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Age of Awareness

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Antilibraries Are the Better Libraries

3 min readJul 2, 2021

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Photo by Pickawood on Unsplash

Do you ever feel guilty about the book staple you haven’t read? Polymath Nassim Nicholas Taleb says you shouldn’t:

“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.”

Yes, you read it right. The pages you haven’t studied indeed add value to your life. Here’s why.

Antilibraries protect you from ignorance

When you just read a few books in your life, you’re likely aware of what you don’t know. But once you’ve read through some hundred books, you tend to become ignorant.

You might be too confident, too sure, and less aware of the things you don’t know. That’s where antilibraries come into play.

The books you haven’t read (and will never read) assemble your antilibrary.

They represent unknowledge and are the best cure for overconfidence. Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes:

“A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.”

Antilibraries help you overcome the biggest enemy

The illusion of knowledge — the things you think you know — is learning’s biggest enemy. The authors of the

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Age of Awareness
Age of Awareness

Published in Age of Awareness

Stories providing creative, innovative, and sustainable changes to the ways we learn | Tune in at aoapodcast.com | Connecting 500k+ monthly readers with 1,500+ authors

Eva Keiffenheim
Eva Keiffenheim

Written by Eva Keiffenheim

Learning expert with 5M+ reads. Committed to building a fairer future, one narrative at a time. Start writing for millions of readers http://bit.ly/learnletter