I Quit Reading One Book A Month — Here’s Why
Last year, I read a total of 14 books. That means I averaged a book a month. A few days ago, I finished reading “Rework” by DHH and Jason Fried. That marked my 4th book in less than 3 months, which means if I continue along this path— I’d average a book a month like I did last year.
One of Socrates famous dictum is, “ The unexamined life is not worth living.” I try to live by these words, and have some sort of feedback mechanism that allows me to change, remove or improve on different aspects of my life. I pick what works for me, and discard what doesn’t. I view life similar to how I view software, the notion here being that there is always an improvement that can be made on the previous “version”. I think it’s important to have this, as it removes the idea of following laid down universal truths and replacing them with custom-crafted personal truths. After all, what’s reality if not that which we think it is? Think about it, cogito ergo sum.
Reading Rework made me think a lot about the whole concept of reading. Is there such a thing as reading too much? Can too much of theorized work result to execution paralysis? Don’t get me wrong, am in no way trying to allude that people should stop constantly adding upon their knowledge base, I’m merely wondering if there is such a thing as doing too much of it. What’s the whole point of reading if you never apply it?
I believe that the things we read and even those which we are taught in school are important and useful, the caveat being that most of us never actually get to test any of it to see which one works for us. Reading 1000 books on swimming won’t make you a great swimmer if you never actually go out and try it. You might memorize all the styles by name and know the best techniques theoretically, but it doesn’t really make any difference if you don’t go to the pool (or ocean, whichever one works for you) to SWIM. This way you can gauge just how much you’ve actually learned.
Knowledge without application is meaningless
In that regard, Rework marks my last book this year. I have decided to instead try and apply the lessons I have picked out in different sets of books and analyse which aspects work for me. It doesn’t mean that I’ll stop learning or reading, I have medium for that. It merely means I won’t sit down with yet another “how to” book. Instead, I’ll try and channel my energy into trying out different things and picking up on the experience of application. Let’s see how far this goes.
