Why I Don't Use Blinkist or Read 50 Books in a Year
Finishing a certain number of books in a year is a vanity metric for knowledge. So is the entrepreneur adage of “I only read business books/non-fiction.”
Popular advice like this quote from Haruki Murakami,
"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
… propagates this snobbish thinking that you’re wasting your time if you read fiction or one that is less than 25 years old (see the Lindy Effect).
I disagree.
How you read matters more than what you read and how much you read.
Regardless of how popular or obscure the ideas in a book are, in order to think differently, you have to seriously grapple with what you read and how they apply (or don't apply) to your life. And to enjoy doing this on a regular basis.
To become smarter, it’s not enough to pick challenging books. It’s more crucial to:
Train yourself to enjoy the activity of reading
Commit to applying knowledge and gaining wisdom
While you don't have to finish every single book you start – I follow librarian Nancy Pearl's advice and read the equivalent of 100 pages minus my current age to help me decide whether I want to keep reading – don’t read a summary just to be able to quote from Robert Caro’s The Power Broker.
For example, I have beef with people who read book summaries or use Blinkist for productivity.
That is not the point.
Sure, read a summary to see if a book interests you. But don't delude yourself that a 15-minute summary gives you everything it has to offer.
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Love reading & gain wisdom
In a world where 99% of knowledge is common and accessible to all, your experience and ideas are the only differentiating factors you can have.
The real gold in reading, therefore, is to learn to think more clearly and to develop the ability to think for yourself and achieve uncommon knowledge. .
To paraphrase Naval Ravikant: smart people come to their own conclusions, whether that’s in how they read or what they read.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust
P.S. Ironically, I'll probably publish my own set of book summaries for my quake books, like what I’ve done with Cal Newport and James Clear’s work. But the intention is to document how the books helped me become a better. Not just to share my interpretation or my notes from the book.