How To Change Your Mindset and Read 20+ Books a Year
If you don’t enjoy learning, you’re not learning the right thing
Why do we fall, Mr. Wayne?
So we can learn to pick ourselves back up.
- Alfred Pennyworth
I hated reading books in high school.
I used to think to myself — why would anyone waste their time reading hundreds of dull pages when you could just use SparkNotes? Or watch the Great Gatsby movie?
My goals in life included hanging out, playing video games, and having fun. The Scarlet Letter was not contributing much to either of those goals, so I wanted nothing to do with it.
Besides, being all studious and intellectual isn’t exactly the cool thing to do when you’re a kid.
What then started happening is that I started to equate books with the forceful acquisition and regurgitation of seemingly useless knowledge.
I was very lucky to have a supportive family that taught me the value of education early on, so I still was able to get good grades and force myself to get through the monotony.
But my interpretation of books eventually grew into a broader interpretation of learning new things, in general. I started to see the learning process as a tedious, painful thing to be avoided at all costs.
And I know that I am not the only one who felt this way. After all, how could you blame us?
All Humans Are Born Nerds
During our formative years, we are experiencing so many exciting changes with our friends, our environments, and ourselves that the last thing we want to do is sit down for 8 hours memorizing math formulas.
For many of us, being forced to learn this way saps away the joy inherent in learning.
Yet we are all born with an innate curiosity for understanding how the world works. Children love asking questions!
But as we get older, we grow cynical. We ask one too many questions and get into trouble, become frustrated by our lack of success in a traditional classroom environment, or worse, start to believe that we actually have this life thing figured out and stop learning new things.
And having this sort of fixed mindset can cause you huge problems later on in life.
As described by James Clear in Atomic Habits, your identity as a person is in a perpetual feedback loop with your habits. And habits themselves are formed through positive and negative reinforcement.
So if you have enough negative experiences associated with a particular action or event, you are obviously likely to not want to do it again. But most importantly, you will start seeing yourself as the sort of person who “does not do that thing.”
This sort of identity-level transformation is the most powerful one, and unsurprisingly, the hardest one to change.
In this sense, what you do is truly who you will become. Not from an abstract, philosophical point of view, but rather from the perspective of your own self-identity.
Essentially, what happened to me (as happens to many others) was that I had enough bad (ie. boring, unexciting, tedious) experiences in the traditional classroom setting that I started believing “I’m not a person who enjoys learning things”.
20 Dollars is 20 Dollars
So how did I go from reading a couple SparkNotes summaries a year to a devoted habit of reading 40+ books over the past two years?
The real change for me came after a prolonged period of what felt like failure after failure.
I had always had big dreams, but being rejected by my target university — the only one I applied to — brought me back to harsh reality.
I spent a year at a local University, taking classes that were relatively easy and not very demanding, and I still couldn’t get the grades I wanted.
I was also not getting the results I wanted in other areas of life, even after years of trying. I felt generally unhappy with myself.
In desperation, I bought the classic self-help books — Think and Grow Rich, Awaken The Giant Within, etc.
It took me way too long to finish them. But after I implemented some of their advice, and actually saw a slight improvement in my life, I felt like I had just discovered fire.
Back then, I was interested in getting an internship in Finance, but I was technically still an undeclared major.
So when I realized that the internet had all the information I needed on how to value a company or read an annual report, I got the same rush of excitement.
It was this fundamental shift in perception, something that wise men figured out Millenia ago, but that I had never so profoundly understood — that knowledge is power.
More importantly, it was the idea that it didn’t matter if I wasn’t a business major, or if I couldn’t afford a private tutor, or if I didn’t have a coach to teach me how to barbell squat properly, or pretty much anything else.
The only barrier between me and doing the things I wanted to do in life was knowledge, and this knowledge was accessible for free on the internet. Therefore, I was free to do anything I wanted.
After this realization, the habit became second nature. I would spend entire days binge reading books, absolutely enchanted by discovering new ideas and ways of thinking.
It was like all these extremely wise and successful people in the books were now my mentors and buddies, and could give me advice that took them decades to figure out themselves.
I now saw myself as a lifelong learner, a proud nerd. I wasn’t just reading books or learning things because I was “supposed to” — I was reading them because I knew they would truly make my life richer and expand my understanding of the world.
What else could you possibly ask for out of 20 dollars?
A Series of Tubes
Because the educational system operates at fundamental odds with how the vast majority of kids and young adults actually behave (in my humble opinion), the belief that learning things and reading books is boring or useless is widespread, and I believe it could be holding many people back from their full potential.
Why?
Because we now live in the age of information, where billions of people are empowered to have an entire civilization’s body of knowledge available at their fingertips.
I am the living proof — I taught myself enough Finance to get an internship on Wall Street, and enough coding to get a job in Tech. All through information that was freely available on the internet!
If you are not constantly taking advantage of that opportunity, not only are you depriving yourself of success, you are also putting yourself at risk for being outsourced or automated.
Much can be said for the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI), the positive (and negative) effects of globalization, and the socio-economic implications of automation replacing entry-level jobs (like this burger flipping robot).
But as individuals, and especially as knowledge workers, we must realize that these trends are bigger than ourselves and it is only through constant adaptation and reinvention that we will be able to thrive in the new economy.
This is a core idea in Reid Hoffman’s Startup of You: being proactive and staying ahead of the curve when it comes to skills and careers, so that when disruption comes (and it will) — you are prepared.
If you don’t believe that learning new things can be fun and exciting, you could be missing out on life-changing opportunities and finding new passions that you never knew about.
The Peer Pressure Dilemma
My advice?
Don’t learn anything because you feel like you have to, or because it’s the new hot thing.
Don’t learn Spanish because you feel pressure to become a more interesting, “cultured” person.
Don’t learn how to code because “that’s how you’re supposed to future-proof your career”.
Don’t learn yoga because that’s what all your fit, good-looking friends are doing.
This is doing the exact same thing we were doing in school — learning out of obligation, not out of curiosity.
It usually doesn’t work to build long-term habits, in my experience, and will ultimately not feel as fulfilling as doing something that you truly feel is yours.
Instead, read and learn things that genuinely catch your attention.
Sometimes you should actually judge books by their cover, because perhaps it’s your intuition driving you to it just as much as it’s their marketing team.
I’m not a psychologist, but I think it comes down to the need for self-determination.
We all have a fundamental need to feel independent and that we are in control of our own destiny. We don’t like being forced to do things.
Obviously, I am not talking about ignoring life skills that we all need to learn to operate as responsible adults, or technical skills in order to perform our jobs.
It’s about embodying the scientist mindset. Experiment. Tinker. Fail quick, and iterate until you find something that works.
This is one of my favorite ideas in the whole world, and one that’s been elaborated upon by many people much smarter than me, including Sam Altman from Y Combinator, Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan, Eric Ries in The Lean Startup and Venture Capitalists in practice.
Take a lot of small bets. Some will pay off disproportionally — quadruple down on those that do.
From a practical standpoint, it could be as easy as reading a lot of small articles about a lot of very different subject matters, then moving on to deep-dive into those that caught your attention the most.
Learning about topics as diverse as philosophy, biology, marketing, and technology really becomes fun when you start seeing similar ideas be applied across subjects.
This kind of specialized-generalized knowledge is in my opinion the most exciting, and arguably the most practical in some cases for reasons already discussed by Tim Ferriss.
Ultimately, it really comes down to accepting that the learning process doesn’t have to be boring.
It can be a thrilling adventure, and it often simply comes down to the subject matter being a good match for your personality, life experiences and worldview, using the right resources and platforms to learn, and surrounding yourself with people who are just as passionate about learning.
So follow your curiosity, even when it takes you to unusual places.
I promise you — those are the places where you’ll find true joy.