The Adoptive Reader

Reading about great people changes who I am and I can’t help it.

When I read a great book I become obsessive about the theories, stories, characters and the behaviours and idiosyncrasies. I feel the need to tell everyone I meet about every minute detail. I find ways to link the lessons and stories to any meetings that I attend and preach to people that I meet about the book of the week. In essence, each book that I read alters the way that I go about my daily tasks and even how I interact with and treat people.

It feels like every great book I read about an amazing person unlocks something in me that I didn’t know existed.

I can’t decide if this is problematic or an asset. To be honest I am sure that most people around me think I am a bit too much to handle on my best days. After all, hearing how Elon Musk relates to your method of cooking dinner or walking your dog doesn’t really inspire everyone in the way it would me.

My most recent binge has been focused on biographies and autobiographies of business people. The peak of my schizophrenic reader syndrome shift occurred while I was reading the Steve Jobs biography. I was running a small startup and can actually remember the change that took place. I became significantly more disgruntled with inefficiency and stupidity and aggressive in my management style. I would refer to the way that Jobs did things and pushed people to breaking point. My co-founder and staff at the time must have absolutely hated that month and my subsequent personality shifts.

I partly suffer from something called confirmation bias (as do most of us). I have a world view and to support and enhance this view I read books that augment this view and tend not to challenge it. I strive for certain things and therefore read content that reaffirms my desire to achieve these things. I then become more aggressive in chasing these things. This isn’t a long term change either, I’m talking about an overnight change in my demeanour if a page in book tells me about something that I like or relate to and want to take on in my life.

I’ve been trying to read more in 2014 but this presents me with a bit of a dilemma. As I read more I change the way I act, the people I see, my approach to family, friends, business, fitness and even my pets.

I feel like the changes are relevant and work for me in the long term but in the short term the changes often damage relationships and burn bridges. No one likes change.

Most people don’t bother to dramatically change anything they ever do.

I don’t want to be the kind of person who lives inside of a confirmation bias. So when I read something that I like that changes or enhances the way I do things I’m happy to give it a go wholeheartedly. If it works, it sticks. If it doesn’t work, I drop it and move on to the next thing. Some may hate this method but to me it feels like I am constantly redeploying code to my internal server with updates, bug fixes and new features and walking out the door an upgraded version of myself.

Sometimes I have to roll back to an older version but most of the time the progress is forward and positively so.

Unfortunately there have been some fairly embarrassing situations where I’ve completely bought into the theories presented to me in a book that actually turned out to be completely rubbish. When I was a teenager I remember reading The Celestine Prophecy, written by James Redfield. I recall believing with everything I had that if I stared hard enough at my finger I could see the energy field surrounding it. And that if I met someone there was a very specific reason for meeting them and I had to extract that reason. It was agonising. I would analyse everything that happened to me, every person I brushed up against in shopping mall, who I was sitting next to on the bus or who I was introduced to at a party. I was 13 for crying out loud. It was torture.

Looking back, it’s clear to me that there is value in understanding happenstance and extracting value occasionally. However not everything is a sign and not every person you’ll ever meet matters a great deal.

A few years ago, a friend of mine who was single at the time suggested that I read The Game by Neal Strauss. I had recently broken up with my girlfriend and after reading the book I believed that I had everything I needed to go out and woo (hit on) women all over with much success. I was wrong. I tried many of the tactics employed by Strauss in the book to very little fanfare. I met no one of value and gained nothing but a bruised ego due to my insane belief that reading a book once could make it easier for me to meet women.

The most positive experience that ever had with a book is undoubtedly The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. I pains me to acknowledge that I can be so deeply affected by a book that I stopped an eight year, 40 a day smoking habit in a single read of a fairly short book. But it worked for me and I have officially gone 3 years without a single cigarette.

I would rather constantly tweak and change my approach and my habits with every new book that I read than live stuck in my ways and be the same person for my entire life.

Here are some of the most influential books that I’ve had the pleasure of reading:

1. The God Delusion — It explained the facts behind a truth I had known for my entire life.
2. The Hobbit — Showed me what the world of imagination could really be like.
3. Eating Animals — Jonathan Safran Foer forced me to reassess my choice to eat animals.
4. I, Lucifer — A great perspective-shifting book.
5. Snow Crash — An incredible look into a sci-fi future.