The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce. [3]
Reading was my first love. [4]
I remember my grandparents’ house in India. I’d be a little kid on the floor going through all of my grandfather’s Reader’s Digests, which is all he had to read. Now, of course, there’s a smorgasbord of information out there—anybody can read anything all the time. Back then, it was much more limited. I would read comic books, storybooks, whatever I could get my hands on.
I think I always loved to read because I’m actually an antisocial introvert. I was lost in the world of words and ideas from an early age. I think some of it comes from the happy circumstance that when I was young, nobody forced me to read certain things.
I think there’s a tendency among parents and teachers to say, “Oh, you should read this, but don’t read that.” I read a lot which (by today’s standards) would be considered mental junk food. [4]
Read what you love until you love to read.
You almost have to read the stuff you’re reading, because you’re into it. You don’t need any other reason. There’s no mission here to accomplish. Just read because you enjoy it.
These days, I find myself rereading as much (or more) as I do reading. A tweet from @illacertus said, “I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.” I think there’s a lot to that idea. It’s really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people. Then, you can really absorb those.
Reading a book isn’t a race—the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.
I don’t know about you, but I have very poor attention. I skim. I speed read. I jump around. I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books. At some deep level, you absorb them, and they become threads in the tapestry of your psyche. They kind of weave in there.
I’m sure you’ve had this feeling where you pick up a book and start reading it, and you’re like, “This is pretty interesting. This is pretty good.” You’re getting this increasing sense of deja vu. Then halfway through the book, you realize, “I’ve read this book before.” That’s perfectly fine. It means you were ready to reread it. [4]
I don’t actually read a lot of books. I pick up a lot of books and only get through a few which form the foundation of my knowledge.
The reality is, I don’t actually read much compared to what people think. I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001 percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success I’ve had in my life and any intelligence I might have. Real people don’t read an hour a day. Real people, I think, read a minute a day or less. Making it an actual habit is the most important thing.
It almost doesn’t matter what you read. Eventually, you will read enough things (and your interests will lead you there) that it will dramatically improve your life. Just like the best workout for you is one you’re excited enough to do every day, I would say for books, blogs, tweets, or whatever—anything with ideas and information and learning—the best ones to read are the ones you’re excited about reading all the time. [4]
“As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.” —Charlie Munger
Everyone’s brain works differently. Some people love to take notes. Actually, my notetaking is Twitter. I read and read and read. If I have some fundamental “ah-ha” insight or concept, Twitter forces me to distill it into a few characters. Then I try and put it out there as an aphorism. Then I get attacked by random people who point out all kinds of obvious exceptions and jump down my throat. Then I think, “Why did I do this again?” [4]
Pointing out obvious exceptions implies either the target isn’t smart or you aren’t.
When you first pick up a book, are you skimming for something interesting? How do you go about reading it? Do you just flip to a random page and start reading? What’s your process?
I’ll start at the beginning, but I’ll move fast. If it’s not interesting, I’ll just start flipping ahead, skimming, or speed reading. If it doesn’t grab my attention within the first chapter in a meaningful, positive way, I’ll either drop the book or skip ahead a few chapters.
I don’t believe in delayed gratification when there are an infinite number of books out there to read. There are so many great books.
The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power.
Generally, I’ll skim. I’ll fast forward. I’ll try and find a part to catch my attention. Most books have one point to make. (Obviously, this is nonfiction. I’m not talking about fiction.) They have one point to make, they make it, and then they give you example after example after example after example, and they apply it to explain everything in the world. Once I feel like I’ve gotten the gist, I feel very comfortable putting the book down. There’s a lot of these, what I would call pseudoscience bestsellers…People are like, “Oh, did you read this book?” I always say yes, but the reality is I read maybe two chapters of it. I got the gist.
If they wrote it to make money, don’t read it.
What practices do you follow to internalize/organize information from reading books?
Explain what you learned to someone else. Teaching forces learning. It’s not about “educated” vs. “uneducated.”
It’s about “likes to read” and “doesn’t like to read.”
What can I do for the next sixty days to become a clearer, more independent thinker?
Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval. [11]
Study logic and math, because once you’ve mastered them, you won’t fear any book.
No book in the library should scare you. Whether it’s a math, physics, electrical engineering, sociology, or economics book. You should be able to take any book down off the shelf and read it. A number of them are going to be too difficult for you. That’s okay—read them anyway. Then go back and reread them and reread them.
When you’re reading a book and you’re confused, that confusion is similar to the pain you get in the gym when you’re working out. But you’re building mental muscles instead of physical muscles. Learn how to learn and read the books.
The problem with saying “just read” is there is so much junk out there. There are as many different kinds of authors as there are people. Many of them are going to write lots of junk.
I have people in my life I consider to be very well-read who aren’t very smart. The reason is because even though they’re very well-read, they read the wrong things in the wrong order. They started out reading a set of false or just weakly true things, and those formed the axioms of the foundation for their worldview. Then, when new things come, they judge the new idea based on a foundation they already built. Your foundation is critical.
Because most people are intimidated by math and can’t independently critique it, they overvalue opinions backed with math/pseudoscience.
When it comes to reading, make sure your foundation is very, very high quality.
The best way to have a high-quality foundation (you may not love this answer), but the trick is to stick to science and to stick to the basics. Generally, there are only a few things you can read people don’t disagree with. Very few people disagree 2+2=4, right? That is serious knowledge. Mathematics is a solid foundation.
Similarly, the hard sciences are a solid foundation. Microeconomics is a solid foundation. The moment you start wandering outside of these solid foundations you’re in trouble because now you don’t know what’s true and what’s false. I would focus as much as I could on having solid foundations. I
t’s better to be really great at arithmetic and geometry than to be deep into advanced mathematics. I would read microeconomics all day long—Microeconomics 101.
Another way to do this is to read originals and read classics. If you’re interested in evolution, read Charles Darwin. Don’t begin with Richard Dawkins (even though I think he’s great). Read him later; read Darwin first.
If you want to learn macroeconomics, first read Adam Smith, read von Mises, or read Hayek. Start with the original philosophers of the economy. If you’re into communist or socialist ideas (which I’m personally not), start by reading Karl Marx. Don’t read the current interpretation someone is feeding you about how things should be done and run.
If you start with the originals as your foundations, then you have enough of a worldview and understanding that you won’t fear any book. Then you can just learn. If you’re a perpetual learning machine, you will never be out of options for how to make money. You can always see what’s coming up in society, what the value is, where the demand is, and you can learn to come up to speed. [74]
To think clearly, understand the basics. If you’re memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you’re lost.
We’re now in a day and age of Twitter and Facebook. We’re getting bite-sized, pithy wisdom, which is really hard to absorb. Books are very difficult to read as a modern person because we’ve been trained. We have two contradictory pieces of training:
One is our attention span has gone through the floor because we’re hit with so much information all the time. We want to skip, summarize, and cut to the chase.
Twitter has made me a worse reader but a much better writer.
On the other hand, we’re also taught from a young age to finish your books. Books are sacred—when you go to school and you’re assigned to read a book, you have to finish the book. Over time, we forget how to read books. Everyone I know is stuck on some book.
I’m sure you’re stuck on something right now—it’s page 332, you can’t go any further, but you know you should finish the book. So what do you do? You give up reading books for a while.
For me, giving up reading was a tragedy. I grew up on books, then I switched to blogs, then I switched to Twitter and Facebook, and I realized I wasn’t actually learning anything. I was just taking little dopamine snacks all day long. I was getting my little 140-character burst of dopamine. I would Tweet, then look to see who retweeted my Tweet. It’s a fun and wonderful thing, but it’s a game I was playing.
I realized I had to go back to reading books. [6]
I knew it was a very hard problem because my brain had now been trained to spend time on Facebook, Twitter, and these other bite-sized pieces.
I came up with this hack where I started treating books as throwaway blog posts or bite-sized tweets or posts. I felt no obligation to finish any book. Now, when someone mentions a book to me, I buy it. At any given time, I’m reading somewhere between ten and twenty books. I’m flipping through them.
If the book is getting a little boring, I’ll skip ahead. Sometimes, I start reading a book in the middle because some paragraph caught my eye. I’ll just continue from there, and I feel no obligation whatsoever to finish the book. All of a sudden, books are back into my reading library. That’s great, because there is ancient wisdom in books. [6]
When solving problems: the older the problem, the older the solution.
If you’re trying to learn how to drive a car or fly a plane, you should read something written in the modern age because this problem was created in the modern age and the solution is great in the modern age.
If you’re talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful, what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family, and those kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better.
Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct. I wanted to get back into reading these sorts of books. [6]
You know that song you can’t get out of your head? All thoughts work that way. Careful what you read.
A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love.
These things cannot be bought.
They must be earned.
(Specific recommendations for books, blogs, and more are on “Naval’s Recommended Reading” page)