23/04/2024
38 READING ADVICE From Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday, the author of 15 books, including The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, Conspiracy and Stillness is the Key, calls himself a professional reader. âThatâs really what authors are. A book is made of books.â Here are 38 reading rules he has followed over the years:
1) Do it all the time. Bring a book with you everywhere. Iâve read at the Grammyâs and in the moments before going under for a surgery. Iâve read on planes and beaches, in cars and in cars while I waited for a tow truck. You take the pockets of time you can get.
2) Physical books only.
3) Itâs not that I have a problem with audiobooksâif it gets you reading, Iâm all for it. I just think thereâs something very special about the physical form. I just read a great book about this actually called Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf.
4) Hardcover over paperback.
5) Bring a pen with you too. Reading is better if youâre taking notes.
6) Keep a commonplace book. As Seneca wrote: âWe should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical applicationânot far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speechâand learn them so well that words become works.â (Hereâs a video on my commonplace book method).
7) Err on the side of age. Classics are classics for a reason.
đ Beat them up. Books are not precious things. As an author, I love it when people hand me a book to sign that has had real miles put on it. When people hand me a pristine copy and tell me itâs their favorite, I assume they are just flattering me. Itâs obvious what my favorite books areâĻbecause theyâre falling apart (hereâs my copy of Meditations for instance).
9) In every book you read, try to find your next one in its footnotes or bibliography. This is how you build a knowledge base in a subjectâitâs how you trace a subject back to its core.
10) Same goes when you find an author you love, read them ALL. I read Cecil Woodham-Smithâs book on the charge of the Light BrigadeâĻonly to find she had also written a biography of Florence Nightingale. It was that discovery that shaped a full third of my book Courage is Calling.
11) That comment from (the disgraced and indicted FTX founder) Sam Bankman Fried about how every book could be a 900 word blog post is preposterously stupid. The whole point of reading is to really understand something. So if all youâre after is the âgist,â skip books and stick with blog posts.
12) If you see a book you want, just buy it. Donât worry about the price. Reading is not a luxury. Itâs not something you splurge on. Itâs a necessity. Even if all you get is one life-changing idea from a book, thatâs still a pretty good ROI.
13) That might sound privileged, but Warren Buffett considers the foundation of his multi-billion dollar empire to be a book. At 19-years-old, he bought a copy of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. We donât know exactly what he paid for it, but in the early 1950s, a hardcover typically went for $1.30âthe best investment he ever made, heâs said. Today, Buffettâs worth $108.7 billion, having given away some $37 billion to charitable causes. Not a bad ROI!
14) Some people might recoil at categorizing a book that way, but as a lover of literature, I have no problem with it. I myself wouldnât be writing this to you today if I hadnât bought a paperback of Meditations in 2006 for $8.25 on Amazon. That book of philosophy taught me not just about life, but also schooled me in the art of writing, in working with and managing people, and gave me the speciality which I now write my own books about. Again, not a bad ROI.
15) Donât just read books, re-read books. Thereâs a great line the Stoics lovedâthat we never step in the same river twice. The books donât change, but you do.
16) As I said, speed reading is a scam. You just have to spend a lot of time reading.
17) If a book sucks, stop reading it. The best readers actually quit a lot of books. Life is too short to read books you donât enjoy reading.
18) The rule I like is âone hundred pages minus your age.â Say youâre 30 years oldâif a book hasnât captivated you by page 70, stop reading it. So as you age, you have less time to endure crap.
19) Embrace serendipity. So many of my favorite books are just random things I grabbed at bookstores (this is why I say donât sweat buying a bookâjust roll the dice). Thatâs what bookstores are for, what Iâve tried to build mine around. Itâs a discovery engine better than any algorithm.
20) Donât just build a library, build an anti-libraryâa stack of unread books that humbles you and reminds you just how much there is still to learn. Itâs a sign of what you donât yet know. Itâs also a resource there whenever you might need to do a deep dive into that topic.
21) Emersonâs line was, âIf we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.â When I was a teenager, I got in the habit of doing this. Every time I would meet a successful or important person I admire, I would ask them: Whatâs a book that changed your life? And then I would read that book (in college, for instance, I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Drew, who was the one who turned me on to Stoicism).
22) Speaking of EmersonâĻin his essay âReading,â he put down his three rules: â1. Never read a book that is not a year old [because only good books survive]. 2. Never read any but famed books [same reason]. 3. Never read any but what you like.â
23) Whenever Iâm in a reading funk/dry spell (most commonly, around book launches), I find Iâm able to get back into a groove by re-reading some of my favorite novels. What Makes Sammy Run? The Great Gatsby. Ask the Dust. The Moviegoer.
24) Speaking of Ask the Dust, I read that because my friend Neil Strauss said in an interview it was his all-time favorite novel. He also turned me onto Knut Hamsunâs Hunger, which he had also raved about. When people rave about something, donât dismiss it. If someone says a book changed their life? Consider it seriously. Theyâre talking about something powerful.
25) I find myself sometimes reluctant to read something thatâs super popular. That snobbishness never serves me well. More often than not, when I get around to those bestsellers I kick myselfâthey were bestsellers for a reason! Theyâre great! Donât be a book snob.
26) You say you donât have time to read but what does the screen time app on your phone say? What does your calendar say?
27) If you want to understand current events, donât rely on breaking news. Find a book about a similar event in the past. Read history. Read psychology. Read biographies. Go for information that has a long half-life, not something thatâs going to be contradicted in the next bulletin.
28) Examples: Read The Great Influenza to understand COVID. Read It Canât Happen Here to understand modern threats to democracy. Read First Principles to understand American politics.
29) Ruin the ending. I almost always go straight to Wikipedia and figure out the plotâespecially if I am reading something tough like Shakespeare or Aeschylus. Who cares about spoilers? Your aim as a reader is to understand WHY something happened, the what is secondary.
30) One of the things that people in publishing know is that readers tend to skip prefaces and forewords. This is crazy! Those things are there for a reason. They often have a ton of helpful and interesting stuff about the context around when the person was writing, who the work ended up influencing, and other tidbits that sometimes stick with you longer than even the work itself.
31) âDonât be satisfied just getting the âgistâ of things,â is what Marcus Aurelius learned from his philosophy teacher Rusticus. One of the reasons I try to spoil the plot, make my way through the intro and the preface, read reviews and articles about the books Iâm reading, watch videos about them, and read other books on the topic is because I want to really understand what Iâm dealing with. If I donât, if I only want a surface take, why read a book at all?
32) When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information?
33) My favorite line from Harry Truman is, ânot all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.â When we read, we arenât learning to impress people, to win some game of mental gymnastics. Itâs to get better, to find things you can use in your real life. If youâre looking to expand what you do with the books youâre reading, I highly recommend our Read to Lead course. Itâs been taken by over 10,000 people, and is our most popular for a reason.
34) Read widely and from people you disagree with. The Stoics believed that we should actively engage with anyone who can be a source of wisdom to us, regardless of their origin. If there is wisdom out there to be had, weâd be wise to avail ourselves of it.
35) Pretentiousness is bu****it. Epictetus once heard a student talking proudly about having made their way through the dense works of Chryssipus. You know, Epictetus told him, if Chryssipus had been a better writer, youâd have less to brag about.
36) Look for wisdom, not facts. Weâre not reading to just find random pieces of information. Whatâs the point of that? Weâre reading to accumulate a mass of true wisdomâthat you can turn to and apply in your actual life.
37) Another line from Seneca is about how people get too caught up in the facts and figures and they miss the message. I totally agree. On the literary snobs who speculate for hours about whether The Iliad or The Odyssey was written first, or who the real author was (a debate that rages on today), he said, âFar too many good brains have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge.â
38) If a book is good, recommend it and pass it along to other people.
