Hello Friends 👋,
If you are still here, thank you for sticking with me. Your time is limited and precious, like the parking spot closest to the entrance at Costco.1 I'll share some life updates over the next few weeks, but life has been busy lately.
The main lesson re-affirmed through this period of my life is that we talk a lot about managing time, but I think the main thing we need to manage is our energy. And to manage our energy, we need to be doing things that actively give us energy; this is why doing anything after our 9 to 5 can feel like carrying a backpack full of lead.
In the meantime, I wanted to share one of my favorite pieces I've written and was originally published on my personal site before Substack happened.
It's about our compulsion with reading books for our ego's sake; foregoing the waltz books invite us to dance, in favor of a senseless sprint in the middle of the dance floor. I believe knowledge is best learned when savored.
Then, I'll share three books I've read over the past couple of months that I've loved.
Book Chugging
(Originally published January 2022)
Nearly everyday, I see a tweet along the lines of:
“I read 10 books yesterday. Here are 10 things I learned from them. A thread🧵”
I’ve also seen maxims like “readers are leaders,” or some quote about how reading is the path to success, and that you are simply not reading enough.
Combine this with our hyper-productivity culture today where speed and output are the key metrics by which we need to do everything. All of sudden my internal dialogue started looking like this:
“Read more! Read more! Read more! Chug! Chug! Chug!”
I imagine myself in a hazy basement of an old, 1920s-era house, held upside down by two guys with biceps the size of my head, with a copy of Sapiens in my hands, while a crowd of inebriated teens demands that I read non-stop, fast and furious, until I’m done.
It seems that reading has gone from a relaxing hobby, a respite, to a chore that must be performed at 3x speed (as David Perell writes on his excellent essay about this). I even recall paying hundreds of dollars for a speed reading workshop a few years back that did little to improve my reading speed or comprehension.
So, we are stuck with a culture of book chugging. I’ve been focused on vanity metrics like the number of books read in a year. As if book chugging 50 books would make me instantaneously a better person than if I read 10 books. I believe this mindset is part of a broader trend in our society whereby the optics of things matter more than the substance.
Instead of book chugging, we should focus on book tasting.
Book tasting implies slower, intentional, and present enjoyment of what you are reading. It dismisses the need for speed, and prioritizes enjoyment and active engagement.
Book tasting is the best way for you to actually draw inspiration and knowledge from whatever you are reading. It surfaces the hidden notes, tastes, and aftertastes of the material you read.
This sounds reasonable, but how do we unlearn the impulse to book chug?
There are three practices I’ve been applying the last few months that made a substantial difference in my reading experience.
The pen is your metronome
I started reading with a pen in hand. It helps me set the pace of my reading with the expectation that I will make frequent stops to underline, write notes, or re-read passages again. Interestingly enough, in many speed reading courses, they recommend using the pen to pace you to read faster (so that you avoid subvocalizing). A pen is meant to write! And to use as a drumstick.
Treat your book tasting as a journey in which every page is a sip, and you are documenting what you perceive from each page and what was interesting. Not only do I underline interesting passages, but I also rewrite an idea in my own words (improves retention), and make notes on the author’s syntax and word choice (especially when I read a sentence that makes me say “ah, that’s beautiful!”).
Use the pen to taste.
It’s not about the number
Simple to say, hard to do. I mentioned earlier how I come across many tweets of people talking about all the books they read. This fed an unreasonable expectation that to be worthy of respect, I needed to read as many books as them. After all, look at all the likes and retweets they got!
But as we have learned in this era of social media, it is a bad trade to prioritize social currency over actual learning. That’s not a knock on the folks who share they’ve read 50-100 books. If they are not book chugging, good for them! They may have more time, skill, and natural gifts to absorb information faster. But this isn’t about them. It’s about you. And any time you set expectations based on external stimuli and not your own intentions and purpose, you are going to have a bad time.
So forget about hitting a number. Focus on reading at a pace where you enjoy reading, your mind races with thoughts inspired by what you read, and where you’d be equally content whether you read one book or 100.
Write about what you read
How often after you read something interesting, do you keep thinking about it? If you are like me, somewhat often.
Now, how many times do you write down what you are thinking about? Most of us do so rarely.
These are the true gifts that come from reading. When your mind takes the idea off the page and continues tasting it after you put your book down. This is where ideas come from! This is where epiphanies come from! So next time you tell yourself you are not creative, read something on a topic that interests you, put the book down, notice the thoughts and ideas that remain in your head, and write those down. I’m willing to bet that once you write those down, other ideas and thoughts will emerge (write those down as well). Soon enough you’ll have your own perspective that builds on the gift that book gave you.
***
Today, I would say I read at about half the speed at which I used to read. A couple of years ago, this would have been devastating for my confidence. But today, I wear that with a badge of pride. Interestingly enough, reading slower has led me to making more time to read.
Absent from the peer pressure and expectation of book chugging, I now look forward to book tasting, to getting “stuck” on a page and writing a bunch of ideas on the margin, or being delighted by a beautiful sentence and studying it for a couple of minutes.
Life and books are too short to chug. Let’s taste them instead.
Books I’ve Tasted Recently
I’ve shifted my reading time from short-form blogs/article to books over the past month. There is a depth which books invariably find themselves in that is more appealing to me right now. When I’m holding a book, I always recognize that I’m holding someone’s life work, reading sentences that may have been sneezed onto a page, or had to be extracted carefully after creative constipation.
That is not to say there isn’t value in short posts, Substack, Medium, etc. Not everything said has to be immutable and able to withstand the sands of time. The short-form serves for the writer to say “here is a vignette of my reality, that I interpret through the lens of all the pieces of my own puzzle. Enjoy.” But if this is what short-form writing says, a book says “Here is my obsession, my attempt at expanding our collective reality, my part in illustrating the power of human expression, the universality of our experience, the timelessness of ideas.” I think that’s beautiful.
Crypto Confidential -
I devoured this book. Not in the book-chugging sense which I have just admonished above; it reminded me of how I tend to eat pizza: selfishly, unbound by etiquette and temperance, holding no regard to carbs or tomato sauce quotas.
Nat is a gifted writer. And that gift has been earned through a lot of work he’s detailed here and here. His book details his experiences in the 2021-2022 crypto boom. From passive participant to critical contributor of crypto projects, Nat takes on what I can simply describe as the Hulk Roller Coaster at Universal Studios.2
I also delved into the world of crypto, mostly through NFTs (it was for the art, ok?).3 So I re-lived the frenzy of this time through his story.
In This Economy? -
How much do you really know about the economy? Maybe you learned about the basic laws of supply and demand at school, but do you know how inflation is measured or the difference between a treasury note and a treasury bond?
If I knew it, I forgot it, and if I didn't know, I pretended I did—like when everyone was watching Game of Thrones and I was nodding along the hysteria, learning about the show through oral retellings.
The economy is people and people are the economy. That's Kyla's main point in this amazing book. I think this should be mandatory reading for every high school in the United States.
I've gushed about Kyla's writing before, but for those not acquainted, I'll just say this: Kyla writes like your over-caffeinated friend who never sleeps because they are always learning and they studied a bunch of random majors at school which now leads them to connect the dots nobody else sees, all of this while being effortlessly captivating.
To make something that can be so convoluted and dry as the economy entertaining is quite a feat. But she does it.
Incidental Inventions - Elena Ferrante
I bought this book at an antique store, not having a clue who she was. Frankly, I was drawn by the fact she was Italian and that I liked the cover; I certainly judged (and bought) the book by its cover.
All of a sudden, her name started popping up everywhere. Most recently, three of her books landed on “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century”4 list the New York Times put out a couple of weeks ago, nabbing the number 1 spot with her book “My Brilliant Friend.”
However, this book is a collection of essays she penned as part of a year-long collaboration with the Guardian newspaper.
I’ve always said that the best writers are those that can make the mundane interesting. Elena has mastered this craft, and it is evident in these pages as she writes about friendships, the exclamation point, motherhood, interviews, and everything in between.
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite passages from her book:
“Sometimes I think I understand why we women increasingly read novels. Novels, when they work, use lies to tell the truth. The information marketplace, battling for an audience, tends, more and more, to transform intolerable truths into novelistic, riveting, enjoyable lies.”
Until next time!
How do I define success in life? In and out of Costco in 20 minutes, pizza slice on hand, 10 meters away from where you parked.
Fun fact: This was the first roller coaster I ever rode on.
I’m lying. I bought plenty of ghoulish, ugly, stupid things, which I’m even too ashamed to show you. Yes. That bad.
I think top 100 lists are ridiculous exercises in mental masturbation. Alas, this compulsion seems to be as natural to human nature as burping. Both make me equally uncomfortable.