Choosing Reading Material

Krishan asks:

"How do you select books? Do you decide one at a time or keep a list? Does this list radically change / shift over time?"

There's no perfect formula for this, but one approach I like actually comes from one of my readers:

• Keep a running list of books you would like to read

• At the end of each month or week, run through this list

• Scan the list for books that still interest you (using time as a filter here)

• From the books that interest you, purchase a set number of books (this can be limited by space concerns, reading speed, budget, etc.)

• Delete books that no longer seem interesting

I have a list titled "Reading" on my to-do list app (I use Todoist), and this lets me do this.

Note: I do make an exception of purchasing any book that really, really excites me right away.

Research programs & synergistic effects

In the gym, you get better gains from focusing on a few, core lifts (usually heavy, compound exercises). Trying to do everything — say, by training for endurance, strength, flexibility, proprioception, fat loss, etc. all at once — can slow progress.

There is a parallel with reading. While it's great to want to read everything, we can improve the quality of our learning experience by (1) taking a set block of time - usually a week or a month - and focusing our reading around a particular theme.

I like the term research program because it sounds cool, but this is really just a way of saying, "Focus your reading around a few specific topics."

This way, each book you read will aid your understanding of other books in your research program. For example, if you read several books at once on time management, the ideas will cross fertilize and concepts from one book can help you understand others.

When you have reaped the "gains" from one particular program, you can (as they say in the fitness world) put things on "maintenance".

You can do this by compressing what you learned into notes (like these), capturing the wisdom in habitual practice, etc.

Another way of thinking about this is to understand that reading has diminishing returns. The more you read about X, the fewer "units of learning" you will gain from reading about X.

So, the more you read on a particular subject, the more learning slows and the fewer insights there are to extract. This isn't to say that you understand the subject fully, but you might have reached your limits for how you understand the world now.

So it's time to go learn or read something else.

Interest as a filter

Will add more here later.

I all of my reading to what interests me.

This is for several reasons:

• Play the long game. We talked about this in the first section. Something has to be intrinsically rewarding if you want to do it for decades, and the only reliable way I know of doing this is to make the activity enjoyable and/or fulfilling.

• Accelerated learning. There are some theories about what makes ideas interesting. Apparently we find something interesting when it challenges a part of our world view. So, by following interest, you actually are repeatedly exposed to ideas that improve your view of the world.