“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time.”
Charles T. Munger
In my experience, the best resource we have available to learn from is books. As Naval Ravikant said, “The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.”. We have access to podcasts, YouTube videos, apps, and online courses. That said, I haven’t been able to find a better resource than books. Reading takes time and effort, so people replace it with other media. The problem is that those resources give you the illusion of learning, but soon after engaging with them, you can’t remember anything.
The more time you dedicate to learning and the more painful it is, the better. You don’t want to make it quick and painless, you want to put in the hours and interact with the material. This means writing in the margins, taking down notes, or transcribing the passages that resonated into notecards. Everything I’m writing in this short article came from a handwritten notecard.
The opposite of this is using technology to make the process as painless as possible. In his book Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicolas Taleb said “Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners or squeeze more ‘efficiency’ out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it.” Productivity isn’t about optimizing for efficiency, but about choosing the pain you’re willing to go through. This is something I see when readers cut and paste the content that resonates. To be able to remember passages, you must write them by hand and you must review them often. In other words, you must be in love with the process; you must love the pain.
In an article titled The Most Important Question of Your Life, author Mark Manson says that most people want a perfect life, but that’s because it’s easy. If someone asked you what you wanted out of life, answering “I want to be happy” is innocuous and meaningless. He argues that a more interesting question would be “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Some things in life, are meant to be painful because that’s what gives them meaning. That applies to relationships, raising children, becoming an entrepreneur, or reading books.
Munger said he read so much his children thought he was “a book with a couple of legs sticking out.” When one of the richest men says he spends his most valuable asset reading, you know he’s up to something. Of course, the reading habits of millionaires go beyond the scope of this article, but if people like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates can make the time to read dozens of books every year, why can’t you? I can’t promise you it will always be easy, but it’ll make you a better person nonetheless.