Two different hats for reading
We all need different kinds of mindsets while reading different types of content, it’s like wearing two hats, and don’t confuse them. I came across it in an episode of the Tim Ferriss Show where he’s interviewing Safi Bahcall, a physicist, business executive, and author. In that podcast, Safi talks about the “Ricles and Reas” framework, which he uses for studying and research. Safi gives some silly acronyms to his processes to make it easy to remember and understand.
Ricles is, reading for information, content and lessons. It’s like when you are reading it for the research or something for academics or something for knowledge then you shouldn’t care about the style of the writing, the craft of the story or anything artistic. What you care about is facts or idea of the stories and lessons. So it’s like if you’re reading nonfiction put the Ricles hat.
And a completely different hat is Reas. Reas is reading for ear, art and style. So when I’m reading to develop an ear for art then I will look for rhythm, pacing and the transitions used by the writer. I’ll look for how writer/poet is using the emotions, how they are playing with words and development of characters.
It’s not like this framework is completely new or it’s an original idea by Safi, we all use this framework subconsciously. But we can agree on the fact that giving a silly acronym, makes it easy to understand and talk about. The way I train for it is to think strategically where am I weak, so I can explain a technical idea pretty well, because of the engineering background, but I’m not great in telling an emotional story because that’s not how we read or write in terms of science.
But the books that just explains ideas are boring (like textbooks or research papers). People don’t connect with an idea, people connect with people. If you can tell a story about people through which an underlying idea is revealed that’s the best of our world (like movies or fiction books or poems). So, if you just talk about the idea then it’s boring and just talking about the people then you’re sort of a fairy tale, but if you can combine the two and make it engaging and knowledgeable, for me that’s the grander challenge, something that needs a framework, and these two silly acronyms make it efficient and fun.
