Lifelong learning will help you be happier, earn more, and even stay
healthier, experts say. Plus, plenty of the smartest names in
business, from Bill Gates to Elon Musk, insist that the best way to
get smarter is to read. So what do you do? You go out and buy books,
lots of them.
But life is busy,
and intentions are one thing, actions another. Soon you find your
shelves (or e-reader) overflowing with titles you intend to read one
day, or books you flipped through once but then abandoned. Is this a
disaster for your project to become a smarter, wiser person?
If you never
actually get around to reading any books, then yes. You might want to
read up on tricks to squeeze more reading into your hectic life and
why it pays to commit a few hours every week to learning. But if it's
simply that your book reading in no way keeps pace with your book
buying, I have good news for you (and for me; I definitely fall into
this category): Your overstuffed library isn't a sign of failure or
ignorance, it's a badge of honor.
That's the argument
author and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes in his bestseller
The Black Swan. Perpetually fascinating blog Brain Pickings dug up
and highlighted the section in a particularly lovely post. Taleb
kicks off his musings with an anecdote about the legendary library of
Italian writer Umberto Eco, which contained a jaw-dropping 30,000
volumes.
Did Eco actually
read all those books? Of course not, but that wasn't the point of
surrounding himself with so much potential but as-yet-unrealized
knowledge. By providing a constant reminder of all the things he
didn't know, Eco's library kept him intellectually hungry and
perpetually curious. An ever-growing collection of books you haven't
yet read can do the same for you, Taleb writes:
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 will
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.
An antilibrary is a
powerful reminder of your limitations -- the vast quantity of things
you don't know, half-know, or will one day realize you're wrong
about. By living with that reminder daily you can nudge yourself
toward the kind of intellectual humility that improves
decision-making and drives learning.
"People don't
walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not
studied or experienced (it's the job of their competitors to do
that), but it would be nice if they did," Taleb claims.
Why? Perhaps because
it is a well-known psychological fact that it's the most incompetent
who are the most confident of their abilities and the most
intelligent who are full of doubt. (Really. It's called the
Dunning-Kruger effect.) It's equally well established that the more
readily you admit you don't know things, the faster you learn.
So stop beating
yourself up for buying too many books or for having a to-read list
that you could never get through in three lifetimes. All those books
you haven't read are indeed a sign of your ignorance. But if you know
how ignorant you are, you're way ahead of the vast majority of other
people.