Something to Keep
“I don’t know a smart person who doesn’t read and read all the time.”
Naval Ravikant, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
A Second Look
I think there’s a difference between someone who reads and someone who doesn’t. Like Mark Manson, I also think that some intellectuals are idiots. Although these statements seem contrary, both can be true. The most important part when it comes to reading is to be conscious about what you’re reading and choose the right models to believe in. Let me elaborate.
I know people who read a lot of stuff online, but since the models they chose are wrong (flat earthers, I’m looking at you), they’re insufferable at parties. I like being contrarian, but contrarianism doesn’t have to mean “asshole”. For example, I disagree with many of the things I read about self-development. That’s ok because I have read enough to challenge some of those claims without making it personal.
It sounds like I’m patting myself on the back here. In reality, swallowing my pride and accepting I don’t know shit was harder than it sounds. This also meant reading several books to challenge old models and replace them with healthier, more accurate ones. The most popular models are inaccurate, but easy to believe because they involve little to no work. It’s easier to try to manifest stuff than actually work to achieve it, but those thoughts are destructive in the long run.
But here’s another, more important thing: although adopting models you’ve read online makes sense at first, you must test them in the real world. Challenging models is hard because we see them as a part of ourselves, but learning something new should be the combination of reading and testing those ideas in the real world. The best teacher is reality because it’ll make a fool out of anyone wrong, and it won’t care about their feelings. And as a contrarian, I love that.
Everything I just wrote came to me after reading Mark Manson’s article, Intellectuals are Fucking Idiots which he recently posted on Substack. If the idea resonated, go ahead and check it out.
Something I Liked
I finally finished reading Wait But Why’s The Elon Musk Blog Series and immediately gravitated toward long-form content. Whenever I’m doing research and come across long-form articles, I immediately send them to my Kindle using the aptly named Send to Kindle extension. Here’s another tip: if the article in question is behind a paywall, I use archive.ph to access it, and then I save it using the extension.
Here are some of the articles I’ve read this morning:
- Our Longing for Inconvenience, The New Yorker
- My Childhood in the Weather Underground, The New Yorker
- What We Discovered in ‘Deep YouTube’, The Atlantic