Reading Principles

One of the most common questions encountered as it relates to personal and professional development is some variant of “how can I increase my capabilities?”  To that, I’ll riff on a Harry Truman quote: Not all readers are leaders, but all good leaders are readers.  Even if you aren’t particularly interested in “leadership” per se, I would submit that reading more and better will help to improve your ability to do great work, make great decisions, and form meaningful relationships.

I’ll put some thoughts down here, this is super broad but hopefully this is at least a start.  As with other principles I hope to share, I realize this can sometimes come across as sanctimonious.  Please trust that this is not the intent, nor by writing this down do I claim to have figured it out or be perfect at doing the things I’m writing about.  I will use some diet/health metaphors below and I think that’s an apt comparison for the concept I’m getting at.  In other words, I don’t claim to be perfect, but I do think I’ve stumbled on at least some pieces of truth that have served me well when I’ve used them (which, for the record, is not all the time, it’s an ongoing journey).  As with other principles, these will benefit from thinking from other folks, so please chime in with thoughts and observations in the comments.

I talked about reading more and better, but I will start by talking about the “better” part.  You will need to optimize your information in-flow.  We live in an over-subscribed world, meaning we have a ton of stuff competing for our attention.  This has always been true to some extent, but it’s even more true now with the sheer volume of information we have access to.  A few framing thoughts to explore this:

1. Think about the mix of what you consume.  Variety is probably good in that it keeps you balanced and exposed to different ideas.  That being said, like with food you probably want to over-index on the good stuff (books and other signal-rich media) and use other media sparingly.  I do realize the inherent irony of me saying this given where this content is posted.  While I don’t mean to imply that all online content is “bad”, if your response were to shut down your browser and pick up a book, then I would still consider this a win.
2. Also think about the cadence of how you consume information.  Important decisions are best made leveraging deliberately collected and evaluated information and using a framework constructed with similar care.  In other words, not via harried multi-tasking with a feed of mostly irrelevant data fed into our brains at all hours.  Perfect focus is probably not realistic, but most of us get far too little of it, much to our detriment.
3. Signal to noise ratio is an important factor to consider.  Other folks have explained this in much more depth than I’ll be able to do justice to, but short version is that a lot of what we could consume is noise, i.e. not something actionable or important.  We should seek out signal, or insights with the power to help us, drive action, etc.  A lot of content especially in news media is superficial, meaning that it’s often framed to generate an emotional response and lacks much by way of context or deeper analysis.  It’s really better to largely ignore this as it distracts us from going after more useful information, which requires attention to digest.
4. Related to the above, Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written about the staying power of knowledge and information, and there’s some profound wisdom in what he’s shared.  Basically, this boils down to a positive relationship between the signal to noise ratio in information, based on the amount of time the content has been relevant.  A book that’s been around for hundreds or thousands of years and has been thought of as profound during that time has withstood the test of a lot of new information in the interim and made it through.  In other words, it’s probably still worth reading.  Conversely, the average article in a newspaper will be totally forgotten in a month, much less a century.  Neophilia (love of new things) tends to drive us to ignore this truth.  Does this mean that we should never read articles?  Not necessarily, but we should also be profoundly skeptical of our obsession with the new if it comes at the exclusion of engaging with established ideas.

Ok so now to the “more” part.  Similar to evaluating what you read, also evaluate how you spend your free time.  Yes, this may mean that you have to scale back some other activities in the interest of reading more.  If this is a struggle, I would suggest doing a time inventory of a typical week to establish how much time you spend engaging in various activities.  I guarantee you will have discretionary time that you can free up.  And the good news is that this will probably not mean you need to give something up entirely.  E.g., most of us could probably easily scale back social media time (to something reasonable, like a couple hours a week) which would probably free up a lot of time with virtually no negative impact on our engagement with that medium.  And massive improvement in other higher-yield areas, reading among them.

Now, while I don’t like to lean too heavily on “hacks”, they do exist and can help here.  Here are a few I’ll offer up, thanks here to my colleague Joe Burrige for assembling many of these via a post and associated content on LinkedIn:

1. Audio books, including with Airpods or other wireless headphones.  This has increased the amount of content I’ve been able to consume immensely, especially in concert with the next topic.
2. Pairing listening with other activities which leave your mind free, driving, exercise, household work
3. Accountability measures e.g.  book clubs and/or library checkout windows
4. Calendar time or otherwise establish dedicated time for reading
5. Don’t forget your library!  Public libraries have a lot of great books including the ability to check out electronic/audio copies of many books.  I just got on this train within the last year and it’s been awesome.  And it’s free.  Great way to participate in your community resources that are tax-supported.
6. Look to thought leaders in your field or in areas you’re interested in and see what they’re reading and what’s been influential to their thinking.  There’s a lot out there, but leveraging the experience of others who have been successful is a great way to get a head start.
7. I threw some shade at most news media earlier in this post*, I will point to The Economist for reporting that is better than most.  Highly objective and analytical, it’s a must-read in my opinion for anyone who is a business professional.  It’s also weekly, i.e. not stream of consciousness which is a major plus.

*I want to clarify as well that I don’t mean to come off as anti-journalistic. On the contrary, I am a firm believer that journalism and a free press is essential for a liberal society and hence of great informational and social value. Rather, it’s worth keeping in mind that on an individual level there can be such a thing as too much of a good thing. While it would be deeply concerning if someone never engaged with any form of understanding their world (and journalism is part of this), the same is true of people who constantly “doom-scroll”. Both are mal-adaptive.