WPenner's Blog

I've always read a lot, enough that it's a family joke. One hundred books a year has been my default for well over a decade. About a year ago, though, I started considering the results of all that reading. I was doing it mostly wrong!

Here are the three biggest mistakes I make and one golden technique to improve!

1. Reading Without Purpose

When the purpose of reading changes, the speed and circumstances of reading must change. Four broad purposes for reading are:

1. Pleasure - Reading for pleasure is often the gateway to better reading. Starting with something enjoyable helps provide the taste for reading. Fanning the flame of interest reading into a passion or obsession propels us to great heights. Maturing our reading pleasures means taking on tougher material without losing the sense of enjoyment.

2. Style - Reading for style is about learning to write, so other people enjoy the writing. Despite what you might have learned in school, style goes beyond grammar. Young people with immature thinking benefit the most from improving their style. Schopenhauer notes that style improves by thinking, so reading for style requires slower reading, with more breaks than reading for pleasure.

3. Intellectual Stimulation - Intellectual stimulation happens when we think smarter people's thoughts after them. Unfortunately, our brains fool us into thinking we understand and idea when we only recognize it. This is almost always incorrect. Thinking requires considering multiple angles, making distinctions, and comparing one thing against others.

4. Fodder for Writing - This kind of reading is about finding the sources which we will use in a project we're working on. We might look for information that proves or disproves our point, illustrates and extends our point, or provides another perspective. This type of reading often uses skimming (reading for the gist instead of every word carefully) and scanning (looking over a text for particular headlines or keywords that jump out).

2. Reading Without Retaining

Reading without retaining information blocks growing in reading. Reading a lot of books does not automatically create a great mind. A great mind has great ideas. Reading broadly and deeply can help develop ideas only when ideas stay with us rather than whizzing by.

Schopenhauer describes the problem like this…

So it is, that much reading deprives the mind of all elasticity; it is like keeping a spring continually under pressure.
The safest way of having no thoughts of one’s own is to take up a book every moment one has nothing else to do. It is this practice which explains why erudition makes most men more stupid and silly than they are by nature, and prevents their writings obtaining any measure of success. ¹

Yes, it seems reading can make you stupid! Exactly the opposite of what most people want when choosing books over other types of entertainment. To avoid this problem, keep recalling the ideas, considering them repeatedly.

3. Disorganized Reading

When reading unconsciously, the problem of disorganization develops. Schopenhauer describes it with the metaphor of a library of information.

A LIBRARY may be very large; but if it is in disorder, it is not so useful as one that is small but well arranged. In the same way, a man may have a great mass of knowledge, but if he has not worked it up by thinking it over for himself, it has much less value than a far smaller amount which he has thoroughly pondered.

Reading can become disorganized in three significant ways.

1. Reading without a project - For anyone wanting to become smarter, the purpose of reading is writing. Input without output is the path towards greater intelligence. Like people who need to talk in order to think, intellectuals write to think the clearest, deepest thoughts. And since writing is best done in discrete chunks, having a writing project in mind when reading is useful for getting ideas organized. With a project in mind, reading changes. The mind takes in information more efficiently.

2. Reading too broadly - Reading broadly seems more good than bad. Knowledge of different literature or scientific information broadens the mind and overcomes biases and blind spots. Yet, when done at the expense of developing expertise, it becomes a disadvantage.

3. Disconnected ideas - Disconnected reading can appear whether reading broadly or narrowly. The problem of disconnected ideas appears when we do not connect ideas to their context and other ideas. Schopenhauer describes it like this:

For it is only when a man looks at his knowledge from all sides, and combines the things he knows by comparing truth with truth, that he obtains a complete hold over it and gets it into his power.

Retaining, Connecting & Purpose

There are several tried-and-true ways of overcoming the three reading problems discussed in this article. Oldest and easiest is to implement a "commonplace book". Such books were ubiquitous once, but fell out of favour several decades ago. Any notebook can become a commonplace book by filling its pages with notes.

The pattern for developing a commonplace book has been described by Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From, Tiago Forte in Building a Second Brain and many, many others.

1. Collect fragments of ideas - Collecting idea fragments is important. Instead of trying to capture everything, keeping only what is most important to a project provides positive focus.

2. Weave fragments into new patterns - Instead of capturing ideas by source (i.e. which book they came from), gather them by topic. Ideas from multiple sources together on a page can combine in new and interesting ways.

3. Understand ideas' different facets - As a collection of ideas grows, don't just look for more similar ideas. Search for ideas which agree, oppose, illustrate, offer alternatives, consequences, constraints or other people's perspectives.

4. Gain creativity and insights - An archivist or librarian collects ideas and rarely (never?) looks at them again. Skilled readers press their knowledge into service with outputs, which benefit from insights and creative new ideas. Insights and creativity most often develop when ideas, unexpectedly placed together, prompt new thoughts. The lack of context offers the brain an opportunity to develop novel interpretations.

The commonplace book is one technique which addresses the three big reading mistakes, improving reading and thinking.²