I usually visit the website of those who leave comments in my postings. Recently, from a comment in the article Journal to the Self, I found Adam Sicinski’s IQ Matrix Blog.

What a wonderful surprise! The website has a wealth of amazing, beautifully-crafted mind maps about various topics relevant to personal development — such as accelerated learning, life success principles, cognitive psychology, memory enhancement, time management and many others.

Mind Map Showcase

Adam Sicinski’s maps are perfectly aligned with Litemind’s mission, so following I present 5 selected mind maps on the topics of: learning, time management, memory, stress management and advanced mind mapping.

Click on the thumbnails to see a larger view of the mind maps. Below each thumbnail is also a link to the original article in Adam’s blog. These articles contain detailed explanations about the mind maps’ contents, as well as links to the full, downloadable maps (in both wide-screen and standard formats). Enjoy!

5 Keys to Improving Your Memory

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6 Keys to Learning

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5 Keys to Effective Time Management

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6 Keys to Stress Management

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Advanced Mind Mapping Strategies

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Get More

This is not a sales pitch, sponsored post or anything like that — I am posting these links because I was amazed with the detail and the attention that went into creating them, and how they really express the essence of the ideas.

Browse around the IQ Matrix Blog and the companion IQX Shop, and check how Adam is quickly developing many great learning resources. Some are paid (such as study aids recreating Shakespearean literature classics), but most of them are free.

Related Articles

• What is Mind Mapping? (and How to Get Started Immediately)
• The Now Habit
• The Medici Effect
• One Small Step Can Change Your Life
• Never Eat Alone
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
• Journal to the Self: 13 Tools to Make Journaling Work for You
• How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci
• How to Recall an Entire Book in 5 Minutes or Less
• Getting to Yes

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Have you ever read a great book, and after only a short period of time could recall just one or two ideas from it? It is very frustrating – and it happens all the time. But there’s a way to avoid forgetting what you have read and, if you do, instantly refresh it in your mind.

Reading Goals, Cheated

The key to reading effectively is to be fully engaged in what you are reading. Underlining, questioning, taking notes – these all help – but there’s one single element that is essential if you want to read effectively: you need to know what your goal is. This is standard advice, and is indeed a good one. But if you want your reading to be truly effective and long-lasting, you need more than simply a goal: you need a very specific and tangible one.

Take, for example, a book such as Getting Things Done. The goal “to get more organized” would be good enough – but just as a generic goal, not as a specific one. A generic goal may be enough to motivate you to start reading a book, but won’t be truly effective by itself to keep you fully involved while reading it. We need something more concrete.

The problem is that we only know the specifics of a book after actually reading it. So what should we do as we want to set a specific goal beforehand? We cheat.

I’ve found that one of the most effective goals to set when reading a book is to commit yourself to create a mind map of it.

This will serve as a specific goal that you can use for any book. Yes, having a “general-purpose specific goal” certainly feels like cheating, but you won’t believe how effective it is. It will really help boosting your reading comprehension; and the best part is that you’ll have a book summary you can revisit at anytime. Contrary to regular book summaries, due to the specific properties of mind maps, you’ll be able to review it at lightning speed, quite often at a single glance.

Top 3 Benefits of Mind Mapping a Book

1. Boost Comprehension While Reading

Being sharply focused on creating such a specific deliverable as a mind map will get you 100% engaged in your reading, guaranteed.

Moreover, every time you reach for your mind map to add more information, you’ll be looking and recalling what’s already in there. In fact, this constant reinforcement works so well, it usually takes months before you need referring to the mind map again.

2. Quickly Review the Entire Book Anytime

This is when mind mapping really shines when compared to other note-taking techniques. It is absolutely amazing what happens when you look at a mind map months or even years after you created it. It is like rereading the entire book in just a glance.

When you first read the book using this method, you did it in such an active manner that by just quickly scanning the mind map brings you all the memories from the book – even the ones you didn’t include in your mind map. In fact, the neural connections formed are so strong that even the emotions you felt at the time often resurface. And with such a personalized and handy summary, you really don’t need more than 5 minutes to review it.

3. Distill the Real Substance of the Book

It is not rare for long books resulting in small mind maps. By creating a mind map, the real content of the book becomes evident. Not everything in a book is straight to the point: authors (validly) use repetition, stories and examples to build and elaborate important points. All you need to do is use standard mind mapping features to reflect that importance: use bold, write your topics in bigger letters or different colors. With your personalized mind map, you’ll be able to trim all fat while keeping the relationships and the relative importance of each topic intact.

Tips to Get Started

Keep the Flow

Avoid reading and creating the mind map simultaneously, as that will disrupt your reading flow. Circle, underline and take notes while reading, pre-selecting the important concepts and passages for your summary. This intermediary step not only keeps you in context and engaged in the book, but also makes it much easier to quickly create your mind map once you read the relevant parts of the book. And by doing this, you’ll have yet another content reinforcement in the process.

Sleep on It

Try not to work on your mind map right after reading the book – let your mind chew on what you have read for a while first. Doing it the next day is a good rule of thumb. If you read every day, a good way of doing it is by working on your mind map for yesterday’s topic right before today’s reading session. Also, try not to get your reading too far ahead of your mind mapping – you’ll lose the benefits of repetitive reinforcement and feel overwhelmed if there’s too much content to add in a single sit.

Use Dual Bookmarking

Instead of using just one bookmark, use an extra one to indicate up to where your book has been mapped. I also recommend using colored Post-it flags, so you won’t need to worry about your second bookmark falling while you’re reading.

Try It

Won’t reading books with this method take much longer than usual? Sure it will – but what’s the point in leafing through several books, only retaining a tiny amount of their content – and only for a short period of time?

If you’re just reading casually and you feel this method is overkill, you are probably right – don’t force yourself to use it, by all means. But if you get your hands on a great book – and there are so many out there – please give mind mapping a try. You won’t regret taking these extra steps to make your books really last in your mind.

To check out a mind map created using this technique, please see One Small Step Can Change Your Life or Never Eat Alone.

Related Articles

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• Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
• What is Mind Mapping? (and How to Get Started Immediately)
• The Now Habit
• The Medici Effect
• Study Matrix Mind Map Showcase
• One Small Step Can Change Your Life

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A mind map is a graphical way to represent ideas and concepts. It is a visual thinking tool that helps structuring information, helping you to better analyze, comprehend, synthesize, recall and generate new ideas.

Just as in every great idea, its power lies in its simplicity.

In a mind map, as opposed to traditional note taking or a linear text, information is structured in a way that resembles much more closely how your brain actually works. Since it is an activity that is both analytical and artistic, it engages your brain in a much, much richer way, helping in all its cognitive functions. And, best of all, it is fun!

So, how does a mind map look like? Better than explaining is showing you an example.

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This is a mind map about – conveniently enough – mind mapping itself. It presents, in a visual way, the core elements and techniques on how to draw mind maps. Yes, I know this may look a little too messy initially, but bear with me: once you break the ingrained habit of linear note taking, you won’t look back.

Benefits and Uses

I think I already gave away the benefits of mind mapping and why mind maps work. Basically, mind mapping avoids dull, linear thinking, jogging your creativity and making note taking fun again.

But what can we use mind maps for?

• Note taking
• Brainstorming (individually or in groups)
• Problem solving
• Studying and memorization
• Planning
• Researching and consolidating information from multiple sources
• Presenting information
• Gaining insight on complex subjects
• Jogging your creativity

It is hard to make justice to the number of uses mind maps can have – the truth is that they can help clarify your thinking in pretty much anything, in many different contexts: personal, family, educational or business. Planning you day or planning your life, summarizing a book, launching a project, planning and creating presentations, writing blog posts -well, you get the idea – anything, really.

How to Draw a Mind Map

Drawing a mind map is as simple as 1-2-3:

• Start in the middle of a blank page, writing or drawing the idea you intend to develop. I would suggest that you use the page in landscape orientation.
• Develop the related subtopics around this central topic, connecting each of them to the center with a line.
• Repeat the same process for the subtopics, generating lower-level subtopics as you see fit, connecting each of those to the corresponding subtopic.

Some more recommendations:

• Use colors, drawings and symbols copiously. Be as visual as you can, and your brain will thank you. I’ve met many people who don’t even try, with the excuse they’re "not artists". Don’t let that keep you from trying it out!.
• Keep the topics labels as short as possible, keeping them to a single word – or, better yet, to only a picture. Especially in your first mind maps, the temptation to write a complete phrase is enormous, but always look for opportunities to shorten it to a single word or figure – your mind map will be much more effective that way.
• Vary text size, color and alignment. Vary the thickness and length of the lines. Provide as many visual cues as you can to emphasize important points. Every little bit helps engaging your brain.

Final Thoughts

Mind mapping is an absolutely fascinating and rich topic – this post only scratches the surface. If you want more reference material now, Wikipedia is always a good starting point.

Mind mapping is a passion for me, and it is one of the strongest drivers behind this blog. I plan to explore it in much more depth – publishing mind maps, providing tips, talking about computer mind mapping, and much more. Just make sure to keep visiting (or better yet, subscribe).

In the meantime, please give mind mapping a chance – try it out. Follow there handy tips and see the results for yourself. Don’t worry too much about doing it the "right" way – just make it fun.

To inspire you, one more great mind map from Buzan Centre Australia on Creative Intelligence.

(click for larger image)

Related Articles

• The Now Habit
• The Medici Effect
• Study Matrix Mind Map Showcase
• One Small Step Can Change Your Life
• Never Eat Alone
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
• Journal to the Self: 13 Tools to Make Journaling Work for You
• How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci
• How to Recall an Entire Book in 5 Minutes or Less
• Getting to Yes

Next Actions

	Did you enjoy this article? Visit the original post and leave a comment.
	Interested in extra content (not available on the site) from Litemind? Sign up for the free Newsletter.