How many situations will you face that have not already been
experienced by someone else? Billions of people, thousands of years …
probably not too many. It’s been done.
Luckily, sometimes
those experiences are captured by history, and thus they become
valuable tools for us to learn and prepare for similar situations.
This is part of the central ethos of Farnam Street.
In an email that
went viral in 2013, U.S. Marine General James Mattis (now the U.S.
Secretary of Defense) candidly wrote about the value of this approach
near the beginning of the Iraq War. Advising a colleague, he wrote:
Thanks to my
reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never
at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or
unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it
lights what is often a dark path ahead.
Speaking
specifically about situations he faced in the context of his military
role, he said “We have been fighting on this planet for 5,000 years
and we should take advantage of their experience. ‘Winging it’
and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the
moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession.”
Whatever country you
are fighting a war in, someone has already fought there before.
Someone has also explored it, mapped it, studied it, and done
humanitarian work there. The hard work has already been done. All you
have to do is read.
Maybe Napoleon
shouldn’t have dismissed the Swedish accounts on the perils of
invading Russia. He might have learned that the Russians didn’t
follow the traditional norms of warfare. They weren’t going to
surrender, or even admit to losing a battle, not with thousands of
miles of country to withdraw into, scorching the earth along the way.
And also that the Russian winter is really, really, harsh. 130 years
later, with Napoleon’s experience to draw from, it’s staggering
that Hitler went down the same path. He got the same results.
Books have a
limitless amount to teach us if we’re willing to pay attention.
You don’t need to
be a military general to benefit from the fore-arming and forewarning
that books can provide. Ask yourself, what body of knowledge would I
benefit from having deep in my bones? Unless you’re trying to make
discoveries in fundamental physics or advanced technology, someone
else has probably already gained the knowledge that you seek, and
they likely have put it in a book to share with you.
Learning how to read
for wisdom is simple, but not easy. The payoffs though, can be
incredible.
The more you read,
the more you will build your repertoire. Incrementally at first, the
knowledge you add to your stockpile will grow over time as it
combines with everything new you put in there. This is called
compounding, and it works with knowledge much the same as it does
with interest. Eventually, when faced with the new, challenging, and
perplexing, you will be able to draw on this dynamic inner
repository.
You will react, not
as a neophyte, but as someone whose instincts have been honed by the
experiences of others, rather than just your own. You will start to
see that nothing is truly new, that awesome challenges can and have
been overcome, and there are fundamental truths to how the world
works.
So learn from
others. Figure out where you are going and find out who has been
there before. Knowledge comes from experience, but it doesn’t have
to be your experience. Deep reading helps you to understand the world
allowing you to conquer panic and maximize your chances of success.