Reading for Growth, Part 2
Do not read this post if you already have a surefire method to pick the books that will change your life.
Photo of the Week
Did you know that there’s a country in South America with an Inclusive Development Index (IDI) higher than Spain and Italy? The secluded coastal villages of that nation have attracted Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps because of the fine wines and the mild Californian climate. Can you guess that country’s name?
It’s Uruguay.
A contrarian travel destination if there’s any, I had the opportunity to visit Uruguay in 2012 from historic Colonia del Sacramento to the delightful boho-chic town of Jose Ignacio where I spotted this picturesque collection of direction signs.
Where would you go if you had just one day in Jose Ignacio?
Choice overload can breed anxiety. We face a similar dilemma when picking our next read. Pre-COVID I was time and again standing in airport bookshops scratching my bald head in front of all the bestsellers on display with their beguiling covers crying out “buy me, you’ll be missing out if you don’t”.
Happily, I’ve grown wiser and developed a set of heuristics to discover the books that will accelerate my personal growth the most.
The task is ... not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees. - Erwin Schrodinger
In this post, I will be sharing with you some of these tools and techniques.
Selecting Books
Once in a while, I stumble upon a blog that adds a valuable brick to the edifice of my knowledge. For a long time, I knew that life did not proceed in a linear fashion, but this post from Accelerated Intelligence was vital in introducing me to the concept of breakthrough knowledge that framed the notion of non-linearity in learning.
Breakthrough knowledge, on the other hand, challenges our fundamental beliefs about how the world works or introduces a new lens through which to see the world. It sticks with us. - Michael Simmons, Accelerated Intelligence
In the first half of this series of posts (Reading for Growth, Part 1) I postulated that our time on earth is a scarce (and arguably non-renewable) resource, hence we should invest it wisely by reading as many good books as possible.
The simplest starting point is to have a clear purpose that’s driving you to read about a particular subject. This is why you want to read. Maybe you need to alleviate your fears about money because you used to live from paycheck to paycheck - even if that worry has become irrational? Or you got a performance review suggesting that you could improve on your strategic thinking or better hold your team accountable, or whatever you lack in order to climb up to that coveted next level on your company’s career ladder.
Or maybe you feel like escaping the straitjacket of self-improvement literature and crave some serendipitous mind expansion. You wonder what authors have influenced Nassim Nicholas Taleb and discovered a brief reference about Karl R. Popper in the bibliography of Black Swan, a book you found illuminating - hence you want to dig deeper.
Regardless of your rational motivations to gravitate toward certain books, you need to answer a key question before clicking on the Amazon Buy Now button - could this book radically change my life?
This question is critical - but don’t overthink it either. Take a risk! Apply the motto of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to your book selection strategy, fail fast, and frequently. Use the advice of this post as a starting point and then learn from your failures, refine your process until it works most of the time.
Most importantly, do not be afraid to stop reading those bad books you regret buying - we all have a wobbly table begging for a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey to prop it up.
Social Proof
Half the fun of writing this blog lies in researching facts, following the semantic breadcrumbs to the original source of knowledge, the intellectual cornerstone from which secondary sources glean their evidence. So much recently produced content is mere derivative work from older books.
Take for example this report indicating that online reviews impact the purchasing decisions of 93% of consumers. Why is that? Because human beings are wired to consume popular products - but how does that affect our book choices?
Book Reviews
Robert Cialdini, in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, introduced the concept of social proof, a phenomenon in which people will often look to others for clues concerning the correct behavior when in a situation where they are unsure of the correct way to behave.
First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t. Especially when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd. Second, quite frequently the crowd is mistaken because they are not acting on the basis of any superior information but are reacting, themselves, to the principle of social proof. - Robert Cialdini
This induces a herd behavior that disregards clues that reviews should play a less influential role in our book purchase decisions:
Academic research found that “reviews posted online reflect a biased view of the overall evaluation of consumers who purchased the product”. They recommend that “consumers should pay more attention to the number of reviews than to the average rating, as the average ratings do not allow to distinguish between high-and low-quality products”.
Publishers and authors fully understand the power of reviews and have developed sophisticated marketing techniques to manipulate Amazon consumers. There’s some evidence that Goodreads reviews aren’t as heavily targeted since readers are less likely to buy books directly from that site.
Ultimately, reviews are an unavoidable factor in decision-making heuristics when selecting a book. This is how I leverage reviews when I go book hunting:
I consider both Amazon and Goodreads reviews, giving slightly more weight to the latter.
On Amazon, I skim through both the Top Reviews and Most Recent reviews. The former often comprise reviews made soon after the book was published and are frequently of dubious origin: they could be from the author’s social network or professional reviewers recruited through paid online services like StoryOrigin, BookTasters, Edelweiss, or NetGalley.
I actively seek negative reviews. To steal a page from Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to shareholders: “what I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent”. There’s often more wisdom in a single (factual) negative review than in ten positive reviews indiscriminately praising the author.
The fewer reviews a book has, the more inclined I am to check its table of contents and browse through its first chapter to lower the risk of picking a dud.
Reviewers are random strangers who read books through the lens of their own unique biases. Separating the wheat from the chaff is problematic since you cannot trust that your interests are aligned with those of the reviewers.
For instance, while I was fortunate enough to join Twilio pre-IPO, money in my imagination is like an unreliable mother, liable to abandon me at any moment. Thus I was excited when I found a reference to How To Worry Less About Money on the recommended book list of Rosie Leizrowice’s, a Content Strategist at Farnam Street.
Many Goodreads reviewers rated the book poorly, lamenting that “I was expecting more of a self-help book but instead read a philosophical review” - which is precisely what I was looking for. I bought the book despite the poor ratings on the account of the trusted source recommendation, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Bestseller Lists
The New York Times Best-Sellers (NYTBL) is the best known and most prestigious ranking of books sold in the US. It is every author’s dream to figure on that list which acts as the ultimate social proof, reputedly boosting first-time authors’ sales by 57%. However, to get there you must sell 5000 copies per week via traditional sales channels.
Digging deeper, I discovered that this ranking suffers from a number of blind spots:
It doesn’t count downloads of free ebooks from online libraries like Project Gutenberg, thus you may not realize that Pride and Prejudice would have easily made the NYTBL for all of August 2020. Basically, the ranking has a bias against classic literature - and thrifty readers.
Non-fiction books sustain their bestseller status for longer than fiction work, but 24% of those books stayed on the NYTBL for only one week. This suggests that the ranking is affected by recency bias.
Amazon Kindle sales aren’t taken into account although they represent roughly 85% of all ebook sales in the US. Check out the Amazon Charts and be prepared to see a rather different picture of what constitutes a literary “hit”.
Needless to say, literature is universal and the NYTBL covers only a fraction of the titles published in the US. As a French native speaker, I can’t help but marvel at how distinctive France’s best-sellers list is compared to its US counterpart.
In the end, best-sellers lists are constructed using a form of wisdom of the crowd which reminds me of the irrational gyrations of the stock market. While on aggregate there’s some value to that type of social proof, perusing a best-seller list isn’t the most optimal solution to discover your next breakthrough book.
Book Awards
I was blessed with a mother who loved to read. She adored modern classics, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago or Albert Camus’ The Plague. As a kid, I raided her book collection with gusto - until an ominous day when I saw my paper companions neatly stacked in boxes, ready to be sold to raise the money we needed for food. My heart sank as I overheard second-hand book buyers haggle and then take away the precious volumes that had illuminated my childhood.
I presume my mother’s book choices were influenced by the Nobel Prize in Literature, an award that was quite fashionable in the ‘70s. Even though there’s a myriad of literary awards, I confess paying scant attention to them, with three notable exceptions:
The FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, which features a thought-provoking long list of books such as the upcoming No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention and If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.
For popular science books, I once again turn to the UK and the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. The 2019 winner is the timely Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.
I’ve always had a weak spot for science fiction books and the SF Awards Database is a fabulous resource to quickly uncover the latest Hugo or Nebula prize winners, which have proven to be reliable indicators of enjoyable reads.
An honorable mention goes to FiveBooks, an attractive book recommendation meta-site that includes a good section of literary awards.
Research
Adopting social proof as your guide to make a book choice isn’t an inherently flawed mechanism, but there are alternative paths worth considering - which require more work but deliver more rewards.
Bibliographies
How do we apply a more data-driven method to discover breakthrough books? We can look into bibliographies. If you have ever dabbled in reading scientific papers, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the citations section, in which the authors refer to earlier works as a means to acknowledge the source of their ideas. Those citations are often used as a measure of a scientific paper’s significance.
Back in 2014, Google Scholar generated a list of the “most-cited” articles of all time for Nature, the world’s leading science journal. More than half of the most influential (i.e. widely cited) scientific articles are actually… books! (highlighted in green below)
What surprised me is how old those authoritative books were: out of the top 40 entries, only one was from the 21st century. This makes sense! Our core ideas tend to remain constant over time. This leads us to an extremely important hypothesis: older books that are still being recommended offer more value since they’ve been around longer. This is an application of the Lindy Effect to books.
If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not "aging" like persons, but "aging" in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life! - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Consequently, to maximize your reading ROI a powerful heuristic is to focus on books that have been around the longest and cited the most. Not only will you have an increased probability of encountering breakthrough knowledge, but you will also learn foundational ideas that won’t be rendered obsolete any time soon.
Scientific publications listed in Nature may seem arcane to most of us. Luckily, the London School of Economics went through a similar exercise in 2016 to give us a more digestible list of the top 25 most cited books in the social sciences. You will spot there the 1992 seminal management book The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge, which introduced Systems Thinking as a pillar of learning organizations.
To be transparent, I’m new to Google Scholar, but the potential of the tool is gigantic.
I wanted to see whether this could be a practical day-to-day book discovery solution so I started a search on software architecture and picked the first-page result with the most citations, the book Software Architecture In Practice, which led me to the doctoral dissertation of Roy Thomas Fielding, the father of the REST architectural style.
In just two clicks!
Ironically, if you want to bring serendipity back into your reading, the data-driven approach of running down the trail of bibliographies and looking at citation counts is quite effective.
Credibility
Would you buy a newly published book entitled “On The Origin of Species” written by a certain Serge Kruppa, Sr. Director of Engineering at Twilio? No? Neither would I, no offense taken.
The author’s credibility clearly matters for non-fiction books - expertise is honed over countless hours of intentional practice - and we want to learn from first-rate experts with a solid track record.
What about a book on how nations cope with crisis and change, written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning geographer, historian, anthropologist, ornithologist, author of several popular science bestsellers? Would you trust that author?
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel came close to breakthrough book status for me. I read it when I was living and working in Mexico City, constantly wondering why Spain conquered the Aztec civilization and not the other way round (imagine pyramids in Madrid instead of churches in Puebla - what a sight).
As an author, he had unassailable credentials and his magnum opus entirely deserved its numerous awards. Success begets success and he went on to write several more books - until his latest publication, Upheaval, got slammed by the New York Times as containing many factual inaccuracies.
The book industry isn’t immune to misinformation. Sometimes this is accidental and due in part to a practice that forces authors to hire their own fact-checkers instead of having the publishers take on that burden.
Quite often, the author is only too happy to peddle his own pseudoscience, like Erich Von Daniken and his seven million copies bestseller, Chariots of the Gods. Long after I stopped believing in Santa Claus, I was still adamant that there was an alien astronaut preserved in a pyramid!
Assessing an author’s credibility is arduous. For this reason, always use your critical reading and critical thinking abilities for books that aren’t backed by dependable peer reviews and meaningful citations, creating a reliable web of trust.
To the critical reader, any single text provides but one portrayal of the facts, one individual’s “take” on the subject matter. - Daniel J. Kurland
Curated Book Lists
Reading lists are like personal awards - they represent a selection of the best books according to a certain worldview and set of criteria pertaining to an individual. Unlike awards, you do not have to trust the acumen of a faceless evaluation committee, rather the judgment of a person of blood and flesh whom you (hopefully) admire, like a celebrity or a prominent industry expert.
I hesitate to make book list recommendations because this is such a private choice, akin to picking a mentor. So please take these suggestions below with a grain of salt:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s reading list can be found on BookAdvice in the contrarian personalities section, together with Peter Thiel. I espouse contrarian thinking as a means to live a unique life - off society’s beaten path - and have read several of Taleb’s recommended books.
Shane Parrish’s newsletter, Farnam Street, has a virtually inescapable gravitational pull that attracts my Google searches on multiple subjects. Understandably, I’m a fan of his outstanding book list.
Bill Gates’ together with other uber-geeks depicted in Walter Isaacson’s book The Innovators, is an inescapable figure in the world of software. From much-reviled nemesis of free software to much-admired philanthropist, his Gates Notes book list is unmissable.
Free Books Libraries
I have a complicated relationship with computer books. Articles and blog posts tend to be more up-to-date given the rapid pace of change in this space. Computer books are also disconcertingly costly. Except for a few classics, like The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth, they suffer from an alarmingly short shelf life.
As an aspiring writer, I acknowledge that authors have a right to be compensated for all the hard work that goes into writing a good book. I do not download pirated books. However, while researching this post I have found a couple of resources featuring high-quality computer books - available for free.
We have reached the end of this post and I have failed you, dear Reader. I only outlined a method to pick good books, falling short of my promise made at the end of Reading for Growth, Part 1. Luckily there will be a Part 3 post to conclude this epic series on books.
Please stay safe… and tuned.