How to read The Art of War and actually remember it

The Art of War takes an afternoon to read and about a week to forget. Here is a simple routine that turns its maxims into ideas you can recall and use.

Why The Art of War slips away

The Art of War is short. You can read it in an afternoon, and many people do. The problem is what happens next: two or three famous lines stick, and the rest dissolves into a blur of generals, terrain and supply wagons.

Part of the reason is the form. Sun Tzu writes in compressed maxims, one after another, often with little explanation. Each line sounds wise on its own, so you nod and move on. Nodding feels like understanding, but nothing has been asked of you, so very little gets stored.

The fix is to slow down and make every section ask something of you.

Work in small sections, not whole chapters

The book has thirteen chapters, and they vary a lot. Some are tight arguments. Others are lists of situations and how to respond to each. Instead of reading a chapter at a time, take a small group of lines that belong to one idea. In the free ClearRead library, The Art of War is already split into 40 sections, roughly three per chapter, so the units are ready for you.

A good session is two to four sections. At that pace you can finish the book in two to three weeks, with time left over for review.

A four-step routine for each section

1. Predict. Look at the chapter title and where you are in it, then guess what Sun Tzu is about to say. One sentence is enough. A wrong guess is just as useful as a right one, because it shows you what you assumed.
2. Read. Read the section once, slowly. Don't highlight or take notes yet.
3. Explain. Close the text and write two or three sentences in your own words. What is he telling a general to do, and why?
4. Grade yourself. Could you explain it without looking? Where you stalled is the part you didn't understand. Mark that section to come back to sooner.

Keep the general and the application separate

The Art of War invites you to apply it to business, sport or office politics. That can be useful, but do it second. First explain what the passage means on its own terms, for a commander in ancient China. Then, if you like, add one line on where you see the idea in your own life. If you skip straight to the application, you end up remembering your interpretation instead of the book.

A worked example

Take the opening of Chapter 1, Laying Plans. Sun Tzu says war must be weighed against five constant factors, which the Lionel Giles translation calls the Moral Law, Heaven, Earth, the Commander, and Method and discipline.

Before reading, the chapter title and the book's reputation might suggest this:

Prediction: he's going to say war is won by having the bigger, stronger army.

After reading and closing the book, the explanation might be:

Before any battle, compare yourself and your enemy on five things: whether the people stand behind their ruler, the weather and seasons, the ground you will fight on, the qualities of the commander, and how well the army is organized and supplied. Whoever comes out ahead on these is likely to win, so most of the outcome is decided before the fighting starts.

Look at the gap between the two. The prediction was about force. The section is about assessment. That shift, from strength to preparation, runs through the whole book, and noticing it here makes later chapters easier to follow.

Now grade honestly. If you could only name three of the five factors, that is a "hard", not a "good". The two you forgot are exactly what your next review should test.

Come back before you forget

A section you explained well today will still fade if you never see it again. This is the forgetting curve: memory drops quickly at first, then more slowly. Each time you successfully pull an idea back out of memory, it lasts longer before fading again.

So return to each section after a day, then a few days, then a week or more. Each time, try to recall it before you reread it. The effort of recalling is what does the work. ClearRead handles this timing for you: a section you grade "again" comes back tomorrow, while one you grade "easy" is pushed weeks out.

Track the few big ideas

For all its variety, The Art of War keeps returning to a small set of themes:

• Win before you fight: preparation and assessment decide most outcomes.
• Know yourself and know the enemy.
• Deception: appear weak when strong, near when far.
• Long wars drain a state, so speed matters.
• Adapt to conditions the way water takes the shape of the ground it flows over.

As you explain more sections, you will notice yourself writing the same idea in different words. When that happens, write one line linking the two sections. By the end you will have a map of five or six ideas with examples hanging from each, which is far easier to remember than forty separate maxims.

When a passage feels obscure

Some sections describe types of terrain, army formations or signals that mean little today. Don't skip them. Write your best guess at what the passage is for, even if the details are unclear, and grade yourself low. Often the purpose becomes clear once you have read the sections around it. If you own a second translation, comparing a confusing line across the two is one of the fastest ways to see what it actually says.

How to tell it worked

A week after finishing, close the book and try to list the main idea of each chapter from memory. Then pick any theme from the list above and explain it with an example from the text. If you can do both without looking, you haven't just read The Art of War. You can use it.