Great entrepreneurs know stuff. Great entrepreneurs know stuff by reading stuff.
For a brief while, I was on a diet of podcasts, Internet sized digestibles, and Business Insider-esque infotainment. It feels pretty good. You’re getting a tonne of content, over a wide spectrum, in a short period of time.
Here’s the problem — most of it is repetitive garbage. The way that Buzzfeed lists of the best Game of Thrones characters are garbage is the same way that Business Insider’s ‘These are the qualities that make Elon Musk Great’ articles are garbage. After a while, reading that he uses first principles to make his decisions isn’t going to make a difference.
You learn in two ways — you learn by researching deep, and you learn by doing. The latter is critical, because if you simply know the concept of first principle learning, but haven’t the faintest clue of how to make it a staple of your daily life, you’re sunk.
The former is also critical, because if you only know the general idea, and none of the specifics, you’re going to be swimming in pretty shallow waters. A balance of the two is important. Learning and doing. But I’m going to focus on learning in this article.
I could have named this article ‘You Need to Read More’, but that allows for more of the garbage you’re already getting off of Facebook and Reddit. You need to read more books, because books are how you gain depth in expertise. Reading Jim Collins’ Good to Great once will benefit you exponentially more than going through the Facebook catalogue. It may not be a wide array of knowledge, but its way more deep and detailed.
But reading isn’t easy. It requires practice and training. Much like any other muscle, it needs to be strained more and more. How do you do that?
- Set aside your first impressions.
First impressions are very misleading. You could read a chapter of a book and not get into it. But books require patience. The ability to see through multiple chapters until you finally get hooked. This isn’t to say that there aren’t boring books. However, if someone recommends a classic and you set it down after chapter one, you’re at fault here.
How do you overcome this? I have a dirty little secret. I look at spoilers.
ducks under incoming barrage
2. Read spoilers and summaries.
I know, I know. It’s blasphemy. But reading spoilers can actually increase your enjoyment of a book. And while you may occasionally have a Sixth Sense that blows you away because you didn’t know the end, for the most part, things aren’t going to have twists and turns.
Go to Wikipedia, read a summary and get a gist for the story. This gives you a bit of context and makes reading something new easier. Also, going from the top down (broad ideas to details) is easier than the general chapter format (broad idea=> detail, 2nd broad idea=> detail…).
Hell, looking at the table of contents is incredibly helpful. It helps plug in the big picture, so that you can then systematically fill in the details.
Now, if you already have the excitement and momentum to avoid this (say you’re reading the sequel to a book you loved), this isn’t necessary. But there will be a lot of cases where there’s no momentum to begin with, and there’s no shame in an overview.
3. Track your reading.
It’s very easy to think you’re making progress when you’re not. This is delusion.
It’s also very easy to make a lot of progress when it doesn’t feel like any. This is demotivating.
Tracking your reading will solve both these problems. I use an app called Bookout. It not only makes it easy to track reading, it also makes it fun (almost gamified), by creating infographics and allowing you to track progress over time.
4. Read in pages as opposed to time
I used to say, I’m going to read for an hour every day. This is a fairly useless commitment, because you can pick up a book, set up a timer, and then daydream for your entire hour. But if you set a page goal (even if it’s small), you’ll get a lot more done. 20 pages a day is a much harder goal to meet than an hour a day. If it doesn’t take very long, congratulations. You can bugger off and watch TV, or if you’re up for it, raise your goal. If it takes a while, stick it out. You’ll read a lot more if you set up your goals this way.
5. Get addicted.
This is one of those few things that isn’t terrible to be addicted to. If you have to, start out with easy stuff, or classics that you know and love. It’s perfectly fine to reread stuff or go back to favourites. As long as the kindle is stoked, you’re justified. (Not to mention that there’s no way you get all the content on your first try.)
Reading is good. Read more. Read methodically.
