On Reading of Passions, not Topics
A short ode to reading to find yourself at home in the obsessions of others
I couldn’t care less about watches. Sure, I can tell when a timepiece is easy on the eye, and I can definitely enjoy the sight of a well-dressed man who looks like he put time into his wardrobe choices that morning. But when it comes down to the intricacies of moving parts, the choice of one material in place of another, or the weight of a case, I am a complete heathen. So, why do I enjoy reading the Hodinkee blog so much? (And why does something tell me you would, too?).
First things first, Hodinkee is a hyper-specialized publication about watches, if you hadn’t gathered that already. Among their latest posts, we can find titles such as “This New IWC is made from the same material as an F1 car” and “What we talk about when we talk about ‘Mall Watches.’”
It is, for lack of a better word, a ‘watch nerd’ extravaganza. However, a reader who wouldn’t let that stop them would click the link and be, at once, hit by a wall of infectious enthusiasm. These writers LOVE their topic, and they come across as writing about it because they can’t do otherwise. Not incidentally, they also sound like extremely well-trained journalists who never forget about the newbie or their personal “calling” to make horological converts out of the uninitiated. Their “How to Wear it” Series can appeal to anyone even remotely interested in style or fashion, “Watch and Learn” discusses the most common watch n00b questions and experiences, and “Talking Watches” is a Youtube success that made us discover the collecting habits of celebs such as John Mayer (twice) and Aziz Ansari to name a few. One can be seduced by the dream they are selling.
For the sake of another example: “Musings on Markets” by Aswath Damodaran. It’s a blog about finance, money, and company valuations. While you yawn, look at the dedication of this NYU Professor and expert in his discipline: he crunches out a surprising amount of posts for someone with a full-time job and a world-renowned career, and they all come with graphs, deep-dives and accompanying videos to explain how Spotify should be priced on IPO day, or the Historical take on Income Tax on Investments in the US. It makes you marvel at his love for the subject, his skill in taking current events and giving them an educational spin, and his curiosity to always go deeper than just a few paragraphs a lot of people would write to then call it a day.
If blogs are not your cup of tea (and yet somehow you are on Medium), Youtube Channels are a candy land of Passion exploration waiting for your plucking. One of my favorites is Super Eyepatch Wolf, mainly crafting video essays on Mass media and Culture. If you aren’t into anime, I dare you to watch The Impact of Akira and resist the urge to find the manga and do a deep dive into it.
I thought about it, and I think I know why I enjoy reading about these obscure topics so much: it is the pleasure of reading about pleasure, to feel the way people feel when they fall in love with something, even if only by proxy. That passion, in a person’s life, becomes a completely new character. And I might not love it in the same way or with the same intensity (or at all), but that is the stuff a well-lived life is made of. And I want to hear all about a well-lived passionate life.
Passion is not just a nice-to-have. In “On Writing Well, " William Zinsser recommends we write of what we are passionate about because it is simply infectious. On top of that, I believe Passion can be its own topic of exploration as we wander outside of our reading comfort zone and try to get clues from others on how they stumbled upon this love that might seem foreign to us: how do they describe their beloved? What does it look like? How does it make them feel to look at what we might only see as a bunch of mechanisms (or spreadsheets)? Is there something we can learn about loving our own passions better?
Indeed, reading passionate writings can make you more passionate about the things you already love.
This open attitude to reading about others’ passion for things we are not into (at least not yet) can also be a form of (literary) wanderlust, defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “the wish to travel far away and to many different places”: how can we travel anywhere, if we are only reading of “home”? It is indeed in travel that we learn the most. And traveling on a route where enthusiasm is a vital ingredient only makes the ride so much sweeter.
It might also have the pleasant side effect of making you smarter: David Shenk, in “The Genius in All of Us,” prescribes considering other people’s points of view as one method to become a so-called “genius,” thanks to the resulting cognitive growth. Without new information, there is no learning, and without learning, there is no smartness to be had.
Do not only take it from me, though. This idea has already trickled down into business books: Palmer and Kaplan, in their WhitePaper “A Framework for Strategic Innovation,” cite unconventional sources as the birthplace of Innovative Strategy in business. No realm of knowledge has to be excluded since everything is connected (this essay is a case-in-point since I am using a document in my MBA reading list as a source).
Good reading, more passion, more breakthroughs, and it makes you smarter? No brainer. Now go read some weird stuff. You will enjoy it.
