Reading for Growth, Part 1
Discover the secrets of a bookworm who's building up a large anti-library of paper and digital books to accelerate his pace of learning.
This is my ridiculously delayed 3rd post. Instead of wrapping up Better Hiring, Part 1 with a second and final installment, I decided to lead you through an exploration of a subject that is dear to my heart: the wonderful world of books.
In this post, I will attempt to share with you my passion for reading, explaining why it is imperative to read often. I will also magistrally shoot myself in the foot by arguing that your time would be much better spent reading books rather than (other) blogs.
I will boast of my ample collection of unread books - and clarify why I appear to be a fervent supporter of the paper pulp industry despite being a professed tree lover. Perhaps I will even redeem myself sharing the pros and cons of alternative digital book formats.
Finally, I aim to build up eager anticipation for Part 2 of this post by introducing the complexity of book selection.
Please join me on a journey that will inspire you to use books to accelerate your personal and professional growth.
Photo of the Week
My godfather was an enigmatic man, well in his 70s when I was still a child. He always dressed in impeccably tailored suits and enjoyed a wealth of uncertain origin. Highly cultivated, he told fascinating stories of a long-gone era between the two world wars.
I was maybe 8 y/o when he offered me a gift that would change my life, a copy of Jules Verne Journey to the Center of the Earth, a beautiful replica of the original Hetzel edition.
This event kicked off a life-long passion for reading anywhere and anytime: in bed, while frequently missing class during primary school and even in the Peruvian Andes as the wind was battering my tent at 5600 m. under a looming serac the night before the assault on Chopicalqui. Few activities better define who I am than reading.
The picture below was captured during a flight over the forbidding glacial highlands of central Iceland in January 2015, showing the Askja volcano. Anyone who visited this land shaped by unimaginable tectonic forces can recognize Jules Verne’s wisdom to locate there the passage to the core of our planet.
The 19th-century fictional stories of Jules Verne revolve around an unshakable faith that science and industrial power were forging a better world. They contributed to my decision to embrace a career in engineering rather than my initial literary calling.
I was taught by my Mom to treat books as something sacred, never to be soiled with writing in the margins - though I confess folding page corners for many years. I have retained that predilection for keeping books in a pristine state, which has hindered my ability to engage more actively with them - but more on that in Part 2 of this post.
Except during my school and university years, I read mostly for entertainment (science fiction novels) and information (travel books) rather than knowledge. Today my home library boasts more than two thousand physical books. I literally built my new house around my library and it is an inexhaustible source of pride and joy.
Why I Read?
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. - Henry Thoreau
As a kid, flying through the pages of Jules Verne hardcovers merely kept me entertained, with the additional side benefits of an improved vocabulary, grammar and bettered reading skills. Nothing was more exciting than a trip to the bookstore, from Payot in Geneva to FNAC in Paris and eventually Waterstones in London - with a significant impact on my parents’ bank account balance!
While I concede that online shopping at Amazon is both convenient and a cultural lifeline for me - I’m still allergic to deciphering books in Spanish - I can’t help but deplore the loss of the serendipitous browsing of books in a bookshop.
Nowadays my approach to reading has evolved from a purely recreational endeavor to become essential groundwork required to achieve my personal and career goals. I read to
increase knowledge.
discover new ideas.
think more clearly.
find meaning and improve my life.
better understand myself and others.
tackle and solve harder problems.
The impact I deliver on my job is strongly correlated with my ability to use my brain. It’s only logical that I want to train it and develop my capacity to learn - a skill that is vital in today’s economy.
Continuous learning is the foundation of continuous self-improvement, which depends upon a system that allows you to select, understand, retain, and apply the information garnered from the world’s best thinkers.
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Elon Musk, and more billionaires than I care to recount, all swear that the best way to learn is to read and read a lot. Their book lists are a fabulous source of inspiration to broaden your literary horizon.
Smart reading goes beyond accumulating knowledge one page at a time, it’s an activity that has the power to yank you out of your intellectual comfort zone.
I read ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,’ which is quite positive, I think, and it highlighted an important point, which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. - Elon Musk
Too often I overvalued my limited knowledge while underestimating the potential consequences of the unknown unknowns looming in my future. Books helped me be prepared, asking the right questions, and focusing on what mattered in my life.
For example, through Homo Deus, I discovered that genetic testing for cancer was now a reality and I dared to ask the question whether I faced an increased risk for hereditary cancer given that both of my parents had died from brain tumors (to my great relief, apparently I’m fine).
And while we’re on the subject of the brain, the latest science suggests that reading slows down cognitive decline.
A book a day keeps the neurosurgeon away?
Why Books?
We live in a distracted world. We are overwhelmed by an increasing onslaught of information delivered through a multitude of channels. Our time and attention are scarce resources that we must use with care.
Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. - Thomas H. Davenport and J. C. Beck
Every day hundreds of news articles, social media posts, podcasts, videos, compete for our limited attention. However, not all information is created equal. Many authors feel compelled to rehash truisms under catchy click-bait titles like “10 Things You Can Do to Become Smarter”. Such a post probably took some random 20 y/o a couple of hours to research and write. How much will you learn from it? How likely is it to change your life? How much of it will you remember 10 minutes after navigating to the next Web site?
The ROI of your focused attention depends on the signal to noise ratio of the content you absorb.
This post took me two full days to research, three days to write, and incorporates lessons gleaned during a lifetime of continuous self-improvement as a high tech professional. Despite the occasional digression and reminiscing - that exists partly because I want to write in a distinctive, more engaging, tone - my goal is to share the deepest possible thoughts with you.
You can expect a tweet from Nassim Nicholas Taleb to be deep and insightful - except when he declares his fondness for squid ink - but the medium itself (a micro-blogging platform) constrains the learning materials (tweets) to 280 characters. Bite-size data is ideally suited for passive information consumption - not learning.
On the other hand, a non-fiction book embodies a person’s life work. Take W. Edwards Deming, the “father of quality”, who had a huge influence on the Japanese industry - impacting Toyota and making his ideas commonplace in today’s lean startup world. He lived until the ripe old age of 93. Guess how many books he wrote? Two.
A book is so valuable because it contains an author’s life lessons and insights - which you can buy for an incredibly low price relative to the knowledge embodied in its pages. There’s hardly a better investment in your personal development. Long term, the disciplined pursuit of reading seminal works in your field will lead you to mastery and success.
A distraction I gladly eliminated 20 years ago when I moved from England to Mexico was watching television - though I mourned the loss of British comedies. Whilst TV and successor video-on-demand platforms do a good job at delivering mind-numbing content, they’re secondary to books as tools for learning, because
Active reading requires an undivided focus that fosters information retention.
Videos are designed to be consumed sequentially while books offer a table of content and an index for random access to information. Videos are like tapes while books are closer in principle to modern data storage systems.
The more you read, the faster and more effective you become at reading - but you can’t get quicker and better at watching videos. These benefits compound over time.
Read 500 pages like this every week. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest. - Warren Buffett
My Library
There’s a carefully hidden feature in the Amazon store that allows you to download your order history. Perhaps Jeff Bezos isn’t keen for us to know the extent to which we fund the growth of his empire? Here’s my data from January 1st, 2006, until August 16th, 2020:
I purchased 309 books from Amazon
I spent $6,563.43 on those books
As you can see, I simply do not worry about the budget I allocate to buying books.
Additionally, Twilio helps employees with a Kindle ebook monthly allowance granted once we demo an app built using one of our APIs - except that despite three attempts, first in Javascript, then in Java and finally in Python, I never completed my demo and thus am not eligible for that aid. Sigh.
So every time I come across a book that looks compelling, I purchase it - unless it isn’t relevant to my immediate interests. In that case, I save it to my Amazon wishlist. New books land on the shelves next to my bed where they constantly beckon.
The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow 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. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Recently, I have started growing my Kindle and Audible libraries at a faster clip than my paper books collection, for reasons I will explain further below. Considering that I flip through a miserly 20 to 30 books every year, my library is expanding far quicker than my ability to absorb its full content - and I’m fine with it.
My library is a vast mine of human insights. From every stratum, I can extract knowledge at will. It is also a part of my history and identity. Each book is a small milestone on the path of my life - and a legacy to my son, a door for him to scout the worlds that have shaped my existence.
Base Principles
The way I read has mutated from a habit to devour not-so-nourishing tales of aliens to a healthier intellectual diet based on principles that have worked well for me:
I aim to go through mostly non-fiction books, aligning with the reasons why I read that I presented earlier.
I don’t mind reading multiple books in parallel. Deeper insights can be derived from different perspectives on the same topic.
If a book feels like a slog, I give it fifty pages to prove me wrong before putting it down - with no remorse. I remind myself that my time is precious.
I consider speed-reading through a good book as akin to under-sampling a rich signal. I never do it, too much information is lost in the process.
I don’t set an objective to read X books every year - only to read daily. I’m not competing against Bill Gates and the 50 books he reads in a year.
Book Formats
I want to fill every nook and cranny of my life with reading. Luckily, there’s a book format for every opportunity.
Audiobooks
A colleague and friend introduced me to Audible in 2017 and it was love at first hearing.
Audiobooks are perfect to fill those gaps in your day when actively engaging in reading isn’t practical. For me, it was when I was commuting. I have fond memories of my walks from an Airbnb or hotel to our SF SOMA office, listening to the superlative Why We Sleep - or flying back home on a Friday night, too exhausted to open a book but delighted to listen to Angela Duckworth’s wonderful Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
Audiobooks aren’t a panacea though. For starter, you can’t highlight something important you just heard. Sitting in an airplane making notes of Ray Dalio’s countless quotable phrases from Principles: Life and Work was tedious and counterproductive. Information-dense material is best consumed in a Kindle ebook format designed to make it trivially easy to highlight and add notes to important passages.
On the other hand, Walter Isaacson’s opus on Leonardo da Vinci was low on my reading priority list but I was curious about the life of the legendary polymath. It was either taking on the audiobook or remaining forever ignorant of Leonardo’s life. I’m glad I picked the former option but found the constant audio reminders to “look at the attached PDF” to be distracting, breaking the flow of the narrative. Audible is a wonderful fit for biographies - except for those of prolific artists!
In general, the greater and more essential the visual content of a book, the more likely I want to buy the print edition. I would never contemplate listening to an audiobook about architecture! However, the format is perfect for opportunistically broadening one’s cultural horizon in fields like social sciences or history, without aiming to retain many specific facts.
Ebooks
There’s nothing that comes close to the joyful sensory experience of reading a real book. However, if you subscribe to the notion that form follows function, ebooks deliver irresistible benefits to the avid reader:
There’s a plethora of Android and iOS eReader apps with matching cloud services that make your library accessible anywhere you take your cellphone.
Concerned about eyestrain reading on LCD and OLED screens? The Kindle Paperwhite eInk display is easy on your eyes.
Frustrated that your 6” Kindle screen is too small to render complex diagrams? Get a Boox Note2 10.3” eInk tablet with Android support. I’ll be trying it out as soon as my next Amazon delivery gets to Colombia.
Keen to remember more from the books you read? eReaders highlights can be exported to Readwise and turned into flashcards. I have 2559 highlights synched with Readwise and couldn’t live without that service.
Book Summaries
I harbor mixed feelings about book summary services. Their value proposition is that they provide the most concise description of the book’s main ideas. If you only care about key takeaways, you could save time by subscribing to services like Blinkist or getAbstract.
Lamentably, good books have a high signal to noise ratio and do not lend themselves to summarizing. Additionally, I feel that domain expertise is a prerequisite to produce a smart summary. Skimming through summaries on Blinkist, I get the impression that the same random 20 y/o blogger also moonlights as a Mechanical Turk for that service.
Selecting Books
The Problem
Assuming a life expectancy of 77 years and an average of 25 books digested per annum, I’m poised to read another 700 books until the fat lady sings - though with diminishing returns since old age and decay will restrict optionality: I suspect there will be scant actionable content to be found in the classic encyclopedia of mountaineering, Freedom of the Hills, once climbing the stairs in my house becomes a tribulation.
Short of hitting the singularity before a heart disease hastens my timely demise, the only option left to me - to all of us - is to spend time reading good books. Since we shall not judge books by their cover, we must develop effective heuristics for book selection. What makes this an arduous task is
A Google researcher posted in 2010 that there were 129M books in existence. This tally is increasing by over half a million English language books every year. Randomly picking the best book to read on any subject is like looking for a needle in a haystack - blindfolded.
We all live inside our own filter bubble that separates us from information that disagrees with our viewpoints. This nips serendipity in the bud.
Popularity doesn’t necessarily equate quality, especially in the online world where click farms could propel any Kindle ebook to bestseller status overnight.
Selecting the right non-fiction book is contingent on having clear priorities in life. Should you learn How Not to Die or how to Talk Like TED? If you just had your third coronary bypass, the answer is obvious - let your needs guide you.
Basically, the odds of timely acquisition of breakthrough knowledge can be greatly increased if you master the underrated skill of intelligent book selection. This will be one of the subjects of Part 2 of this post.
What is incredibly valuable about writing is how it forces you to research your topics and think deeply through your content. Doing this is also incredibly time-consuming, much more so than I expected.
Faced with the options to adjust either the quality, length, or frequency of this blog to avoid the impending ruin of my family life, I decided to reduce publishing frequency to a bi-weekly pace.
In less than two weeks, Part 2 of this post will cover:
A method to pick good books
How to make time (and space) for reading
How to remember what you read
A sample reading workflow
Reading tools recommendations
My personal list of breakthrough books
Until then, please be safe, and thank you for reading until the end.