Do you really read?
jasonevanish.com
jasonevanish.com
Nice philosophy, with one giant outlying case: The best and the worst of anything you can possibly read will seem the same: like a waste of time. And the only way to tell the difference is to add one new dimension: time. The best things you read will seem like a waste of time today, but one day you'll realize that it changed your life.
Apologies to Maslow, a suggested hierarchy of reading value:
=================
/ 6-WasteOfTime \
/ 5-DifferenceMaker \
/ 4-Actionable \
/ 3-SomeValue \
/ 2-Engaging \
/ 1-Interesting \
/ 0-WasteOfTime \
===============================
Also, I just realized most of my reading is Value 1 now. :/.
Human behavior is more often a matter of degrees and shades. It typically takes a while for things to sink in, and it typically takes a while for people to actually implement ideas they think are good.
What that means is that it's not just a simple binary matter of people reading something that should have an impact on behavior and then either it impacting their behavior a lot or not at all.
And that's true of everything, from political beliefs to personal beliefs and ideology to personal and professional behavior.
Wow, I could not disagree more.
The implication here is that the subset of 'things worth reading' are things that show up on your RSS reader. I'm absolutely positive that the vast majority of the things you read on the internet are inferior compared to other things you could be doing with your time; its important to keep abreast of trends and current events, but the advent of Read-it-Later services has, I think fetishized the blog post.
Pick up some Steinbeck or Vonnegut or something. Trust me, it'll help you a lot more than a self-help blog post or Six Ways To Engage Your Customers.
When you are tempted to write "trust me", please reconsider and think of why your readers should believe what you're saying.
So in this specific case: why do you think people should be reading "Steinbeck or Vonnegut or something"?
I don't particularly disagree with your advice, but I'm also not inclined to follow it without so much as a shred of a given reason.
It's obviously not foolproof to make predictions about another person's experience based on your own life, but this is perhaps a more charitable interpretation of what GP meant by "trust me".
But yes, the principle of charity should always apply and yours is the correctly charitable one.
> Too often we read something, share it and talk about it,
> but fail to retain its meaning. Maybe you retweeted
> something about taking care of employees, but then you
> failed to show interest and compassion for an employee
> that came into work visibly upset. Maybe you just shared
> an article about the importance of open communication,
> but then disregarded comments from someone who tried to
> bring up a problem with you. Regardless of what it is,
> you’re wasting your time with all your reading if you
> don’t use it to drive action.
This is a false dichotomy, both are helpful. However, there something to be said about stepping outside the 'filter bubble', and acquiring varied skills/interests/viewpoints is always helpful. Why? Because it is in learning novel things that the brain actually gets stimulated and reshapes itself to become more optimal (thanks to a little thing called neuro-plasticity). Right now, due to our inefficient learning processes and media bombardment, we all get so overstimulated that we feel like deer in headlights with poor time management skills, and we end up unusually paranoid about what we consume. There is something to be said about what could be ‘worthwhile’ to read for some people, but we seem to over complicate the algorithm by which we calculate this as if it were some kind of fragile balance between 'good and evil' that we need to actively maintain. It’s really quite simple: if you’re interested in something, read up on it! Simple as that. Furthermore, if some tangent sparks your curiosity along the way, follow up on that as well. The sheer fact that you’re even remotely interested in the thing you’re reading about will ensure some level of efficient learning, so go and indulge.
Due to the way memory works (recognition in particular, or ‘pattern matching’ memory), the brain has the capacity to operate like a fairly sophisticated machine learning algorithm, so keep feeding it data and don’t worry so much about what you’re gonna get out of it, cause your brain is gonna sort that all out later anyway.
“Most people spend nearly all their energy trying not to change. This is what the philosopher [sic] William James meant when he wrote the mind’s main function was to be a fortress for protecting your ego from reality. When the mind has to accommodate a new fact, James argued, it doesn’t settle on the change to its model of reality that is most likely to reflect reality. It protects the fortress, calculating the smallest possible modification to its bulwarks that can account for the new fact.
It's not just brilliant, it's astonishingly modern. It's not out of the question for the late 19th century, because Freud and Nietzsche were both working this territory. Still, the formulation sounds contemporary (to us, not William James). Can anybody point me to where James wrote about this?
(It's glib, though, to say "The real key is Self-Awareness with Discipline". This is extraordinarily hard to do and to take it as anything less than a life-long task, let alone treat it as an item on a to-do list, is naive. Even one tiny example where you catch yourself doing what the quote describes is worth more than a grand general statement.)
Edit: after thinking about this for a bit, the quote seems understated. Even as much as "the smallest possible modification to its bulwarks that can account for the new fact" is atypical. Far more often than that, the new fact is either elided from consciousness or ejected by the mental equivalent of antibodies, and the "bulwarks" remain as they were.
Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. [http://www.authorama.com/pragmatism-6.html]
The hardest part about the post was the balance between being instructional (you and we pronouns) and when/how much to talk about my own stuff (I). I don't think I nailed it by any stretch, but done beats perfect.
A great many people believe they are thinking, when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
(Paraphrasing, I'm on mobile and in a hurry.)
One has, I think, to be careful about applying this insight to other people. It's best in the first person.
It's unfair for Jason to criticize us for not getting meaning out of things as abstract as "Do you really read?" Maybe it's just me, but the abstraction of "self-help" blog posts seem unlimited.
I think we are much more in touch with the philosophical message of a sci-fi book than the message, however briefer, of the blog post.
The big hypocrisy here is that the blog post is so vanishingly thin on concretes that it sounds like it was written by someone who's never read a good book.
I think reading fiction has a lot of value. If you want to enhance your creativity and be inspired you can get a lot from great fiction. It will also make you a better writer. It can be act as a break from your day to day as well (recharging is important).
In the end, my hope was to pose the question and have people consider what it means for themselves. Being more purpose driven, or at least knowing why you do something, can never hurt. We only get 24 hours in the day, so choosing wisely how to spend it is important. If you're thoughtful about how much and what you choose to read, it can pay off in many ways.
It's also fun. You know ... fun?
[There are certainly other benefits, but I think the notion that activities like reading fiction need to be justified seems a bit wrong-headed.]
> Being more purpose driven, or at least knowing why you do something, can never hurt
Er, well, that's far from clear...
Being generally aware, more or less, of what you do and why you do it is almost certainly a positive thing, but if you obsess over justifying everything you do and every second of your day ("Relaxing read: 30 minutes. Laughing with friends: 15 minutes. ...") you may well go nuts, and going nuts seems, ... counterproductive...
Everybody is different, and some people are fine with ultra-controlling every aspect of their lives, but for many people, I don't think this is true. There are many points in the spectrum from total slacker to robot. Leave a little freedom to chill.
I challenge myself to answer the following questions in everything I read:
1. Has this taught me anything new and valuable? (If not, move on quickly)
2. How can I apply insights from this article today? (Wait and I’ll forget)
3. When have I applied the ideas from this post? Where have I not, but could have?
(What was the difference?)
I say this because it's often a potential 'takeaway' from an article to apply similar challenges in one's life, and like Jason says, unless it can be applied immediately it is often forgotten.
Success may not come easily, but if you feel like a constipated man straining on a toilet, your experience is not success.
I use it to save articles I think will have value at some point but have little relevance now or things that I have read in their entirety and think will be important to come back to. Essentially I'm building a repository of web clippings that I can search through when trying to read about a particular topic.
You are essentially building an anti-library: http://www.ryanholiday.net/building-your-antilibrary/
I have had numerous problems come up that I knew immediately where to look for a solution, even I haven't read all those articles.
I'm afraid to say, it is (with a couple of notable exceptions) one of the most conformist, populist and lacking in adventure reading lists I've read for a long time.
Simply put, he isn't reading; he is picking up whatever is the "top 10 list of <subject X> from AMZN or Good Reads" and digesting it in a very conventional way.
So; no Jason, you don't really read. What you're doing is rote learning what is the considered 'wisdom of the crowd' de jour on topics and expecting enlightenment. That's not how reading works. If you need a concrete example of this, many great insights come from people reading on topics wildly outside their field and suddenly applying said insights into their own fields.
Chaos Theory / Math was started like this, from a tiny office spitting out weather data.
Jason will no doubt do well on a middle / high rung (Gamma+ or Beta-) but will never "do a Jobs".