Reading is one of the most high-leverage activities you can perform. Reading for just 30 minutes a day can improve your life a lot. It's like what Naval Ravikant, founder and former CEO of AngelList, says:

"The reality is, I don't actually read much compared to what people think. I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001 percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success I've had in my life and any intelligence I might have. Real people don't read an hour a day. Real people, I think, read a minute a day or less. Making it an actual habit is the most important thing."

Reading is important. The only thing that is more important than reading is reading wisely. The type of books you pick up has an impact on the opinions you have and the choices you make. I want to highlight a few ideas on how to read wisely I came across in the essay On Reading by the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

Conversing With The Dead

Reading allows you to talk to the dead. It enables you to learn from the mistakes of the past and get insight from the great thinkers of the past for little to no cost. Consider how reading impacted the founder of Stoicism, Zeno.

A young Zeno who wanted to attain the best life he could live decided to seek advice from the Oracle of Delphi. The Oracle told him that he should take on the complexion of the dead.

Zeno's interpretation was that he needed to talk to the dead. He thought he could do that by reading, so he started to read ancient texts on various topics. Through that, he became a successful merchant in his time.

Unfortunately, he suffered from a shipwreck on one of his trips and returned to Athens with nothing. Instead of complaining, even though he had every reason to do so, he went to a bookstore. There he read about Socrates and asked the bookkeeper where he could find people like Socrates. Luckily, the bookkeeper pointed to Crates (a famous philosopher of the school of Cynics), who happened to walk by. From this point on, Zeno went on to find the school of Stoicism.

Now imagine if he thought he was too arrogant to learn from the dead, to read about the mistakes of the past. Stoicism wouldn't be here today, and Zeno wouldn't have been a successful merchant.

The shelves of a library preserve the errors of the past and expositions concerning them, as Arthur Schopenhauer says.

Books preserve the errors of the past. You don't have enough time to repeat the mistakes of prior generations and live long enough to learn from them. It is arrogant to think otherwise. Luckily, thousands of authors have devoted their lives to preserving things they have learned for future generations. It's up to you to take advantage of it.

Reading is letting someone else think for you

"When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

When you read, you are reading the author's thoughts, their opinions. You allow their thoughts to enter your mind and let some of these ideas reside in your head. You are, in essence, allowing another person to think for you.

Deferring thought is great when you read the works of the great people who have existed throughout history. Reading the works of Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger will do more good to your knowledge of investing than any course in college does. However, reading from people who are not good thinkers or write for questionable incentives only poisons your thoughts.

"One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.
In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited."

Generally speaking, books that have been around for centuries have stood the test of time as opposed to books written recently. Recent books have not withstood the judgment of time, yet most people prefer new books over old due to recency bias. So make it a habit to prefer old books over new ones. And more importantly, choose good books over bad ones.

You don't have to retain everything you read

"It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents. To desire that a man should retain everything he has ever read, is the same as wishing him to retain in his stomach all that he has ever eaten."

This one should be obvious, yet it was not for me until I came across the idea. Like most people, I thought I should try to retain everything I read. If learning is the intention of reading, surely you must remember everything you read, right?

No, as it is a wasteful endeavor. Schopenhauer compares the person who tries to retain everything they read similar to one who wants their stomach to retain everything they eat.

Your stomach absorbed the essential nutrients from the food you ate to forge you into who you are today. Similarly, your mind absorbs the vital ideas you read about to forge you. You don't need to try to retain everything; it is important to be able to separate the signal from the noise. Actionable knowledge is far more useful than knowledge.

Reading Too Much

In a previous article, I wrote that once you optimize for the number of books you read in a year, you start to lose focus of the real reason you started reading: learning things that interest you. Reading too much is akin to overfeeding your stomach.

Schopenhauer uses the analogy of the stomach again:

"And just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over."

Reading too much can cause us to consume large quantities of information without actually retaining and reflecting upon it. Schopenhauer encourages us to reflect upon what we have read. He argues that you cannot assimilate what you have read without taking the time to reflect, leading to wasted time and effort.

You want to be aware of what you are reading and how much you are reading. You also want to take time to reflect upon what you read and try to put it to use in your life. What's the point of learning things if you can't take action?

I do have to note that reading too much isn't a problem for most people. Reading too little is. Don't use this idea to rationalize yourself into thinking you don't need to read.

Thanks for making it to the end. I know it has been a while since I've written. Things have been chaotic; however, that shouldn't be an excuse not to keep the habit. Going forward, I will write regularly with a reduced cadence of one article every week or every other week, depending on the article's length.