The purpose of reading is not just raw knowledge. It’s that it is part of the human experience. It helps you find meaning, understand yourself, and make your life better.
—Ryan Holiday
I read to increase knowledge. I read to find meaning. I read for a better understanding of others and myself. I read to discover. I read to make my life better. I read to make fewer mistakes.
To paraphrase David Ogilvy, reading and learning is “a priceless opportunity to furnish our mind and enrich the quality of our life.”
Wherever I go, a book is not far behind. It might be on my phone or a physical copy, but a book is always close by. (I love printed books. I just find something so calming and peaceful about reading a paperback or hardcover book.) During my initial years in America, when I had to commute long distances to reach my workplace, I used to read books on my seat in the bus to ensure that not a single minute was wasted during my learning and development phase.
Finding time to read is easier than you might think. Waiting for a bus? Stop staring down the street and read. Waiting for a taxi? Read. On the train? Read. On the plane? Read. Waiting at the airport for your flight? Read.
Reading alone, however, isn’t enough to improve your knowledge. Learning something insightful requires work. You have to read something above your current level. You need to find writers who are more knowledgeable on a particular subject than you are. This is how you become more intelligent. Reach out to and associate with people better than you and you cannot help but improve.
A lot of people confuse knowing the name of something with understanding it.
This is a good heuristic: Anything effortlessly digested means that you are reading for information. For example, the job of the news media is to inform us about day-to-day events, to entertain us, to reflect the public moods and sentiments of the moment, and to print stories that will interest us today and that we will want to read.
But that’s exactly what creates problems for readers, who often succumb to the recency and availability biases that “news” creates. The same applies to social media. The feeds we take in are characterized by recency bias. Most of what we consume is less than twenty-four hours old. Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about what we consume: Is this important? Is this going to stand the test of time for even a year?
As you grow older and become more mature, you realize that not everything deserves a response. This truth applies to most things in life and almost everything in the news.
We’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.
—Nicholas Carr
The true scarce commodity of the near future will be human attention.
—Satya Nadella
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
—Herbert Simon
In my view, studying old newspapers is a far more productive exercise than reading today’s newspaper. (Buffett likes to call it “instructive art.”) Morgan Housel writes:
Every piece of financial news you read should be filtered by asking the question, “Will I still care about this in a year? Five years? Ten years?” The goal of information should be to help you make better decisions between now and the end of your ultimate goals. Read old news and you’ll quickly see that the life expectancy of your goals is higher than that of the vast majority of headlines.6
Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes, in his book Fooled by Randomness, “Minimal exposure to the media should be a guiding principle for someone involved in decision making under uncertainty—including all participants in financial markets.”7 His key argument is that what is reported in the media is noise rather than information, but most people do not realize that the media is paid to get our attention.
The key lesson is that, in the pursuit of wisdom, we must read much more of what has endured over time (such as history or biographies) than what is ephemeral (such as daily news, social media trends, and the like). I agree with Andrew Ross, who says, “The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.”8
All of the history of humankind is a short chapter in the history of biology. And all of biology is a short chapter in the history of the planet. And the planet is a short chapter in the history of the universe.
—Will and Ariel Durant
Will and Ariel Durant’s work compresses five thousand years of history into one hundred pages of conclusions. It focuses on timeless truths, not on today’s trends—the antithesis of social media. The book highlights the lessons of history, not the events that define it. It explains how all of life, from the simplicity of single-celled organisms to the complexity of humans, is governed by the laws and trials of evolution. The laws of biology double as the fundamental lessons of history. All beings are subject to the processes and trials of evolution. Only the fittest survive. Natural selection leads to better qualities being retained and passed along. The result is a constant cycle of improvement for the whole.
Always respect the old. Apply the “Lindy effect” to reading and learning. According to Nassim Taleb, “The Lindy effect is a concept that the future life expectancy of some nonperishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.”9 So, a book that has stood the test of time and survived fifty or one hundred or five hundred years and is still widely read because it contains timeless wisdom is expected to survive another fifty or one hundred or five hundred years for that very reason—that is, its wisdom is timeless.
The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
—Mark Twain
One should read on varied topics, such as health and fitness, personal finance, investing, business, economics, decision making, human behavior, history, philosophy, self-awareness, and, of course, life. Reread the classics in these fields on a regular basis. Use the Lindy effect to your advantage. Also, share your latest book purchases with like-minded friends. It’s a lot of fun to co-read and exchange insights.
Reading for understanding narrows the gap between reader and writer. How can we read better to bridge this gap?
How to Read a Book
The goal of reading determines how you should read. Although many people are proficient in reading for information and entertainment, few improve their ability to read for knowledge.
Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren have written the seminal book on reading. Their How to Read a Book provides the necessary skills to read anything. Adler and Van Doren identify four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical. Before we can improve reading skills, we need to understand the differences among these reading levels. They are discussed as levels because you must master one level before you can move to a higher level. They are cumulative,
