Lately, I’ve been on a reading slump. I feel somewhat disillusioned with most nonfiction books. Most of the books I start, I never finish. As someone whose identity revolves around reading books and writing articles based on them, I’ve been experiencing some sort of identity crisis. Reading is one of the greatest gifts and one of the activities with the best return on investment. Charlie Munger once said “There is no better teacher than history in determining the future. There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.”
Munger was notorious for being an avid reader. He once said: “As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.” I may not have a lot in common with successful investors, but that’s an idea I can relate to. But while I think reading is one of the best ways to grow and learn, that doesn’t mean you have to read everything. Especially everything popular. Mark Twan famously said, “Whenever you find on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde echoed a similar idea by saying “Everything popular is wrong.”
Since I started the website a couple of years ago, I read hundreds of books and summarized most of them. At the time, I felt like I went from zero to one. In other words, I went from not knowing anything about philosophy, psychology, productivity, and entrepreneurship to knowing the basic pillars of those disciplines.
The more I read, the more books I left unfinished. On this topic, Naval Ravikant said “The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you learn more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power.” Similarly, Nassim Taleb wrote in The Bed of Procrustes “Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.” It took me years and a lot of pain to figure that out for myself.
The fact that I can use quotes from books I’ve read to deal with things I’m struggling with never ceases to amaze me. Here I was on a Saturday morning thinking about how disappointed I felt about leaving more books unfinished and as soon as I turned to my notecard system, I came across half a dozen quotes about that topic. What better to illustrate that than with another quote? James Baldwin once said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” So how do I overcome this reading slump? I must keep reading, but I don’t have to read everything.