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Comment by ajdecon | Hacker News Reader

Go to the library. (Yes, the place with all the books. ;-) ) Wander through the nonfiction section and scan the titles. If anything catches your eye, pick it up and read the first couple pages. If it seems at all interesting, check it out and read it.

This technique is responsible for my reading in depth about the history of shipping containers, learning just a little bit about how to do interior design, and reading a large number of gardening books. (And doing some gardening!) Among other things.

You could probably come up with something similar online. (For example, clicking "Random article" on Wikipedia and actually reading it.) But I find that if I'm at a computer, I'm more prone to revert to narrow interests. Going to the real, physical library seems to make me less distractable -- or more so, depending on how you look at it. :)

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I'll add that one shouldn't exclude older books for being old. I've been reading scientific literature from the 1960s, and it's full of similar topics to now (information explosion, data science, organizational principles). They, like we, are in a bubble formed by the general cultural expectations of that era and topic.

Only, it's a different bubble than now.

It also ended up making me less interested in following the new hotness, when I realize it's often little different from the new hotness of a few decades ago. Makes me jaded before my time ;)

A hundred times this. I was at the library with my nephew a few years ago. He was watching a magic show the library was putting on, so I just wandered around. If I hadn't done that, I never would have gotten into homebrewing and the surrounding theory, which has been a huge horizon broadener and eats up a good portion of my time.

So many things would never strike your interest on the internet as much as they would when you're holding a book. I'm not sure what the difference is, but your theory seems as good as any.

Excellent advice about the library. An anecdote from me: a few years ago I was researching the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. I wanted to find out about his famous housing complex called Unité d'habitation (Housing Unit) first built in Marseille in France. I started my research online looking for floorplans and commentary or critques. I found very little (there is a lot more available online today, but not when I was looking).

Consider that Le Corbusier is one of the most famous architects of the 20th century so this was a surprise. Eventually, I did find what I was looking for by going to the library and visiting an architecture exhibition. The point of all this is that we assume everything is mostly online and so it's our first port of call for any research or knowledge gathering. But there is a huge amount of information and knowledge found in books that have never made it online. If you never go to the library, you simply won't realise what you're missing.

Someone once gave me a great piece of advice - read a book that you might not "normally" read, especially an autobiography. Doing so can give you a glimpse into a wholly different way of thinking about the world than you might be used to. I follow this advice whenever I'm in an airport and the results are always interesting.

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