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Reading a book a week for your career
- Ididntdothis 7y ago“Stop reading books you don’t like.” This can be quite liberating. On the one hand it’s tempting to work through a book you don’t like but in the end this is often very exhausting. I also used to look down on a lot of books but now I have no problem reading Stephen King. He is a damn good writer and fun to read.
- keiferski 7y agoI have never understood this attitude, honestly. Some of the most worthwhile things in life are difficult, literature included. Discarding things because they don't immediately grab your attention seems like a side effect of our low-attention span age.
- ASalazarMX 7y agoDifficult things are rewarding, indeed, but you need infinite time to try them all. You have to pick your battles if you want to advance.
- bambataa 7y agoIt's perfectly reasonable to read a quarter/fifth of a book and decide that you don't like the style, premise or whatever. Sometimes I persevere and enjoy the book after all but perhaps that's just acclimatisation. People who walk out of films, though...
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI have no problem with difficult things but in my free time I don’t want to force myself to do things I don’t enjoy. I have to do this already way too much at work.
- kbutler 7y agoRather than "difficulty", consider ROI and opportunity cost. If it's difficult, but you're learning a new skill, expanding your perspective or capacity, or enjoying the challenge, by all means, keep going. If you're not enjoying it, and the payoff is just having completed it, and you could do a lot more valuable/enjoyable stuff with that time, then stop reading Finnegan's Wake, for goodness sake.
- ASalazarMX 7y agoIt's specially liberating in fiction works. You don't have to soldier through a big book you don't like, allow yourself to drop it in favor of a better one. There's always the option of resuming it if you feel like it.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago”There's always the option of resuming it if you feel like it” Exactly. Sometimes you just aren’t in the right mood/phase if life or simply not ready for the material.
- TwoCent 7y agoIn the book "The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction", by Alan Jacobs, he advocates reading "at Whim". It was a welcome antidote to the notion that one ought read a lot and read "great" books. It's a good, quick read that will give some thought-provoking ideas about the reading life.
- lozaning 7y agoBut I really am gonna finish cryptonomicon one day damnit!
- beckingz 7y agoIt's worth it!
- Ididntdothis 7y agoThat actually was an easy one for me :). Enjoyed it a lot.
- lozaning 7y agoI've gotten halfway through like 4+ times. Maybe I'll try again soon, i'm honestly not sure why I've never finished, i like the storey well enough.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago“Seveneves” on the other hand bored me to death after a while. The first half was great but then I lost interest. Finished it though.
- techopoly 7y agoIn my opinion, Stephen King might be the best English language novelist since the mid 1950s or so. I think people mostly look down on him because he's generally identified with horror, which is of course his typical genre -- but his work transcends the genre and is deeply literary. Carrie should be on the bookshelf next to other somewhat recent masterpieces like the Grapes of Wrath, Invisible Man (Ellison's), Lord of the Flies, the Great Gatsby, and Ulysses.
- sciencewolf 7y agoI really don't get the goal of reading X books a year. The impact of reading comes from DOING THE THINGS that the books recommend to do. Often I'll speak to folks who call themselves "prolific readers", and it'll be obvious that they've retained a bit here or there-- but few are actually practicing those things! Warren Buffet is cited as an example in this article. Sure he reads a lot, but most it consists of SEC filings and balance sheets. If you examine his quotes, you'll find he cites ONE book (the Intelligent Investor) over and over again. He read that one book, and LIVED it for decades. In my opinion, that's a much better goal than reading a book a week.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoI agree. I read more than 90% of the ppl I know and I'm heading in a direction of quality over quantity - at least for nonfiction.
- ozim 7y agoI care to disagree. I read for getting different perspective on life, having fun with ideas presented in a book. So I don't retain much and I don't care about "doing those things" because I am not going to be next Warren Buffet after reading his biography. What reading does to my mind is that it shapes "personality". I am not going to live by the "How to win friends..." but what I got from it is to be more friendly and open to other people and to be more empathic. I think it kind of stayed with me even thou I read that book once and did not follow recommendations to live by it and challenge myself to do all stuff there is in that book. Then if you read multiple books and see common ideas presented by many authors you kind of get really great insights that stay for longer than when you read one book. Because then you see that more than one person thinks that way.
- sdoering 7y agoI second this. Between fiction and non-fiction I read (or mostly listened to) 76 books last year and am currently in my 14th book this year. I get contact to a lot of ideas from a lot of different points of view. I am literally bathing my brain in ideas from many different people. Especially when I am listening to fiction these ideas tend to mingle. This year, as an additional step, I am playing with the ideas behind the so called 'Zettelkasten' to better structure the ideas I extract from the books. And to reach a higher level of retention. Non the less I mostly listen to books to relax while commuting. So every idea I gain as additional knowledge is an extra win in my book.
- Apocryphon 7y agoAs an engineer, it's not as easy to get through technical books in such short amounts of time.
- ASalazarMX 7y agoA book a month would be a more achievable goal, if still unreasonable if they're all technical books. You can't speed read technical books, specially if they're about new topics that require practical exercises. Reading x books doesn't count as learning x topics.
- jniedrauer 7y agoI don't know if there are people who can learn complex topics by reading a book, but I certainly can't. Without any context, I can't keep enough of it in my head for long enough to build a mental model of the whole system. At best I'll come away with a vague familiarity with some of terminology. I have to actually implement parts of it to retain it.
- sciencewolf 7y agoAgree with this sentiment. With the exception of very specific topics that I've encountered in the wild but have no theoretical context on (e.g. Async JS), I have never been able to learn from a book. Tutorials/blog posts are great for this because you can stop and implement.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoWith technical books I find it very important to actually apply them. So one technical book per year may be enough. I made good money doing C++ for more than decade and had maybe 3 books that I understood more and more over the years.
- Jtsummers 7y agoAnother thing with technical books is that you can read portions of them and interleave several books (or books + papers). I have 4 or 5 books going on at a time, and I make progress in each most weeks. Usually not all on one topic, either. And then you can mix in other readings. A chapter in a technical book may only survey its particular material, but you may want to explore the ideas further. So you go out and get some papers to read or another book. I may not finish many books in a year, but I do get a lot of reading in.
- keiferski 7y agoA general rule of thumb: if a nonfiction book has been published in the past ±30 years, is about some vague new concept like "outliers" or "a Black Swan event", and is written by someone that hasn't spent decades working in their field: read the Wikipedia page or a summary instead. You'll save yourself hours and hours of time.
- ASalazarMX 7y agoIf you're interested in common reviews, despite all its shortcomings, GoodReads is still a place where honest reviews can be picked.
- jcomis 7y agoor check https://sivers.org/book https://sivers.org/book for some great summarization from Derek Sivers
- durpleDrank 7y agoI agree with this. Even YouTube tends to have 5 minute summaries.
- dangus 7y agoA book a week...for my career...how many hours do you want me to freaking work? I already spend 40 at this desk, I’d like a life outside of work, please. Bringing up people like Warren Buffet constantly as capitalist idols and role models is horrifically annoying, too. Nobody’s going to become Warren Buffet by reading the same quantity of books as him.
- omosubi 7y agoI think the point is that reading more will improve you in many ways both in and outside of work. Of course if you have young children or ageing parents to take care of that's a different story but for most people the time spent looking at social media or playing games could be better spent reading.
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- anongraddebt 7y agoIt's so hard to find quality books to read that weren't published decades or centuries ago.
- ishyfishyy 7y agoI think that depends on what you're looking for. Technical books are always evolving. There's always new fiction. Self-improvement and business books, especially the best ones I find, are quite old.
- pvitz 7y agoI remember reading Fravia's essay about evaluating sources [0] (e.g. books) about 20 years ago and it was pretty good advice for me as a teenager. In my experience, being very picky about the choice of books pays off. There is no need to read 50 bad books per year if there are two excellent books you can spend a year with. [0] https://fravia.2113.ch/evaluate.htm https://fravia.2113.ch/evaluate.htm
- omosubi 7y agoI'm not sure I agree with the assertion that podcasts are a bad way to engage with ideas in the way that books allow you to. Of course many podcasts don't do this or even proclaim to, but my experience has been that certain interviewers/podcasters are really good at laying out ideas or worldviews that you can then evaluate yourself. The one downside is that they generally take more time to go through and it's hard to know beforehand whether what you are going to listen to is worthwhile
- awa 7y agoAny recommendations on podcasts?
- durpleDrank 7y agoSecurity Now
- dredmorbius 7y agoNew Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com https://newbooksnetwork.com
- omosubi 7y agoConversations with Tyler is quite good - I don't agree with him on many things politically but he has a very idiosyncratic way of looking at things that has informed my own worldview
- snaveen 7y agoI read 1 to 1.5 books a week. I have been reading for sometime now.My problem is that my friends don’t read much. Everyone wants to read but don’t enjoy reading as much. I have a hard time finding people with similar habits. Most of my friends work on tech industry and is aware of benefits.