B (10:09)
The Stoics were right when they said we never step in the same river twice. And honestly, my relationship with Marcus Aurelius Meditations is the same way. This is a book I have read literally hundreds of times. But when I picked it up off my bedside table last night, I found something in it that struck me very much of that moment that I've obviously seen hundreds of times before. But that was the moment that I needed it, and that's why we reread. I also think that rereading is a great way to get out of a slump or a dry spell. If I'm finding myself, I'm not reading enough. I haven't read anything good recently. I want to go back to a book that I know is amazing. That reminds me why I love literature. That reminds me why I love history. That reminds me why I love philosophy. Right? If you want a guaranteed good read, go read something you've already read before. One of the worst habits you can have as a reader is to be a snob, right? Sometimes I find myself reluctant to pick something up because it's really popular. And I catch myself doing this. I'll find myself reluctant to read something because everyone else is reading about it. I see it at every airport, I hear people talking about it. And you know what I find most of the time when I pick up one of those books, I go, oh, this deserved all the attention it was getting. That snobbishness never serves me well, even when I'm reading it. And I. I find that it's not that good. What I'm getting out of it, where that's helping me as a writer and as a thinker is it's forcing me to consider why it's good for other people. What are they getting out of it? What are they responding to? Right? Life is too short to yuck other people's Yums. Read the bestsellers, read the popular stuff. And even if you don't appreciate it, it can help you understand why that writer is reaching a large audience. And that can make you better at whatever you do. Look, most bestsellers are bestsellers for a reason. They're doing something for someone. You should never read without taking extracts. Pliny the elder said that 2,000 years ago he was talking about keeping what we call a commonplace book. For thousands of years, people have read and take written down passages and quotes. They write them down in little journals. I do mine on note cards. Quotes, stories, ideas, observations, things that inspire, things you want to look up. You gotta keep a commonplace book. One of the reasons I don't read a lot of ebooks and I don't do audiobooks is I feel like it's just going into a black hole. I go, oh, I like that, that was interesting. But I'm not recording it anywhere. There's no process by which I'm downloading it from one medium to another. If you want to learn how to keep a commonplace book, I'll link to a video where I do just that. Look, life is too short to read bad books. If a book sucks, stop reading it. The best readers quit books, right? You turn off a TV show that's boring. You walk out of a movie that sucks. Stop eating food that doesn't taste good. You unfollow people on social media who aren't adding to your life. Life is too short. The best reading rule here in this regard is 100 pages minus your age. As you get older, you got less time to read shitty books. I give more time to books that I'm not enjoying than my 95 year old grandmother does. And I think that makes perfect sense. I would say that great writers and good books are not hard to read. A student once bragged to the philosopher Epictetus that he'd made his way through the dense writings of Christ Chrysippus. And Epictetus looked at him and said, you know, if Chrysippus was a better writer, you'd have less to brag about. The point is, the job of the writer is to make their ideas understandable, is to make their story interesting and compelling and exciting. And if they can't do that, find someone who can. My view is that a long book has to justify itself. Robert Caro earns every page that you read, and I think I've read something like six or seven thousand pages of his writings. Ron Chernow does the same. I think I've read something like 4,000 pages of his writing. And I'm not bragging. It's a credit to them. It was a joy to spend those hours with them. But I picked up other big biographies of historical figures I really wanted to learn about, and I quit. Right. Because life is short and the writer should have done a better job. A question that will change your life is, what's a book that's changed your life? Ask that question to people you admire. Ask that question to. To people that you meet. That was Emerson's line. He says, if we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. If you only read the books that people you admired said had changed their life, that'd be a pretty good reading list. I will say generally cool titles make for crappy books. I wish this wasn't true, but it is. If there's anything to be skeptical of, it's books with great titles. And then, conversely, some of the best books I've ever read had terrible titles. We did a video of this not too long ago. By the same token, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. And at the same time, you. You kind of should. As an author, I tell you, you spend a lot of time thinking about the COVID And if you don't, that says something about the author's process, right? It tells you something about the leverage they had over their publisher. It tells you something about who they think will like a book like this. You know, when you're reading, you should look for wisdom and not facts, right? We're not just reading for random pieces of information. We're not preparing for a test. We are not preparing for trivia night. We're reading to accumulate wisdom and insights. We're reading to learn and grow and be changed as people. I think this is an important question to ask yourself when you're reading. What do I plan to do with this information? One of my strategies when I read is I try to find my next book in that book. I read the footnotes, I read the bibliography, I read the acknowledgments. I want to read like a monkey swinging from vine to vine. I want to plan out where I'm going next based on where this subject is taking me, what it's exposing me to, what I'm learning about as I'm learning. There's something profoundly wonderful about finding an author you love and then just reading everything they've written, really going backwards and forwards in their whole body of work, getting to know their strengths and their weaknesses, seeing how they evolved and Grew as a thinker and as a writer. So when you find someone you like, go all the way. A basic rule of life. When you see a book you're interested in, buy it. Don't sweat the price. Don't wait for it to come out in paperback. Don't wait for it to be on sale. If you're worried about what it costs, go get it from the library. I'm saying this as an author, even though it's not in my interest, go pirate it on the Internet. If you're interested in reading something, you should read it, right? Books are one of the best investments you can ever make in your life. Warren Buffett's entire fortune can be traced back to a book recommendation he got as a young man. Benjamin Graham's the Intelligent Investor. My life was changed when someone recommended the Stoics. Imagine if I said, I'll get to that later. Imagine I said, oh, I'll wait to see if that ever goes on sale, right? For $10 or $20 or from a library for free, right? You can change your life. It is an incredible return on investment. If there's a flicker of interest in a book, go for it. Speed reading is a scam. If you want to read a lot, you have to spend a lot of time reading. The only way to speed up your reading is to know a lot about the subject that you're reading about, right? And how do you do that? You have to have spent a lot of time reading about it. There's no shortcuts, there's no hacks, there's no way getting around it. If you want to read a lot, you got to spend a lot of time reading. Reading your nightstand should be ambitious. It should have a stack, like mine does, of books that I am reading and also books that I want to read, right? You should be building not just a library, but as Nassim Taleb says, an anti library. A book that humbles you, that embodies what you don't know about yet, what you haven't got to yet, but you know that you should a reminder of how much there is left to learn and how many books that there are left to read. If you see a book, if you're thinking about reading it, grab it, put it on your nightstand, put it on your desk, have it there as a reminder, as a nudge, that as you're wasting time on your phone, as you're wasting time on tv, as you're wasting time doing whatever, that there's a big stack of unread books that you need to get to Seneca said that we should read like a spy in the enemy's camp. He was saying that we should be familiar with the ideas of people that we disagree with, of schools of thought that we don't subscribe to. We should take wisdom wherever it comes from, whoever it comes. You should read books and writers that you disagree with. If all you're doing is underlining things that you like, things that confirm what you already believe, you're not doing a good job as a reader. Read people you disagree with. Read like a spy in the enemy's camp. If you're only finding stuff that you like, if you're only finding stuff that supports what you already believe, you are not reading diversely or cross critically enough. You should be arguing with the authors that you read. You should be disagreeing in the margins of the books you read. You should know enough about a topic that you should be able to spot that sometimes the author is incorrect, that they don't know. Reading is a conversation. It is also an argument. Look, good things happen in bookstores. I know this as someone who owns a bookstore, but so many of the books that have changed my life are just random things I grabbed off a table at a bookstore that I chanced upon on on a shelf. I didn't know I was looking for them, but I was right. That's how I built my bookstore, is that all the books are face out, that they're only books that we've loved and raved about that we think have the potential to change your life. But the point is, a bookstore is a better discovery engine than any algorithm. Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Whenever you see a bookstore, pop your head and be open. If you see something that piques your interest, grab it. You don't have to read it right away. Let it sit, sit on your nightstand for a while. But the point is, go to bookstores. Wonderful things happen there. And when you see a book, grab it, because you never know what effect it's going to have on you. Look, prefaces and forewords are there for a reason. Don't skip them, right? They often have tons of helpful and interesting stuff in there, stuff that you're going to recognize now for the second time when you actually get to that part in the book. I even add to this. I try to read reviews of books that I'm reading. I read the Wikipedia page. I read summaries of the books that I'm reading. I want to have the context. I want to be able to wrap my head around the subject. I don't care about spoilers. I don't care about preserving the mystery. I want to download what's in here. I want to be able to wrap my brain around it. I don't want to be lost. I want to understand what's happening. And that's what all this stuff is for. Look, you can never pay someone back for recommending a book to you, but you can pay that forward. If you read something good, tell other people about it. Be a fan. Be an advocate. Right? Press it into people's hands. I started my reading list newsletter 15 years ago, just recommending books that I love, that I thought other people would like. And now something like 200,000 people from all over the world get this recommendation every single month. It's why the Painted Porch, my bookstore, exists. Be an advocate, be a supporter, be a fan. If you find something good, tell people about it. I think it's this reading rule that I'm proudest of the the most. I'm proud to have been able to champion books, turn some of them into bestsellers, bring them back from obscurity, take books that were out of print and bring them back in. I'm trying to pay forward what these books did for me. I'm trying to tell people about Marcus Reelius's Meditations, which changed my life. So those are just some of my reading rules. I'm sure you have your own. I'd love to hear about them. You can put them in the comments below.
