
Do you really read? - jevanish
http://jasonevanish.com/2013/06/23/do-you-really-read/
======
edw519
_I challenge myself to answer the following questions in everything I read:
Has this taught me anything new and valuable? (If not, move on quickly) How
can I apply insights from this article today? (Wait and I’ll forget) When have
I applied the ideas from this post? Where have I not, but could have? (What
was the difference?)_

Nice philosophy, with one giant outlying case: The best and the worst of
anything you can possibly read will seem the same: like a waste of time. And
the only way to tell the difference is to add one new dimension: time. The
best things you read will seem like a waste of time today, but one day you'll
realize that it changed your life.

Apologies to Maslow, a suggested hierarchy of reading value:

    
    
             =================             
            / 6-WasteOfTime   \
           / 5-DifferenceMaker \
          /    4-Actionable     \
         /      3-SomeValue      \
        /       2-Engaging        \
       /      1-Interesting        \
      /       0-WasteOfTime         \
      ===============================
    

So how do you know if something that appears to be a waste of time is Value 0
or Value 6? You don't. Sometimes you just gotta go with your gut.

~~~
TeMPOraL
This is a valuable insight; even if you can't distinguish reliably between
Value 0 and Value 6, you can still increase your net gain by reallocating time
spent on Value "Engaging" and "Interesting" to "WasteOfTime".

Also, I just realized most of my reading is Value 1 now. :/.

------
jmduke
_Regardless of what it is, you’re wasting your time with all your reading if
you don’t use it to drive action._

Wow, I could not disagree more.

The implication here is that the subset of 'things worth reading' are things
that show up on your RSS reader. I'm absolutely positive that the vast
majority of the things you read on the internet are inferior compared to other
things you could be doing with your time; its important to keep abreast of
trends and current events, but the advent of Read-it-Later services has, I
think fetishized the blog post.

Pick up some Steinbeck or Vonnegut or something. Trust me, it'll help you a
lot more than a self-help blog post or Six Ways To Engage Your Customers.

~~~
dsjoerg
"Trust me" is shorthand for "Without any supporting argument whatsoever,
please believe".

When you are tempted to write "trust me", please reconsider and think of why
your readers should believe what you're saying.

So in this specific case: why do you think people should be reading "Steinbeck
or Vonnegut or something"?

I don't particularly disagree with your advice, but I'm also not inclined to
follow it without so much as a shred of a given reason.

~~~
foobarbazqux
"Trust me" is also shorthand for "I have reflected deeply on this, and based
on my personal experience, and our shared humanity..."

It's obviously not foolproof to make predictions about another person's
experience based on your own life, but this is perhaps a more charitable
interpretation of what GP meant by "trust me".

~~~
dsjoerg
Fair enough. I was annoyed because I have found those particular authors hard
to connect with, and now some random dude wants me to trust him that they're
good for no stated reason.

But yes, the principle of charity should always apply and yours is the
correctly charitable one.

------
gruseom
I'm normally biased against self-help blog posts, and even more when they
quote other self-help blog posts, but this is brilliant:

 _“Most people spend nearly all their energy trying not to change. This is
what the philosopher [sic] William James meant when he wrote the mind’s main
function was to be a fortress for protecting your ego from reality. When the
mind has to accommodate a new fact, James argued, it doesn’t settle on the
change to its model of reality that is most likely to reflect reality. It
protects the fortress, calculating the smallest possible modification to its
bulwarks that can account for the new fact._

It's not just brilliant, it's astonishingly modern. It's not out of the
question for the late 19th century, because Freud and Nietzsche were both
working this territory. Still, the formulation sounds contemporary (to us, not
William James). Can anybody point me to where James wrote about this?

(It's glib, though, to say "The real key is Self-Awareness with Discipline".
This is extraordinarily hard to do and to take it as anything less than a
life-long task, let alone treat it as an item on a to-do list, is naive. Even
one tiny example where you catch yourself doing what the quote describes is
worth more than a grand general statement.)

Edit: after thinking about this for a bit, the quote seems understated. Even
as much as "the smallest possible modification to its bulwarks that can
account for the new fact" is atypical. Far more often than that, the new fact
is either elided from consciousness or ejected by the mental equivalent of
antibodies, and the "bulwarks" remain as they were.

~~~
jessedhillon
One of my favorite quotes is from William James, addressing this point:

 _A great many people believe they are thinking, when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices._

(Paraphrasing, I'm on mobile and in a hurry.)

~~~
gruseom
If you find the original, I'd like to see the citation.

One has, I think, to be careful about applying this insight to _other_ people.
It's best in the first person.

------
doctorpangloss
I think we could all stand to read more fiction.

It's unfair for Jason to criticize us for not getting meaning out of things as
abstract as "Do you really read?" Maybe it's just me, but the abstraction of
"self-help" blog posts seem unlimited.

I think we are much more in touch with the philosophical message of a sci-fi
book than the message, however briefer, of the blog post.

The big hypocrisy here is that the blog post is so vanishingly thin on
concretes that it sounds like it was written by someone who's never read a
good book.

~~~
jevanish
I definitely think long form reading (aka-books) is a great way to go (I read
about 20 books/yr). I definitely should work in more fiction to my life, but
as of yet I have focused on adding and building skills.

I think reading fiction has a lot of value. If you want to enhance your
creativity and be inspired you can get a lot from great fiction. It will also
make you a better writer. It can be act as a break from your day to day as
well (recharging is important).

In the end, my hope was to pose the question and have people consider what it
means for themselves. Being more purpose driven, or at least knowing why you
do something, can never hurt. We only get 24 hours in the day, so choosing
wisely how to spend it is important. If you're thoughtful about how much and
what you choose to read, it can pay off in many ways.

~~~
snogglethorpe
> _I think reading fiction has a lot of value. If you want to enhance your
> creativity and be inspired you can get a lot from great fiction. It will
> also make you a better writer. It can be act as a break from your day to day
> as well (recharging is important)._

It's also fun. You know ... fun?

[There are certainly other benefits, but I think the notion that activities
like reading fiction need to be _justified_ seems a bit wrong-headed.]

> _Being more purpose driven, or at least knowing why you do something, can
> never hurt_

Er, well, that's far from clear...

Being generally aware, more or less, of what you do and why you do it is
almost certainly a positive thing, _but_ if you obsess over justifying
_everything_ you do and every second of your day ("Relaxing read: 30 minutes.
Laughing with friends: 15 minutes. ...") you may well go nuts, and going nuts
seems, ... counterproductive...

Everybody is different, and some people are fine with ultra-controlling every
aspect of their lives, but for many people, I don't think this is true. There
are many points in the spectrum from total slacker to robot. Leave a little
freedom to chill.

------
nsxwolf
I didn't realize everything I read is supposed to drive me to action. Can't I
just find it interesting?

------
basicallydan

      I challenge myself to answer the following questions in everything I read:
    
      1. Has this taught me anything new and valuable? (If not, move on quickly)
      2. How can I apply insights from this article today? (Wait and I’ll forget)
      3. When have I applied the ideas from this post? Where have I not, but could have?
        (What was the difference?)
    

Whenever I read an "I challenge myself to answer the following questions..."
list in a blog post, I think "Wow, do I challenge myself like they do in this
scenario? Will they mind if I steal their technique? Will I stick with it? Do
_they_ stick with it?"

I say this because it's often a potential 'takeaway' from an article to apply
similar challenges in one's life, and like Jason says, unless it can be
applied immediately it is often forgotten.

------
jkldotio
News studies show people go for junk gossip/celebrity/sex/emotional type news
far more than anything economic or political. Which makes it difficult for
things like my project ([http://jkl.io](http://jkl.io)) which specifically
seeks to remove the trivial in favour of the high brow broadsheet type news.
However I think the "information diet" meme is gaining more traction as people
are feeling overloaded and want to focus on quality, less visual distraction
and fewer ads.

------
bane
I read for different reasons, sometimes to learn, sometimes to relax. I'm
reading a book on Peter the Great, growing up as a Caucasian kid in Hong Kong,
some fast search algorithm papers, and am working my way through the X-Men and
New Mutant comic books. I'm getting something out of all of them, even if what
I'm getting is to clear my mind so I can sleep better.

~~~
keiferski
What's the Hong Kong book called?

~~~
bane
[http://www.amazon.com/Gweilo-Memories-Hong-Kong-
Childhood/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Gweilo-Memories-Hong-Kong-
Childhood/dp/0553816721/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1372090260&sr=8-2&keywords=gweilo)

------
hvass
Just few hours ago I read this by Schopenhauer: “Students and scholars of all
kinds and of every age aim, as a rule, only at information, not insight. They
make it a point of honour to have information about everything, every stone,
plant, battle, or experiment and about all books, collectively and
individually. It never occurs to them that information is merely a means to
insight, but in itself is of little or no value.”

------
alfiejohn_
I asked myself the same question years ago with TV and I figured in the end
that watching TV was a complete waste of my time. These days I probably watch
under 10 minutes a week in total if that.

------
mnemonicsloth
If you want disciplined self-awareness, you are not going to get it by reading
articles that grab your attention with drama and self-doubt: _Hypocrites!_ The
takeaway is always that the author is the smartest guy ever and you need to
push harder to keep up.

Success may not come easily, but if you feel like a constipated man straining
on a toilet, your experience is not success.

------
weisser
Curious how others use Pocket (or something comparable)...

I use it to save articles I think will have value at some point but have
little relevance now or things that I have read in their entirety and think
will be important to come back to. Essentially I'm building a repository of
web clippings that I can search through when trying to read about a particular
topic.

~~~
hvass
I do that with my browser bookmarks, but not with Pocket, I usually read
everything I save there.

You are essentially building an anti-library:
[http://www.ryanholiday.net/building-your-
antilibrary/](http://www.ryanholiday.net/building-your-antilibrary/)

I have had numerous problems come up that I knew immediately where to look for
a solution, even I haven't read all those articles.

------
lotsofcows
Well done, you've completely missed the point of literature. One reads to
experience another self. Anyhing else is a waste of time.

------
ireadqrcodes
tldr;

~~~
fideloper
I chuckled at this...and decided saying so was worth any down votes. This
place could use some humor.

------
websitescenes
This is so important in today's climate.

------
Helpful_Bunny
I read this piece; I then went to his recommended book list[1] to see what
_he_ classed as reading.

I'm afraid to say, it is (with a couple of notable exceptions) one of the most
conformist, populist and lacking in adventure reading lists I've read for a
long time.

Simply put, he isn't _reading_ ; he is picking up whatever is the "top 10 list
of <subject X> from AMZN or Good Reads" and digesting it in a _very
conventional_ way.

So; no Jason, you don't really read. What you're doing is rote learning what
is the considered 'wisdom of the crowd' de jour on topics and expecting
enlightenment. That's not how _reading_ works. If you need a concrete example
of this, many great insights come from people _reading_ on topics wildly
_outside_ their field and suddenly applying said insights into their own
fields.

Chaos Theory / Math was started like this, from a tiny office spitting out
weather data.

Jason will no doubt do well on a middle / high rung (Gamma+ or Beta-) but will
never "do a Jobs".

[1][http://jasonevanish.com/books/](http://jasonevanish.com/books/)

