.

Have you ever realized — quietly, after the fact — that something you cared about, just for yourself, had ended up mattering to someone else? We’d love to hear about it. Share your story with us in the comments — we read every one.

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Start highlighting the web with Glasp

“The best way to cheer yourself is to cheer somebody else up.”

― Albert Einstein

Hi friends,

We hand-picked 3 good pieces of content to inspire and motivate you now and in the future. Keep track of the insights that resonate with you by highlighting them with Glasp💡

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

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📚 3 Good Recommendations

Collective Intelligence: How Shared Knowledge Makes Everyone Smarter
by Glasp (12 mins)

• Collective intelligence depends on conditions, not smart individuals. Research shows group performance relies on equal participation, social sensitivity, and diverse perspectives—not high IQs.

• Four requirements for success: diversity, independence, decentralization, and proper aggregation. Without these, crowds produce groupthink and misinformation.

• AI amplifies but can’t replace human judgment. The future is human-AI collaboration—AI synthesizes patterns while humans provide the attention and context that feed collective knowledge.

Save to Glasp

The Google Capital Company
by Ben Thompson (11 mins)

• Google as the new Berkshire model: Just as Buffett used See’s Candies profits to fund capital-intensive BNSF Railway, Google is using its high-margin advertising cash to build out AI/cloud infrastructure—betting on larger absolute dollars over relative margins.

• Berkshire’s $10B bet: Alphabet is raising $80B in equity, with Berkshire finally investing in Google. The signal: AI compute demand is massive, and Google’s TPU advantages make it the best vehicle for deploying Berkshire’s $373B cash pile.

• Cash wins the compute race: When compute capacity becomes the bottleneck, the company that can deploy the most capital wins—and Google’s combination of ad revenue, equity issuance, and chip infrastructure positions it to dominate.

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Things I Think I Think... The New Internet Era
by Ted Neward (6 mins)

• AI is a tool, not a destination: Like electricity and the internet before it, companies succeed when they treat AI as a means to an end—not the end itself.

• Diversified giants survive; pure-play AI won’t: Apple, Microsoft, and Meta have fallback products. OpenAI and Anthropic, branded entirely around AI, will likely collapse and get acquired.

• Expect broad fallout: VC debt unwinding could rival the sub-prime crisis, NVidia’s GPU dominance will erode, and public backlash against AI will create PR problems for AI-centric brands.

Save to Glasp

📣 Community Updates

• 🟥 Export Kindle Highlights via the Glasp API:
  You can now export your Kindle highlights programmatically through the Glasp API. See the docs here.

• 🟦 Kindle Highlights in the Obsidian Plugin:
  The Glasp Obsidian Plugin now supports exporting your Kindle highlights straight into your vault. See how here.

• 🟩 Glasp MCP Connector:
  We launched the Glasp MCP Connector, so AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT can connect to and read your library directly. Get started here.

• 🟨 Audio Transcription Milestone:
  We’ve now transcribed over 70,000 audio sources on Glasp. Turn any video or podcast into highlightable text — give it a try here.

❤️ Gratitude

Thank you for sharing and mentioning us on X, LinkedIn, and/or your blogs. 🙂 We appreciate your support! Please don’t hesitate to ask us anything at any time. Also, feel free to join our Reddit Community ;)

• ChatGPT for YouTube: The FREE extension that instantly summarizes videos with AI on Inteligencia Aritificial Blog

• Kazuki Nakayashiki, cofounder of Glasp on Inception Studio

• Glasp.co: Social Web Highlighter on ToolsFine

  

• Glasp on WebCatalog

  

• Glasp on Hidemium

• ✪ My Curation Lineage: A Personal Knowledge Map You Can Borrow From - #74 by on

• Glasp: AI Annotator on AI Tools Explorer

• 96 Ferramentas de IA alternativas para 2026: lista organizada por categoria com links para consulta (96 Alternative AI Tools for 2026: List organized by category with links for further information.) by

• Best AI Tools for Literature Review and Thesis Writing 2026 on iLovePhD

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter!
See you next week ;)

Best,
Kei and Kazuki

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📣 Community Updates

📌 Community Milestones

• Kindle highlights imported: 68,000+ unique books

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🔧 Feature Updates

• Glasp API — You can now access your highlights programmatically. The new Highlight Export endpoint lets you pull all your highlights — including imported Kindle books — into your own tools and workflows. Read the API docs.

• Kindle Auto-sync (Beta) — Glasp now imports your new Kindle highlights automatically on a schedule (Daily, Every 3 days, or Weekly) — no manual export needed. Enable it in Extension Settings → Kindle Integration. We’ve updated this tutorial with the steps.

• MCP Connector — Bring your Glasp highlights into Claude and ChatGPT. Connect Glasp as an MCP server and ask your AI assistant about everything you’ve read, highlighted, and saved. Read-only and private to you — it can never post, edit, or delete. Connect it here

📖 New Tutorials & Posts

• Top 3 Most-Highlighted Kindle Books in May

  • The Great Omission — Dallas Willard

  • Mindset — Carol Dweck

  • Educated — Tara Westover

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See you next week ;)

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Kei and Kazuki

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But you read the lines, and something happens. They were marked by someone who saw the world differently than you do now. Someone with different fears, different reasons for finding that sentence important on that day.

That someone was you.

This is one of the strangest experiences of a long reading life: meeting a version of yourself you no longer are. And it raises a question worth sitting with — what was she trying to tell you?

Joan Didion thought about this for most of her career. In her essay On Keeping a Notebook, she defended the seemingly pointless habit of recording the small details of one’s life — overheard conversations, weather, what someone wore. Why bother? Her answer became one of the most quoted lines in American letters:

“I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

You change. You become someone else, gradually, while pretending to remain yourself. The person who underlined that book five years ago had a different relationship with ambition, with loss, with what was worth wanting. If you can’t find your way back to her, you’ve lost something more important than a memory.

You’ve lost the thread that makes you, you.

Without a record of who you were, you become a weathervane.

Every new event spins you in a new direction. Every loud opinion pulls you off course. The career you wanted last year is forgotten by next week, replaced by the next thing that caught your attention. You believe you are choosing. Mostly, you are reacting.

Identity — the sense that the person waking up tomorrow is the same person who went to sleep tonight — is not given to you. It’s kept. And it’s kept by the small, almost mundane practice of looking back.

Every culture that took the self seriously developed some version of this practice. Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations not for us. He wrote them for himself — daily entries meant to be read back, to remind him who he was trying to be when the day’s events tried to make him forget. Montaigne wrote his Essays in part to track his own changing mind, returning years later to add notes in the margins. Thoreau’s journals ran to two million words, most of them never published. Their authors weren’t recording for posterity. They were keeping themselves company across time.

The form barely matters. A journal. A daily log. A notebook of overheard things. A folder of saved passages. A line in a book.

What matters is that something exists outside your head that you can return to — a record you didn’t write for anyone, that survives your own forgetting, that proves you had a center even when the world tried to scatter you.

Without it, you drift. With it, you can recognize yourself.

Most of us already keep some version of this — old journals, photographs, drafts of essays we never sent. But these capture the expressed self. The performed self. The one we composed for our future selves to find.

Highlights are different. Highlights are not composed. They are the trail of small involuntary recognitions — this. this matters. I don’t know why yet. You weren’t writing for anyone. You weren’t even writing.

You were just paying attention.

Which is why, when you read your own old highlights, they hit harder than your old writing. There is no posture in them. They are the most honest record you have of who you used to be.

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The stranger you’ll be in 2030 needs the same thing the stranger you were in 2020 needed from you — proof that she existed, that she paid attention, that she was here.

She will be confused, changed, looking for a thread back to herself. She will not remember why the year you are living through right now felt like it did. She will need someone to have left a record — not the performed kind, not the public kind. Just the honest kind.

She will need you to have marked the page.

The honest thing about reading is that you forget most of it. The kind thing about reading is that the small parts that mattered — the lines that stopped you, the passages that made you put the book down for a minute — can be saved. Not for the world. Not for a noble cause.

Just for the person you become.

Open a book you read years ago. Find a line you underlined. Read it slowly.

She is talking to you. She has been waiting.

Have you ever opened an old book, notebook, or journal and found a line you’d marked — one that suddenly made more sense, or one that no longer did? We’d love to hear about it. Share your story with us in the comments — we read every one.

And if this resonated, forward it to someone who keeps books with their own handwriting in the margins.

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Hi, I’m Bobby Powers! I run the Leader & Learner publication, where I share two posts per week that will help you become a more curious leader and learner.

Today, we’re taking a peek into personal values. I’ve been drafting a list of life rules for the past decade or so, and whenever I stumble across a new principle that resonates with me, I add it to my list.

Life rules are a personal thing. Some of mine may resonate with you, but others definitely won’t. I share this list to inspire you to reflect upon which principles guide your own life.

Here are 70 of my linchpins for living:

1. Completely own who you are. There’s no force more powerful than someone fully embracing their uniqueness. Harness your version of weird. It’s a superpower.

2. Define your own version of success. Some of the saddest people have fat wallets and big houses. Riches, fame, and power don’t bring happiness. Instead, aim your arrow at fulfilling relationships, passion-fueled hobbies, and meaningful work.

3. Never lose your childlike sense of wonder. Kids never lose sight of the little things: they gleefully run through sprinklers, pick up rocks to search for creepy crawlies, and view every snowfall as a chance to resurrect last year’s snowman. Most adults could benefit from an extra dose of that mentality in their lives.

4. Always be a student. School should be the beginning of learning, not the end of it. Make it your goal to learn something new every day.

5. Drink deeply from good books. They’re a chance to get mentored by dead emperors, business titans, and Olympic athletes. People whom you could never normally ask for advice are as close as your local library or Kindle account. You have wisdom on tap, waiting for you, whenever you’re ready. (HT: John Wooden)

6. Exhibit confident humility. Have the modesty to understand whether you’re the best person to make a particular decision. Learn from others when they’re the expert. Act with boldness when you’re the expert.

7. Assess yourself with third-party objectivity. Whenever you find yourself in a conflict, ask yourself what an unbiased journalist would write about the situation. What are the facts? How did you contribute to the mess?

8. Less certainty, more inquiry. Doubt yourself. As Bertrand Russell says, “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” (HT: Maria Konnikova)

9. Operate in permanent beta. Your personal operating system is still an early model. Many more upgrades are on the way, but only if you watch for them. (HT: Reid Hoffman)

10. Follow your curiosity. Curiosity doesn’t just point to areas of intrigue; it points to areas of potential competitive advantage. The people who succeed are often those who work the hardest, and those who work the hardest are often the ones who love what they’re doing.

11. Hypothesize and test, then repeat. Thinking is usually the worst way to learn if something works. The best way? Just trying it out. Rather than thinking your way out of problems, experiment your way out of them. (HT: Anne-Laure Le Cunff)

12. Create your own weather. Choose to never have a bad day. Will Arnett puts it like this: “If you say, ‘Things are gonna be hard for me,’ then guess what? Things are gonna be hard for you…My starting point is: I’m happy no matter what. I create my own weather…How you feel is a direct result of what you think about. The only thing you can control is what you think about.”

13. Love all seven days. Don’t live for the weekend. If you only enjoy two out of every seven days, you’re sacrificing 71 percent of your life. Figure out how to love Mondays—either by shifting your perspective, finding the right workplace, etc.

14. Find perfect in the average. Even if you’re not on a beach sipping on a Piña colada, there’s a good chance you can inject a few perfect elements into your average Monday, like enjoying a beautiful sunset, taking a peaceful walk, or catching up with an old friend over the phone.

15. Be hyper-present. If you’re out to dinner with a friend, be out to dinner with a friend—not answering texts or scrolling social media. Live in the current moment by prioritizing the person in front of you.

16. Take joy in others’ success. The zero-sum mindset of “I win, you lose” leads to unnecessary competitiveness. Instead, embrace a positive-sum mindset. Cheer on other creators, entrepreneurs, and artists. If they win, we all win.

17. Focus on the smooth water while paddling. Kayakers are more likely to wipe out if they look at the rocks they’re trying to avoid. Similarly, you’re more likely to botch a presentation or interview if you’re focused on what can go wrong. Instead, focus on the smooth water: how well you’ve prepared, what’s in your immediate control, and what can go right.

18. No bad beats—focus on the process. Hang around a poker room for five minutes and you’ll hear several players complaining about their “bad beats” (poor luck). Don’t be that guy. Sometimes the odds will fall your way, and sometimes they won’t. Either way, focus on what you can control.

19. Use setbacks as alternative fuel. Rejections can be constructively molded into a chip on the shoulder. It’s not bad to have something to prove. Use those setbacks as fuel in the tank—to learn, to grow, to overcome. Here’s a perfect example from Jay Yang, who went on to publish the Amazon bestseller You Can Just Do Things:

20. Ask “What can I learn from this?” Every challenge in life is an opportunity to practice a virtue. Treat every event as neutral. It’s not “good” or “bad.” It’s just something that happened, and now you get to decide how to respond.

21. Widen the space between stimulus and response. When someone pisses you off, it’s easy to lash out. But remember, there’s a difference between a reaction and a response. The former is emotion-driven and instinctive. The latter is a chosen move. Five deep breaths can be the difference between one versus the other.

22. Use fear as a compass. It’ll show you which option will teach you the most. If a project or challenge looks scary, don’t run from it. Instead, run toward the fire. You’ll learn more than you imagine and become known as someone who can solve any problem.

23. Choose dreams that scare you. Be willing to pursue goals that are so big, you’d be embarrassed to share them with 90 percent of the people in your life. (HT: Benjamin Hardy, PhD)

24. Identify the first step. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when thinking about a big project like writing a book, starting a business, or running a marathon. But that overwhelm generally comes from thinking about Step #50, and you don’t need to know Step #50 right now. Just identify Step #1…and do it.

25. Start with rubbish. The best way to work up the gumption to tackle Step #1 is to lower the bar. Rather than sitting down to “write a bestseller” (a daunting proposition) on the first day of your writing project, tell yourself you’re just going to “jot down some thoughts.” By so doing, you’ll avoid procrastination, get out of your own way, and begin actually making progress.

26. Practice radical incrementalism. If you want to do something BIG, just bite off a tiny bit each day. Big things get accomplished through small, consistent actions. Follow the Latin adage of festina lente: Make haste slowly. (HT: Oliver Burkeman)

27. Prepare for a long road. Meaningful accomplishments take longer than you think: finishing your novel, finding the right job, breaking through with your business idea. Because of this, it’s important to do three things:

    1. Set reasonable expectations for yourself.

    2. Start today.

    3. Enjoy the journey.

28. Fall seven, rise eight. The victors in any arena of life are determined by those still standing at the end, not those who avoided falling along the way. (HT: Japanese proverb)

29. Be the bull in the china shop. Do you know someone who can be given any project and they’ll figure out a way to succeed? Make it your goal to become that person. Develop the ability to run through walls. It’s the most hireable skill on the planet.

30. Choose alive time over dead time. In most situations, you can either wait for something to happen or you can take action. I bet you can guess which usually works out better. (HT: Robert Greene)

31. Close every loop. If you say you’ll do something, follow through. The size of the task doesn’t matter. And as soon as you complete what you promised, close the loop by telling the person it’s done. Simple actions like this build trust.

32. Die on the treadmill. One of the most inspiring quotes I’ve found:

“The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be out-worked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple, right?” -Will Smith

33. Be worthy of remark. “Remarkable” hits differently when you think of it as “something worthy of remark.” How can you embrace that principle in your own life? How can you become so good that others can’t help but notice and share it?

34. Expand your job beyond its official boundaries. The best way to earn a promotion is to start living into that role today. Want to become a manager? Act like a leader. Want to run a big project? Make yourself helpful by coordinating group tasks.

35. Be efficient with processes and effective with people. Efficiency is meant for computer programs and job tasks—not interactions with humans. For people, effectiveness is key: doing the right things, not the fast ones. Examples: building early buy-in for a project, hearing everyone’s opinions, etc.
    

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36. Respect those not in the room. The easiest way to prove you’re trustworthy is to avoid speaking poorly of people who aren’t around. The least trustworthy person is the one who backbites the guy who’s not in the room.

37. Impatient with actions, patient with results. Big changes often take time. Don’t get worked up if you don’t see instant successes, but do demand instant effort.

38. Talk about emotions without getting emotional. Emotions aren’t bad, but not being able to control them is. In many situations, the one who keeps their cool will prevail. Examples: negotiations, sports, debates, etc. (HT: Mollie West Duffy and Liz Fosslien)

39. Be loving, candid, and assertive. It’s possible to be both candid and kind. If you can master those two skills, you’ll have a successful career as a leader and communicator.

40. Disagree without being disagreeable. This represents the highest bar of communication. Avoid the two extremes of passivity and aggressiveness. Find the middle ground of assertiveness: sharing your perspective in a courageous, respectful way.

41. Facts > Interpretations. The fastest way to derail a conversation is to label someone with a term like “lazy” or “entitled.” Interpretations are controversial; facts are not. In tense situations, stand on the firm footing of facts.

42. Assume positive intent. When people do things we don’t understand, it’s easy to jump to conclusions about their intelligence, work ethic, or character. But you’ll never go wrong by first asking yourself, “Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do what this person is doing?” (HT: Crucial Conversations)

43. Find common ground. “Us vs. Them” thinking is a surefire path to lose-lose decisions. Whenever you’re negotiating with someone, look for opportunities to use “we” language (like “We both want…” or “We can probably agree that…”).

44. Strong opinions, loosely held. Courageously defend the things you care about, but be willing to admit when you’re wrong. Or, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

45. Relentlessly single-task. As Steve Uzzell once said, “Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.” Do one thing at a time, and do it spectacularly.

46. Make time for walks and nature. If you’re cranking away on a big problem and can feel yourself getting tense and stressed, unplug and go outside. A light walk can often jostle big ideas from the brain.

47. Pre-make your decisions. Roy Disney said, “When values are clear, decisions are easy.” To expedite your future decisions, determine the rules you want to guide your life: “Whenever [this situation] arises, I’m going to [take this action].”

48. Put in the work to become an overnight success. Inevitably, any time someone’s career skyrockets “out of nowhere,” when you dig into the details, you’ll see they’ve been preparing for that moment for years. What are you doing today to prepare for your moment five years from now?

49. Write with your pen, not your mouth. It’s way easier to talk about something than it is to do it. But as Ryan Holiday says, “Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources.” Instead of talking about something you haven’t done yet, be the person who works in humble, quiet isolation, then emerges from hibernation having completed something of substance.

50. Life is about direction, not speed. Don’t get worried about not achieving your dreams fast enough. Instead, focus on whether you’re working on the right things. (HT: Sahil Bloom)

51. Improve by being boringly predictable. Success is more dependent on consistency than flashiness. It comes from daily singles and doubles, not weekly home runs.

52. Find your plus/minus/equal. To become great requires finding a mentor to guide you (+), a mentee you can guide (-), and someone at your level who will challenge you and make you better (=). (HT: Frank Shamrock)

53. Desire less. Contentment is the real path to happiness. Or, as Naval Ravikant says, “Every desire is a chosen unhappiness.”

54. Use failure as a cue to try harder or differently. Failure can be a powerful teacher, but only if you have the humility, curiosity, and grit to learn from it.

55. Take ferocious self-accountability. Be willing to hold up a microscope to your own behavior. Doing so can be impossibly difficult but also life-changing. (HT: Elizabeth Gilbert)

56. “Be a river, not a reservoir.” When you learn something, immediately share it with others. By teaching, your knowledge will only grow, not diminish. (HT: John Maxwell)

57. In the long term, the slow way is the fast way. Working too quickly leads to mistakes, which cost time and money. Counterintuitively, the best way to move quickly is often to slow down. Effectiveness leads to efficiency, or as the Navy SEALs say, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

58. Compare you against you. The most meaningful yardstick in life is who you were yesterday versus who you are today. As Hemingway said, “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”

59. Believe in Wilson’s Law. If you prioritize knowledge and intelligence, money will inevitably follow. (HT: Giacomo Falcone)

60. Make a decision, then take imperfect action. There are always a hundred ways to do something. If you try to work out the perfect answer in your head, you’ll find yourself living in a purgatory of analysis paralysis. Instead, choose a path, commit to the path, and take immediate action on that path. (HT: Oliver Burkeman)

61. Use comparison as teacher, not torture. There are two ways to view a peer’s accomplishments: inspiration or jealousy. Which do you think will make you better? (HT: Mel Robbins)

62. Compare little things, not big ones. James Clear puts this well: “To improve, compare little things: marketing strategies, exercise technique, writing tactics. To be miserable, compare big things: career path, marriage, net worth. Comparison is the thief of joy when applied broadly, but the teacher of skills when applied narrowly.”

63. Balance ambition and contentment. You always have a choice between one of two focuses: (1) what you want and (2) what you have. To live a great life, build your house in Camp #2 with occasional glimpses at Camp #1.

64. Push through the dip. Anything worth doing will have lumpy results. Most creative ventures hit a bone-chilling dip, where you question everything and aren’t sure if anyone cares about your work. This is when most people give up. Don’t be most people. (HT: Seth Godin)

65. Seek to express, not impress. When talking to others, you have the choice of whether to speak vulnerably or arrogantly (trying to impress them). “Impress” mode is the surest way to torpedo a conversation, whereas “Express” mode forges genuine relationships. (HT: Tristan de Montebello)

66. Love the questions. Many important topics in life don’t have easy answers: religion, politics, relationships, etc. Instead of seeking black and white answers, fall in love with the questions themselves—and find others who also love pondering those questions. (HT: Rainer Maria Rilke)

67. Don’t hunt small game just because it’s easier to kill. It sure feels good to cross items off a to-do list, but most tasks don’t move the needle in a meaningful way. Instead of attacking 100 tasks that ultimately don’t matter, target the one that will make a difference.

68. Exhibit a next-play mentality. Okay, so you struck out this time. So what? Success hinges on what you do next. (HT: Brad Stulberg)

69. Focus on others. The more you’re paying attention to yourself, the less you’re paying attention to others. That means that the more comfortable you are being yourself, the closer you can get to other people. (HT: Tim Grahl)

70. Fear being stupid, not looking stupid. The best time to ask a dumb question is today. (Trust me, it will look way dumber tomorrow.)

The most powerful life rules are the ones you choose for yourself. May these serve as inspiration for drafting your own “linchpins for living.”

📣 Community Updates by Glasp

• 🟥 Glasp Talk with Bobby Powers:

  Glasp Talk features intimate interviews with luminaries, revealing their emotions, experiences, and stories. The guest, Bobby Powers, is a dedicated learner passionate about leadership and personal development. With over a decade of experience managing teams, leading onboarding, and Learning and Development programs at various startups and SMBs, Bobby is also an avid reader, having read over a thousand books in the last 15 years.

  ✨ Want a concise summary before diving in? Install the YouTube Summary with ChatGPT extension by Glasp for instant video summaries!

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“It is not possible for one to teach others who cannot teach his own family.”

― Confucius

📚 3 Good Recommendations

Learning OS: Designing Your Personal Operating System for Learning
by Glasp (18 mins)

• The problem isn’t tools—it’s systems. Notes apps answer “where do I put this?” but not “what should I read?” or “what will I do with it?” Most people let algorithms pick their curriculum by default.

• A Learning OS has six layers: Inputs → Engagement → Synthesis → Memory → Output → Feedback. Your weakest layer is your bottleneck—fix it first before optimizing others.

• AI handles volume; you handle stance. AI excels at summarizing and scaffolding, but the struggle of wrestling with ideas is where learning happens. Outsourcing it skips the point.

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Why books donʼt work
by Andy Matuschak (20 mins)

• Books assume reading equals understanding: Most readers absorb far less from non-fiction than they realize, because the medium is built on “transmissionism”—the flawed idea that words on a page automatically transfer knowledge.

• Readers are left to do all the hard work: Real understanding requires active thinking, self-testing, and reflection, but books offer no support for this—leaving readers to struggle alone with metacognition.

• We need new mediums, not better books: Instead of fixing an inherently limited form, we should design mediums where engaging naturally leads to understanding—like the author’s Quantum Country, which weaves spaced repetition into reading.

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What if the browser was the server?
by Arthur Cornil (5 mins)

• SaaS is overkill for personal tools: Single-user apps like journals or habit trackers don’t need remote servers—users pay subscriptions just to store data elsewhere while suffering network latency.

• Browsers can now run backends locally: WebAssembly (WASM) compiles any language to run in-browser, and OPFS provides persistent storage—enabling SQLite and backend logic entirely client-side.

• Tradeoffs exist but are manageable: Data is browser-bound (requiring export/import), and real-time collaboration still needs servers, but for personal productivity tools, this eliminates unnecessary server dependencies.

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📣 Community Updates

• 🟨 Glasp Crossed 1M Backlinks & DR 70:

  We just crossed 1,000,000+ backlinks and reached a Domain Rating of 70 on Ahrefs 🎉 Every blog mention, highlight share, and link from our community helped get us here. Thank you for being part of Glasp. 🙏

  

• 🟥 YouTube Channel Tracking, 2,700+:

  The number of YouTube channels tracked on Glasp just passed 2,700 🎉 Glasp automatically pulls transcripts from your favorite channels so you can highlight, summarize, and revisit them anytime. If you haven't tried it yet, please check this tutorial.

• 🟦 Top 10 Kindle Books of April 2026:
  We just published our monthly roundup of the 10 most-highlighted Kindle books on Glasp in April — with the single passage that the most readers independently highlighted from each title. See the full list here.

❤️ Gratitude

Thank you for sharing and mentioning us on X, LinkedIn, and/or your blogs. 🙂 We appreciate your support! Please don’t hesitate to ask us anything at any time. Also, feel free to join our Reddit Community ;)

• Kindle Highlights Exporter (2026) on Best AI Tools

  

• Boost Your Workflow: Automating Glasp Highlights with GitHub Actions for Enhanced Software Development Efficiency on devActivity

• Ep. 8 – Building a Knowledge Legacy: From Silicon Valley to AI with Kei Watanabe on Bridging Talks’s YouTube

  

• Glasp on Obsidian Stats

• You’re building the product, closing the deals, and figuring out GTM at the same time. Here’s what’s actually working. by

• 5 AI Agents Manage My Entire YouTube Channel (I Only Record) on Guilherme Cardoso’s YouTube

  

• 12 Free Tools to Summarize YouTube Videos in 2026 on BuddyX

• 10 KI-Add-ons für Browser, die den Arbeitsalltag erleichtern on Impulse Medien GmbH

• Porqué la Curación es el Futuro: Razones, Herramientas y Ejemplos (para la nueva autoridad digital) - una entrevista con Robin Good by

• Операционная система здоровья: как один Влад Куклев собрал AI-тренера, нутрициолога и стратега в одном Telegram-боте (Health Operating System: How Vlad Kuklev Combined an AI Trainer, Nutritionist, and Strategist in a Single Telegram Bot) by

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter!
See you next week ;)

Best,
Kei and Kazuki

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Here are the 10 Kindle books Glasp readers imported and highlighted the most in April 2026 — along with the single passage that the most readers stopped on in each. Where the same book has also been highlighted by Glasp readers in other languages — Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French — you’ll find those linked too.

New here? Here’s how to download and import your Kindle highlights to Glasp

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

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📚 The Top 10

1. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals — · 28 readers

Oliver Burkeman, the former Guardian columnist behind This Column Will Change Your Life, argues that we get about 4,000 weeks alive — and that productivity culture is a doomed attempt to deny that limit. The book reframes time management as the art of choosing what to neglect.

“The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally ‘out of the way.’”

— Top Highlight: 10 of 28 readers · 36%

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (38) · Español (4) · Português (1) · Deutsch (1)

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2. The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel · 48 readers

Morgan Housel, partner at Collaborative Fund, makes the case that doing well with money has more to do with behavior than intelligence. Across 19 short stories, he shows why patience and humility tend to outperform credentials over the long run.

“If expectations rise with results there is no logic in striving for more because you’ll feel the same after putting in extra effort.”

— Top Highlight: 23 of 48 readers · 48%

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🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (7) · Español (6) · Português (6) · Deutsch (3)

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3. The Daily Stoic — & · 48 readers

Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman pair 366 passages from Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus with short modern meditations — one for each day of the year. Holiday has done more than anyone to bring Stoicism to a contemporary audience.

“Having an end in mind is no guarantee that you’ll reach it — no Stoic would tolerate that assumption — but not having an end in mind is a guarantee you won’t.”

— Top Highlight: 14 of 48 readers · 29%

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (6) · Português (2) · Deutsch (1)

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4. Deep Work — Cal Newport · 35 readers

Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown, argues that the ability to focus without distraction is becoming both rarer and more valuable. The book lays out a set of rules for protecting concentration in an economy designed to fragment it.

“Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.”

— Top Highlight: 15 of 35 readers · 43%

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Español (1) · Português (3) · Français (1)

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5. Unlimited Memory — Kevin Horsley · 28 readers

Kevin Horsley, one of fewer than two dozen people in the world to hold the title International Grandmaster of Memory, walks through the techniques memory champions use to learn faster and remember more — including the method he used to memorize the first 10,000 digits of Pi.

“You can have success or excuses, but you can’t have them both. People that learn quickly focus only on the information and skills that matter. Excuses don’t matter — they are ‘thought viruses.’ The only things that keep you from getting what you want are the excuses you make to yourself.”

— Top Highlight: 6 of 28 readers · 21%

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6. Excellent Advice for Living — · 12 readers

Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired, spent his 70th birthday distilling decades of observation into 450 short proverbs for his children. The result reads like a personal Whole Earth Catalog for living well.

“Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don’t focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout.”

— Top Highlight: 8 of 12 readers · 67%

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7. The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk · 14 readers

Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist who has worked with trauma survivors for over 40 years, shows how trauma reshapes both brain and body — and which kinds of treatment actually help. The book has become a foundational text for understanding modern PTSD.

“The stress hormones of traumatized people, in contrast, take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli. The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability, and sleep disorders.”

— Top Highlight: 4 of 14 readers · 29%

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Español (1)

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8. Meditations for Mortals — · 7 readers

Oliver Burkeman returns with a four-week course in giving up the fantasy of getting everything done. Where Four Thousand Weeks made the argument, this one turns it into daily practice.

“The main point – though it took me years to realize it – is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system or habit or routine. If you don’t prioritize the skill of just doing something, you risk falling into an exceedingly sneaky trap, which is that you end up embarking instead on the unnecessary and, worse, counterproductive project of becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing.”

— Top Highlight: 6 of 7 readers · 86%

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9. Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman · 48 readers

Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate in Economics, introduces the two systems that drive human thought: fast, automatic intuition (System 1) and slow, deliberate reasoning (System 2). The book maps the cognitive biases that emerge when intuition gets ahead of itself.

“Systems 1 and 2 are both active whenever we are awake. System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged. System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions.”

— Top Highlight: 13 of 48 readers · 27%

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (28) · Español (7) · Português (16)

👉 See the 9 other most-highlighted passages

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10. Thinking in Systems — Donella H. Meadows · 26 readers

Donella Meadows, environmental scientist and lead author of The Limits to Growth, offers a primer on systems thinking — how to see the world as interconnected feedback loops rather than linear chains of cause and effect.

“The least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behavior.”

— Top Highlight: 11 of 26 readers · 42%

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (13) · Português (2)

👉 See the 9 other most-highlighted passages

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⭐ The Highlight of the Month

Out of every book on this list, one passage drew the strongest collective pause: 6 of 7 readers who saved Meditations for Mortals highlighted the same paragraph — an 86% consensus, the highest of the month.

Oliver Burkeman, on the trap of becoming-the-kind-of-person-who:

“The main point – though it took me years to realize it – is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system or habit or routine. If you don’t prioritize the skill of just doing something, you risk falling into an exceedingly sneaky trap, which is that you end up embarking instead on the unnecessary and, worse, counterproductive project of becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing.”

A fitting capstone for a month where Burkeman appeared twice on the list — readers are clearly wrestling with how to actually live inside their finite time, rather than perpetually prepare to.

📅 Want the bigger picture?

If you’d like to see what Glasp readers highlighted across the whole quarter, here’s the Top 20 from Q1 2026 (January–March):

👉 The Top 20 Books Glasp Readers Highlighted in Q1 2026

Bring your Kindle highlights to Glasp

Every reader in this list imported their Kindle highlights to Glasp. Once imported, your highlights become searchable across every book, article, and PDF you’ve saved — and part of the collective data that shapes lists like this one. If you haven’t imported yours yet, here’s how it works:

👉 How to download and import your Kindle highlights to Glasp

Closing

Click any title to read the other highlights Glasp readers left behind. Each book is a window into how the community is thinking — and a shortcut to the ideas that shaped their month.

Every highlight is a breadcrumb for the next reader. That’s how knowledge sharing works on Glasp.

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