Becoming a Better Reader

so a lot of people I think want to become better readers and this is actually might be even how you discovered my channel in the first place early on in my YouTube career I made a couple of videos that were just me talking to a camera a lot like this though my presentation style was a little bit weird back then um but those videos were about why you should read and how you could read a little bit better I like some of the stuff that I said back then and I thought though today would be

a good idea aide to come back and revisit some of the those ideas and then revise them based on a couple of years of talking about reading publicly and thinking about it more and writing a whole lot more I would say that a lot of these thoughts I've actually been working them out in public over on my substack um which I link down below I'm going to plug it here because I don't have a patreon I ran one but I don't really like patreon as a platform um but substack is the way that I ask

people to support me so if you think my work is valuable at all you can go to my substack you can become a paying subscriber uh you get a lot of writing I write a ton on it nowadays and uh you could see me sort of work out my thoughts but also you're just helping me make it the first bit of advice that I used to give people when they talked about uh reading and reading goals was to actually probably stop having big reading goals and I would tell this one story which is that I

used to have really ambitious reading goals of really big numbers uh you know I I was not loving reading whole books when I was in grad school and and then eventually I got back back into reading for pleasure and I was impressed by the number of books that I read in a year when I had started about halfway through the year I think the year that I really got back into reading I read 45 books and I had started about halfway through the year and so I said why not set a bigger goal let's say

52 just to be safe um even though if you look at my old Pace maybe that doesn't quite make sense but I said 52 at first and I met and exceeded that goal and then I said 75 uh I hit that inste 100 and I didn't hit it and I noticed that changed about my reading when I set a goal that was unobtainable and unobtainable here just means unobtainable for me given my abilities and my reading speed my interest but also my life circumstances which we'll talk about that in just a second what I was

doing was I would actually try January and February of that year were terrible months for my reading not because I didn't read a lot because arguably I read too much and what I was doing is I would find short books that I could cram like I would read like three short books in a single day on like January 1st because then I would be ahead of schedule and since I was behind in December I started doing the same thing and I still didn't quite hit the goal because I started to feel quite burnt out and

I realized I had committed a really common mistake so there's this idea that you see sometimes in business but you can see it elsewhere which is that once you make something into a metric it ceases to be a good metric some of you might know that I used to work at tech companies and for instance one way you might measure the productivity of someone is how many many tickets they close meaning problems they've solved well once everyone kind of figures out that that's how they're being measured they start opening tickets for everything so that they

can close more tickets so the system becomes gamed right and no longer is closing tickets actually a reliable metric for how productive or useful you are at the company and I think reading goals are a lot like this for some people they're motivators and that is probably their biggest value is they motivate you to push yourself and I don't want to discourage anyone from pushing themselves if especially if that's what they feel they need but I find that when you start measuring the value of your reading based on the number of books that you have

read then what you end up doing is reading books that aren't very good or reading books that you don't care about or powering through a book that you really would rather quit because you end up wanting to have the number you want to even if you don't put it on good reads even if you're just doing it in a notebook like I do these days is you just wanted to have the number and so one thing that I found that was super helpful for me as I was trying to become a better reader and I

would still recommend this to anybody is that I stop numbering my books even when I put them in my notebook you know I have this little notebook that I have used for a couple of years where I write down every book that I read from cover to cover that's the Only Rule has to be a book that I read from cover to cover sometimes I skip the acknowledgements I used to put a number next to each one uh so I would see exactly how many books I'd read this year but off the top of my

head I I don't know how many books I've read this year because I haven't been counting them I write them down and I could count them but I never get around to it and I find that I'm I'm happier with my reading that way another problem that happens when you start looking at reading goals a little too much is that um because you value the number itself if your life circumstances change then you start feeling really guilty or bad about this so I have I have a son he's uh over a year old now and

something that happens when you have a kid is that you can't read as much just doesn't happen especially if you have a job or if you make content or if you write or any of this kind of stuff um kids take time and they're loud and they're noisy and they're wonderful and I love having a son I love being a dad it's like my favorite thing in the world but it means you read less and if you're measuring your worth or your value of either yourself or the activity of reading based on numbers then having

a kid is going to make you feel bad and that feels weird if a a tremendous and positive change in your life actually ends up making you feel bad just because you can't read as much so those are the downsides and dangers about reading goals and why I would still uh stand by that advice but one thing that was pointed out to me by someone um not directly but through an article that like could have been about me but I'm not totally sure and if it was I don't mind that it was but this guy

wrote this article about the value of being a promiscuous reader or I don't think he used the word promiscuous and that's what I used when I kind of wrote a follow-up on my substack and basically what he was saying saying was that actually there's a lot of value in someone who instead of just reading one really good book um is willing to try and Sample lots of things and just reads whatever they find that looks good and okay I think that he made a really good point and that I made a good point and that

somewhere the truth is kind of in the middle the truth is not always in the middle but I think in this case it is as you want to become a better reader one of the things you need to do is just read a lot you need to see what you like you can find what's going to hold your attention and you need to look at lots of different jobs to see what sort of books that you like and which particular authors you like the most you know you might have come to this channel because you

saw me recommend philosophy books and that's great but you might read some philosophy and go this sucks like I don't want to read philosophy anymore and if that's the case well then probably just don't read philosophy go and find something else that you'd read in the last couple of years I discovered that I really like reading biographies I never thought that I did I always thought biographies were kind of pointless um especially biographies about like philosophers or thinkers or writers because I thought I could just read their work and why is their biography important but

I've now found that I just really enjoy them biographies are now one of the things I read for fun uh two of the best books that I've read in the last couple of years um were biographies of philosophers and they were biographies of very different kinds of philosophers one of them was a biography of a Rand who I am no fan of but I read her biography and I just loved it it was the biography by Jennifer Burns and then recently I've been reading a biography of KL Mars who's like the polar opposite of of

iron Rand and it's because not only are the stories interesting about these philosophers and it helps contextualize their work and that's really interesting but the biographers just wrote Good biographies biographies are just enjoyable stories to read and you learn a lot about history and different political movements and all kinds of stuff by reading these biographies I never knew that I enjoyed reading biography so much but now I do and that was because I took a chance and I think that in that article the the point that is definitely true there is that a good reader

will also be willing to experiment and a good reader will read widely to understand just what it is that he or she really likes to read and my previous advice which was like to find that one book that great book and read it really deeply throughout the whole year might actually get in the way of you exploring and finding those books that you actually really enjoy reading so while I would not moderate my claims about reading goals I think in general reading goals are pointless at least numbers wise I think you should avoid them um

people will disagree and if you disagree I'd love to hear why you do down below but I I feel pretty strongly about this but the idea of only reading one book really really well versus reading widely and experimenting I think I would moderate that point but another thing that I think I would like to emphasize more when I talk about becoming a better reader is this idea of having a reading project I think actually that instead of thinking about reading goals thinking about projects uh is a more useful framework for actually becoming a better reader

and these projects can come in a lot of different forms so I'm going to use U three different types of projects actually so that we can talk about their differences but also their similarities and so you can see what I mean so one kind of project I would say is kind of like someone who is doing research for the first time or who is um writing a thesis or a dissertation now you don't have to be writing one of those in order for this to be a useful way to think about your reading uh it's

just kind of following that model when you're writing a dissertation or a thesis what you're doing is asking a good question and trying to answer it and working out exactly how to ask that good question is a lot of the work and then you find that the answer is usually very complicated and takes hundreds of pages to actually appropriately answer and that's the beauty of doing research especially in the humanities it's asking the right question and then really elaborately answering it and I think more people outside of Academia could think about this so there's this

guy I know in my Discord server I won't say his name because I didn't ask his permission to talk about this he is really interested in ethics he's not a philosopher I don't think he's ever studied philosophy he's just really interested in ethics and it came from like a really personal place I think he just wanted to know how to live his life and so he started reading ethical theories and now he's read a bunch about virtue ethics and he's read about like Cicero and then he has read a bunch of stuff about utilitarianism of

various kinds even nihilism and error Theory and he can talk pretty competently about these different areas of philosophy even though he's never studied philosophy in the classroom and I see this is a guy who has really just had a well-defined question and then he's doing his best to try to answer it he's curious he's thorough and he's just seeing where the question takes him and I think for especially people who like to read non-fiction thinking of a reading project like that is really powerful another kind of reading project you might have though is like let's

say you're more into reading fiction like fantasy let's use fantasy as an example um because that's the kind of stuff that I often read uh at least for fun it might just be that there's this big series that you want to be able to read that alone is kind of a project in itself um or it might be that what you're looking at is looking at a genre and when you look at at the whole genre you want to get a sense of maybe the history of that genre or the way the genre is varied

across time and space or just how it's diverse now you know what are the different types of sort of Epic Fantasy that are being written today that's an interesting question that you could ask and thinking about it not as I want to read 25 books this year but instead I want to read The Works of Robert Jordan well that'll get you about halfway to your 25 book goal and it would mean that you get to see a story carried through over many books you would also get to read a great fantasy series in my opinion

and there's something just really nice about sustaining yourself through that larger project and then the Third Kind of project is similar to the first but it's to be comprehensive about a particular thinker or philosopher or author so I'm actually kind of engaging one of these projects right now if you looked at my top 10 philosophy books video you'll have noticed that I said that the phenomenology of spirit is my top 10 philosophy books and that I don't understand it that's cuz I've read it and I've Revisited it and I always feel like maybe I'm about

to like Glimpse the truth when I read it um but I never quite get there and The Graduate seminar I took on Hegel uh apparently was not helpful enough uh maybe I'm just too stupid to understand Hegel but I'm like dedicated to understanding Hegel now and I have this big pile of books I've got secondary Works about Hegel I have a biography of Hegel that also talks about his philosophy and then of course I have all of these works by Hegel so the point is through all of those books what I'm trying to do is

understand what Hegel actually meant and what his contribution to philosophy was and so you might lump that into the first kind but I think it's a little bit different because I'm not asking like a particular question about hegel's philosophy it's more of this general question like what's hegel's deal and I want to do this with Hegel I've been doing this sort of on and off with with n and there's just a lot of value when you're trying to become a better reader or become a student of something of just dedicating yourself to the project a

little bit we've talked about like why I still don't like reading goals why I think you should be willing to read widely why I think having reading projects is valuable so now I just want to talk about what I think is like the most crucial piece of reading advice that I could give you and that advice is pretty simple do you want to read hard books do you want to read books that seem challenged ing that you feel intimidated by well if you want to do that the best thing you can do is to just

start reading them you might start reading them and immediately see that you're not ready for this maybe it's too hard it's too dry or it's just not the right time in your life and what's going to happen there is you're going to put the book down you're going to walk away and maybe later you're going to come back and you're going to be ready for it and then another thing that might happen though is that you're going to find it's not nearly as hard as you thought it was and you're able to just read it

and understand it and you're going to feel good and you're done you've done it and then it turns out that the only thing that was holding you back from reading that difficult book was you it was just your belief that you weren't ready was the thing holding you back third outcome though is that it's a struggle it's a SLO and that you still make it and if you have this SLO and then you still make it the that's a profound sense of accomplishment like when I do that I feel great I I feel awesome when

I slog through a book that I can tell is still worth it that you know I've made it somehow but notice that none of those outcomes are bad even the outcome where you don't finish the book it's not bad it just means that it's not the book for you right now and one day it might be but it also just might be a book that you're never going to get around to reading and that's okay because there are too many books out there and you're never going to be able to read them all so regardless

of what you do by even attempting it you've gotten something out of it and you haven't really lost anything except some time of course our time is precious of course we want to make the most of the time that we have and so we should be I would say at least careful about throwing our time away but this was time well spent this was time earnestly trying to achieve something and even if you failed to read the book or you end it or you finish it and you realize that this was not a good book

to read you still got something out of the whole experience and that's slightly changing you as a person and really I think that's about all we can ask for a really good book it's hard it's hard to demand of our B that they always be enjoyable or that they always be entertaining because sometimes the best books need to be a bit dry or boring sometimes but I think if we were asking like what makes it a really good book it's that it transforms you when you read it so that if you ever go and read

it again it will be a slightly different person who's picking it up and reading it this time