Building a toolkit for creative projects: Headway
Discovering non-fiction books through audio summaries
*This post was written in collaboration with Headway, who kindly gifted me a subscription to the app in exchange for an honest review. As always, all views here are entirely my own, and I will only ever partner with companies I would genuinely use myself and whose values align with mine. Only if you get curious and decide to test the app through my link at the bottom of the newsletter will I earn an affiliate commission.
The era of the business and self-help book
A few years ago, when I lived in Brazil, there seemed to be a specific list of business and self-help books going around that anyone who wanted to start a new business or go independent needed to read. The same titles were recommended on podcasts, quoted on social media, and used by coaches in courses and masterminds. Think Playing Big* by Tara Mohr, The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss, or Atomic Habits by Morgan Housel, just to name a few.
Without having read any of the books, I could tell you quite a lot about each of them, who they are for and who the writer is. I told my husband that if we went away on a reading retreat for a few days, split the list, read them and prepared summaries and notes for each other, then we would be able to start and run any business we wanted.
I was, of course, exaggerating. A lot more goes into starting a business than what you find in these books, but everyone seemed to find real life-changing insights and advice in them. I had a few projects in mind for which the books would have been useful, so I picked up a few. Some had some real practical tips; others were very heavy on the author’s personal experience or research examples.
Then life happened: we moved back to Europe, I changed jobs and took on a lot of freelance work, and I found myself more drawn to reading fiction during my free time.
Building a creative business toolkit
After a couple of years in Paris, my life has settled again and I finally found the time to start thinking about some creative projects I had put on the back burner. That’s when my mind went back to that list of books.
I quickly realised how business culture has changed among creative entrepreneurs and small business owners, and how these days it seems to be way more focused on personal advice, community sharing and artistic inspiration.
Suddenly I had a new list of apps to try, communities I could join and tools to test to build a creative business toolkit.
The books I had saved seemed to have been quietly put aside, but I was still interested in the basics and I always find that when I learn from books the takeaways really stay with me. I just struggled to pick ones that were not too basic and offered useful insights that I could apply to my projects.
Testing Headway
Then Headway got in touch and asked if I was interested in trying the app and writing a review. As I’m always curious to learn about companies in the publishing world, I thought this would be a very interesting tool to test.
Headway is the world’s most downloaded book summary app, offering summaries of nonfiction bestsellers and daily microlearning sessions. I had explored a few similar apps before but never got around to testing them.
Before I agreed, however, I confirmed a couple of things around how summaries are created, whether AI was involved, and respect for authors’ copyright:
No AI is involved for content generation. All of the summaries are crafted by a team of professional, in-house human writers, editors, and voice actors. They read each book, extract the core ideas, and package them into structured 15-minute text and audio versions.
Since the summaries are original and a condensed analysis of the ideas, with no reproduction of the full text other than short quotes, these fall under the commentary and review frameworks. There is no copyright infringement, and it serves as a discovery tool for authors and publishers, with many users ending up buying the full books.
I spent two weeks testing the app, listening to summaries while doing chores, walking to the swimming pool and on the metro when going out. If audiobooks are not your thing, you can also read the summaries instead. Here are my thoughts:
The summary is no replacement for actually reading the books. However, it is a fantastic discovery tool, much more helpful than reading online reviews or synopses. It helped me get an idea of the structure and chapters and quickly select whether some of the titles would go deep enough into the topic or only cover the basics, saving me a lot of time.
Topic plans: I love connected book recommendations to dive deep into a subject and Headway has a section called Plans which does exactly that. You can select among numerous topics and a series of book summaries will be presented with recommended titles that will help you learn about that area. I have been working through the titles on ‘Build a personal brand’ and found some useful books I would like to read.
Audio highlights: I always struggle with non-fiction audiobooks as they are the type of books I want to take notes from, underline and write down important takeaways. The app has an easy on-screen button to highlight a quote at any moment, even when the screen is locked. That paragraph is then written down and saved in your library. This was incredibly helpful.
Flashcards for spaced repetition: I have been using boxes of flashcards to learn German words for the last year or so and love the concept. Headway has a system for this inside the app. You can save words you want to learn from summaries and then practice them with flashcards in your Library using the spaced repetition method.
Practising languages: the app is available in English, Spanish, French and German. As I’m always looking for small moments in my day to practice French more, this was a perfect and unexpected way to focus on a short read and save any keywords I didn’t know.
Gamification is not my thing, so I didn’t really get into the daily goals and streaks, but if that motivates you, you can set how much you want to learn on a daily basis.
I found the voices to be a bit too sterile and unemotional and I would have preferred a bit more variety in the tone and cadence. But you could also read the summaries instead.
As I said, overall I don’t find book summaries to ever be long or detailed enough to replace the actual books, but using Headway as a browsing and selecting tool helped me create a much more focused TBR for my business projects.
If you are curious about trying the app, you can follow the link below and be guided through a quick quiz about your reading preferences to set up your account (*affiliate link). I would love to know if you end up trying it or if you have ever used audio summary apps before.
Which tool should I test next for my creative projects toolkit?
Have a lovely weekend!
