The Way You Read Books Says A Lot About Your Intelligence, Here’s Why
This is why the smartest people in the world own tons of books they don’t read.
Author’s Note: This article was written over 60 hours with love and care using the blockbuster mental model.
If you love to read as much as I do, walking into a bookstore as an adult feels exactly like walking into a candy store as a kid.
The shelves are lined with the wisdom of humanity, insights that each author has spent years refining. It’s all right there at your fingertips, condensed into a format that you can curl up with.
So naturally, you pull out your credit card or press the ‘Buy Now’ button.
And the books pile up. On your shelves. In your bedroom. In your car. Maybe even your bathroom.
The most dedicated book addicts find space where there was previously none:
And as the books pile up, so does your guilt. Guilt at not reading all of the books you buy. Guilt at not finishing the books you start.
If this describes you, I have good news for you.
Even if you do not have the time to read them all, overstuffing your bookshelf or e-reader is good for you.
—Jessica Stillman
As I will explain in this article, for people who actually put in the time to read and learn how to learn, unread books strewn across the house might actually be a sign of intelligence rather than a lack of it.
Not only is having tons of unfinished books around a sign of smarts, but it also puts you in great company. I finally let go of my own guilt when I did a deep dive into the reading habits of luminary entrepreneurs and informally surveyed my most successful friends. Most of them only read 20 to 40 percent of the books they purchase. Many of them were reading over 10 books at once.
In fact, one of the most avid readers in the tech scene and a self-made billionaire entrepreneur, estimates…
I maybe start half the books I get, and I probably finish a third of the books I start. And that works out to finishing 1–2 books per week.
—Patrick Collison
What’s going on here?
As I’ve studied the reading habits of others in addition to the enormous changes in our knowledge society, I’ve become convinced that our new times call for new ways of searching for, filtering, consuming, and applying knowledge in order to improve our lives.
The explosion of information in different mediums and formats, research tools to find the best information, and new apps to consume the information don’t just call for more reading. These call for new ways of reading.
Getting lost in fiction the old-fashioned way is still a big part of my reading life, but when I am reading to learn rather than to relax, I now use a variety of shortcuts and strategies to choose what books to buy and how to read them.
What follows are the smartest non-fiction reading hacks I’ve come across from world-class entrepreneurs.
Smart Reading Hack 1: View Books As An Experiment
My friend Emerson Spartz, a successful serial entrepreneur and investor who has read thousands of books, makes a compelling case that buying a book is an experiment. On the cost side, you’ll need to spend about $15 and some time. But on the upside, a book can change your life. That’s a pretty good bet!
What we know about experimentation is that the more “smart” experiments you perform, the more likely you are to find a breakthrough experiment that changes everything. The most eminent scientists and successful companies are typically the ones who perform the most experiments.
In my experience, I need to research, purchase, and explore 10 books before I find one that I consider to be breakthrough knowledge.
Inherent in being a good experimenter is being OK with the losses. Therefore, remember that every time you purchase a book that turns out to be a dud, you are just one step closer to a book that will change your life.
Smart Reading Hack 2: Do Fractal Reading
We’ve reached an inflection point as a knowledge society. The metadata that books generate (i.e., author interviews, author presentations, book summaries, reviews, quotes, first and last chapters, etc.) is often just as valuable as the book itself.
Why?
It’s free. This allows you to try more books before you buy them. Therefore, each book buying “experiment” has better odds of succeeding.
It’s multimedia. You can access this information as text, audio, and video, which makes it easier to incorporate into your lifestyle (e.g., your daily commute or chores).
It has a high signal-to-noise ratio. The shortened formats cut out the fluff and get right to the big ideas.
Just as a book is a condensed version of an author’s best ideas, the book’s metadata is a condensed version of the book.
Therefore, I call this type of reading ‘Fractal Reading’ because fractals are objects where the same patterns happen at different levels of scale.
We’ve reached a moment where it might be more useful and convenient to spend one’s non-fiction reading time “Fractal Reading” rather than reading one whole book cover to cover. For example, I’d estimate I spend 50% of my deliberate learning time focused on Fractal Reading rather than deep, sequential reading. This helps me more effectively select which books to go deep on and understand the most important and relevant sections of a book so I can jump right to them. In most cases, doing Fractal Reading on 5 books is more valuable and engaging to me than consuming one book cover-to-cover.
Here’s how to do it:
Read 2–3 book summaries (Google search). For almost any book, you’ll find several book summaries, which often contain the best information in the book (the 20 percent of ideas that create 80 percent of value). And to clarify, I’m only talking about nonfiction books here. This, of course, would not be relevant to fiction.
Listen to an author interview (podcast, Google). Interviews are engaging, and the interviewer does the work for you, asking the author the most pertinent and compelling questions they’ve gleaned from reading the book.
Watch an author presentation (TED, Google, or university talk). When an author is forced to whittle down a 200-page book into a 20-minute talk, they share their biggest idea and best story.
Read the most helpful 1-star, 2-star, 3-star, 4-star, and 5-star reviews (Amazon). Amazon helps us all quickly sort the most well-thought-out reviews from readers who loved the book down to those who hated it.
Read the first and last chapters of the book. The first and last chapters of a book often contain the most valuable content in it (this obviously doesn’t work if you’re hoping to get lost in a novel). In addition, the first and last paragraphs of each chapter contain the big ideas of each chapter. With Google Books, ebook free samples, and Amazon’s Look Inside feature, it’s often possible to get the first and last chapter of a book for free.
Smart Reading Hack 3: View Your Unread Books As A Reminder Of How Little You Know
Intellectual humility isn’t valuable just because it’s a virtue. It’s valuable because it gives us a more realistic conception of ourselves and our place in the world, which helps us conduct our lives more effectively and harmoniously. For example, humility helps us make better decisions and inspires us to learn more.
Here’s how I think of it: there are billions of people who have been creating and documenting their knowledge for thousands of years. What we know compared to what humanity has collectively discovered is but a drop in the ocean. And that ocean is growing at a speed we can’t even fathom. Most of the scientists who have ever lived are alive today!
To take things even further, when it comes to all of the knowledge that humanity could discover and what we’ve already discovered as a species, the difference is more like a grain of sand in the universe. So there are three levels of humility we should have:
Personal Knowledge
Humanity’s Current Knowledge
All Potential Knowledge
Yet, when it comes to day-to-day lived experience, it feels like we know way more than we actually do. On our good days, many of us feel like we have this ‘life thing’ figured out. Like we are at the end of a cycle rather than the beginning. This is because we are constantly reminded of what we know and rarely reminded (if ever) of how little we know.
Sure, we may know conceptually that we don’t know everything, but we don’t physically see it. I was recently reminded of this when I spent two hours touring through two of Princeton University’s six libraries. I must have walked through 10 football fields of books and academic journals. On the one hand, it was inspiring to see everything I could learn. On the other hand, it was extremely humbling. It helped me see how little I currently know, and it helped me see that even if I spent my whole life just reading, I would still only know a fraction of the knowledge out there.
Creating an anti-library by surrounding ourselves with unread books in your home can evoke a similar feeling. Bestselling author and successful investor Nassim Taleb describes the value of an anti-library brilliantly in his book, The Black Swan:
A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You’ll accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Taleb isn’t alone in his sentiment. Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco collected more than 30,000 books. Thomas Jefferson collected more than 6,000 books, making his library the largest in the country at the time. The founder of Priceline.com Jay Walker has such a big collection of books that he built his home around it. Thomas Edison put his work desk in the center of his personal three-story library. Out of all of the rooms in Bill Gates’ house, his favorite is his enormous 2,100-square-foot library.
