This is why the smartest people in the world own tons of books they
don’t read.
For people who actually put in the time to read and learn how to
learn, unread books strewn across the house might actually be a sign
of intelligence rather than the lack of it.
Not only is having
tons of unfinished books around a sign of smarts, it also puts you in
great company. I finally let go of my own guilt when I did a deep
dive into the reading habits of luminary entrepreneurs and informally
surveyed my most successful friends. Most of them only read 20 to 40
percent of the books they purchase. Many of them were reading over 10
books at once.
In fact, one of the
most avid readers in the tech scene and a self-made billionaire
entrepreneur, estimates…
“I maybe start
half the books I get, and I probably finish a third of the books I
start. And that works out to finishing 1–2 books per
week.” — Patrick Collison
What’s going on
here?
Reading habits of
others in addition to the enormous changes in our knowledge society,
our new times call for new ways of searching for, filtering,
consuming, and applying knowledge in order to improve our lives.
The explosion of
information in different mediums and formats, research tools to find
the best information, and new apps to consume the information don’t
just call for more reading. These call for new ways of reading.
What follows are the
smartest non-fiction reading hacks.
Smart reading
hack 1: View books as an experiment
Buying a book is an
experiment. On the cost side, you’ll need to spend about $15 and
some time. But on the upside, a book can change your life. That’s a
pretty good bet!
What we know about
experimentation is that the more “smart” experiments you perform,
the more likely you are to find a breakthrough experiment that
changes everything. The most eminent scientists and successful
companies are typically the ones who perform the most experiments.
Inherent in being a
good experimenter is being OK with the losses. Therefore, remember
that every time you purchase a book that turns out to be a dud, you
are just one step closer to a book that will change your life.
Smart reading
hack 2: Do Fractal Reading
We’ve reached an
inflection point as a knowledge society. The metadata that books
generate (i.e., author interviews, author presentations, book
summaries, reviews, quotes, first and last chapters, etc.) is often
just as valuable as the book itself.
Why?
It’s free.
This allows you to try more books before you buy them. Therefore,
each book buying “experiment” has better odds of succeeding.
It’s
multimedia. You can access this information as text, audio, and
video, which makes it easier to incorporate into your lifestyle
(e.g., your daily commute or chores).
It has a high
signal-to-noise ratio. The shortened formats cut out the fluff and
get right to the big ideas.
Just as a book is a
condensed version of an author’s best ideas, the book’s metadata
is a condensed version of the book.
Therefore, I call
this type of reading ‘Fractal Reading’ because fractals are
objects where the same patterns happen at different levels of scale.
We’ve reached a
moment where it might be more useful and convenient to spend one’s
non-fiction reading time “Fractal Reading” rather than reading
one whole book cover to cover. For example, I’d estimate I spend
50% of my deliberate learning time focused on Fractal Reading rather
than deep, sequential reading. This helps me more effectively select
which books to go deep on and understand the most important and
relevant sections of a book so I can jump right to them. In most
cases, doing Fractal Reading on 5 books is more valuable and engaging
to me than consuming one book cover-to-cover.
Here’s how to do
it:
Read 2–3 book
summaries (Google search). For almost any book, you’ll find several
book summaries, which often contain the best information in the book
(the 20 percent of ideas that create 80 percent of value). And to
clarify, I’m only talking about nonfiction books here. This, of
course, would not be relevant to fiction.
Listen to an
author interview (podcast, Google). Interviews are engaging, and the
interviewer does the work for you, asking the author the most
pertinent and compelling questions they’ve gleaned from reading the
book.
Watch an author
presentation (TED, Google, or university talk). When an author is
forced to whittle down a 200-page book into a 20-minute talk, they
share their biggest idea and best story.
Read the most
helpful 1-star, 2-star, 3-star, 4-star, and 5-star reviews (Amazon).
Amazon helps us all quickly sort the most well thought-out reviews
from readers who loved the book down to those who hated it.
Read the first
and last chapters of the book. The first and last chapters of a book
often contain the most valuable content in it (this obviously doesn’t
work if you’re hoping to get lost in a novel). In addition, the
first and last paragraphs of each chapter contain the big ideas of
each chapter. With Google Books, ebook free samples, and Amazon’s
Look Inside feature, it’s often possible to get the first and last
chapter of a book for free.
Smart reading
hack 3: View your unread books as a reminder of how little you know
Intellectual
humility isn’t valuable just because it’s a virtue. It’s
valuable because it gives us a more realistic conception of ourselves
and our place in the world, which helps us conduct our lives more
effectively and harmoniously. For example, humility helps us make
better decisions and inspires us to learn more.
Here’s how I think
of it: there are billions of people who have been creating and
documenting their knowledge for thousands of years. What we know
compared to what humanity has collectively discovered is but a drop
in the ocean. And that ocean is growing at a speed we can’t even
fathom. Most of the scientists who have ever lived are alive today!
To take things even
further, when it comes to all of the knowledge that humanity could
discover and what we’ve already discovered as a species, the
difference is more like a grain of sand in the universe. So there are
three levels of humility we should have:
Personal
Knowledge
Humanity’s
Current Knowledge
All Potential
Knowledge
Yet, when it comes
to day-to-day lived experience, it feels like we know way more than
we actually do. On our good days, many of us feel like we have this
‘life thing’ figured out. Like we are at the end of a cycle
rather than the beginning. This is because we are constantly reminded
of what we know and rarely reminded (if ever) of how little we know.
Sure, we may know
conceptually that we don’t know everything, but we don’t
physically see it. I was recently reminded of this when I spent two
hours touring through two of Princeton University’s six libraries.
I must have walked through 10 football fields of books and academic
journals. On the one hand, it was inspiring to see everything I could
learn. On the other hand, it was extremely humbling. It helped me see
how little I currently know, and it helped me see that even if I
spent my whole life just reading, I would still only know a fraction
of knowledge out there.
Creating an
anti-library by surrounding ourselves with unread books in your home
can evoke a similar feeling. Bestselling author and successful
investor Nassim Taleb describes the value of an anti-library
brilliantly in his book, The Black Swan:
A private
library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read
books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should
contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means,
mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you
to put there. You’ll accumulate more knowledge and more books as
you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves
will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger
the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books
an antilibrary.
Taleb isn’t alone
in his sentiment. Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco
collected more than 30,000 books. Thomas Jefferson collected more
than 6,000 books, making his library the largest in the country at
the time. The founder of Priceline.com Jay Walker has such a big
collection of books that he built his home around it. Thomas Edison
put his work desk in the center of his personal three-story library.
Out of all of the rooms in Bill Gates’ house, his favorite is his
enormous 2,100 square foot library.
Smart reading
hack 4: Abandon good books for great books.
On a great podcast
episode of the Knowledge Project, Patrick Collison, the self-made
billionaire founder of Stripe, makes the following case:
At every moment,
you should be reading the best book you know of in the world [for
you]. But as soon as you discover something that seems more
interesting or more important, you should absolutely discard your
current book … because any other algorithm necessarily results in
your reading ‘worse’ stuff over time.
In other words, do
exactly the opposite of what we’ve been taught. Instead of vowing
to finish every book you pick up, allow yourself to simply drop your
current book — but only if you find one that’s better. Life
is too short and there are just too many good books out there. On the
other hand, we have to be careful about going too far in the other
direction, abandoning great books just because we see a book with a
catchy title.
How do you know
you’re not jumping too quickly between books? This is where Fractal
Reading earns its stripes. If a book’s metadata hasn’t captured
your attention, then it’s unlikely that reading the whole book
will.
Smart reading
hack 5: Use books to create space in your mind for great ideas to
collide
We know that
targeted advertisements are effective. They affect us both
consciously and unconsciously. Similarly, books placed strategically
in our environment do the same.
My mentor, business
partner, and friend Eben Pagan thinks of a bookshelf as a playlist of
all-time intellectual greats:
The most
important book on your bookshelf is the one that you haven’t read
yet. If you have a great potential book, now may not be the right
time to read it. It might be in a year, or 10 years. But when you see
a book at the right time, you will become curious about it and take
it off your bookshelf.
Patrick Collison
speaks in similar terms:
The other thing
I think is actually quite valuable is just leaving books out. When
somebody recommends a book, I’ll very often pick up a copy… And,
I’ll leave it out. So there is books in the kitchen. There’s
books in my bedroom… And just strewn everywhere.
And surprisingly
commonly, someone else will recommend the book or some aspect of the
book, and it’s still around you. It’s still salient. And you’ll
be like, ‘Oh yeah, I should really check out that thing.’
Or, something
else triggers its relevance. You read an article. You start
appreciating a point or a question or something.
And so, part of
the reason I still value physical books is because it creates a kind
of idea space for you that makes productive collisions more likely to
happen.
Smart reading
hack 6: Read books like magazines
Reading a book like
a magazine is a powerful metaphor. When we pick up a magazine, we
don’t feel guilty if we don’t read every page or if we just do a
5-minute reading spurt. Instead, we often skim to find the most
interesting and relevant articles and then go deep and slow on those.
This approach is powerful on a few levels:
It helps find
the most important knowledge that’s worth going deep on.
It helps us slow
down so we get the most from what we do go deep on.
It makes reading
easier to do, which means we are more likely to actually be
consistent.
Because, let’s
face it. Our attention spans aren’t what they used to be. Sitting
and reading for hours straight without distraction is theoretically
great, but if you don’t actually do it, it has zero value.
Avid reader and
famous tech investor and entrepreneur Naval Ravikant has pioneered a
reading system that helps him use his shorter attention span to his
benefit.
Ravikant noticed
that many of the books that had the most value are older source books
that form the foundation of other books. He describes the value of
these books in a Tim Ferriss podcast episode:
The older the
problem, the older the solution. If you’re talking about an old
problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and
peaceful of mind, what kinds of value systems are good, how should
you raise your family…these kinds of things, the older solutions
are probably better because they’ve withstood the test of time. Any
book that has been around for 2,000 years has been filtered by a lot
of people.
But Ravikant noticed
a challenge with reading these types of books:
…but I knew it
was a very hard problem because my brain had been trained on Facebook
and Twitter and these other bite-size pieces. So what I did is I came
up with this hack where I started treating books as throw away blog
posts or as bite-size tweets or Facebook posts. And I felt no
obligation to finish any book. Now, any time someone mentions a book
to me, I buy it. At any given time, I’m reading between 10 and 20
books. I’m flipping through them, so if the book is getting a
little boring, I’ll skip ahead. Sometimes, I’ll start reading a
book in the middle because some paragraph caught my eye, and I’ll
just continue from there. I feel no obligation whatsoever to finish
the book.
If at some point
in time, I determine that the book is boring if it’s got some
pieces of it that are incorrect so that now I can’t trust the rest
of the information in there, I just delete them, and I don’t
remember them at all. so I treat books now like other people might
treat other throw away light information on the web. So all of a
sudden books are back into my reading library.
Ultimately, it’s
not about how many books you finish.
Just by walking into
their homes it is difficult to tell the difference between a book
hoarder and smart reader. Each house would be strewn with books. But
under this surface similarity, there are three qualities that
separate the two.
Smart readers
create a consistent learning ritual. I recommend you follow the
5—Hour Rule, spending about an hour a day reading like many of the
the world’s top entrepreneurs and leaders. I spent dozens of hours
creating a free webinar that helps you find the time to learn and
stay consistent. Today, I spend 4–5 hours per day in deliberate
learning while growing my company and raising two kids.
Smart readers
learn how to learn. In other words, they maximize the value they get
from the time they put into reading. I created a free email course to
help you learn mental models, one of the keys to learning faster and
better. Inside, you’ll learn the models that self-made billionaire
entrepreneurs and investors use to make business and investing
decisions — tools you can apply immediately to your life and
business. You’ll also learn how to naturally use these models in
your everyday life.
Smart readers
take action until they get the result they’re looking for. The
value of theoretical knowledge comes from its application.
If you take these
three steps consistently, then it’s time for you to let go of the
guilt. You don’t have to read all the books on your shelf. And when
you do pick one up, you don’t have to read the entire thing.
Whereas book
hoarders judge themselves by the number of books they own, smart
readers judge themselves by what they get out of them.