“Another point about long-term thinking is how it sways the information we consume. I try to ask when I’m reading: Will I care about this a year from now? Ten years from now? Eighty tears from now?”
Morgan Housel
When I rediscovered reading, I felt overwhelmed with the sheer number of books I wanted to read. Soon, I realized that most nonfiction books are not very good. Only a handful of books offer information that is going to be relevant in the long term. When you start doing something for the first time, everything seems important. Soon, you find out that there are a couple of core principles you must focus on and ignore everything else.
This is what John Reed wrote in his book Succeeding: “When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles—generally three to twelve of them—that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.” Once you recognize the books that teach you those core principles, reading becomes more sustainable, not to mention less overwhelming.
In The Bed of Procrustes, Nassim Taleb says: “Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.” So as someone who summarizes books on the internet, my job is to find books that are worth summarizing and ignore everything else.
As you read more books, other books suddenly become irrelevant. When I read Atomic Habits, other books on the same subject were no longer meaningful. These include Mini Habits, High Performance Habits, Tiny Habits, and How to Change. By reading one of the best books on the subject, I deemed similar books completely irrelevant. In a way, my job is to spot those important books and make as many other books trivial in comparison.