If one of the fastest ways to learn is reading, then one of the most important decisions we make is choosing what to read. Recently I’ve been thinking how to do thoughtfully curate what I read and have stumbled on two lessons
1) Read what surprises you
Claude Shannon’s work on entropy shows that information comes from how much you reduce uncertainty. As Brian Christian states in The Most Human Human; “the more entropy or surprising something is the more information you get from it.” When choosing what to read, this means that books and articles that surprise you every single page or sentence are “information dense” as you’re constantly learning something new.
2) Read old books
The Lindy effect states the longer something has existed, the longer you can expect it to exist into the future. When choosing what to read this means old books and articles are worth your attention. If these books or articles have stayed in the public consciousness, the information in them has a long half life and is more likely to be relevant in the future. Said another way, it’s better to bet that the lessons in Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations will stick around compared to the most recent NYT bestseller.
Taking these lessons gives me a 2×2 grid to focus on:
Putting this grid into practice, I’ve begun focusing less on books’ Amazon ratings and more on
- Books >10 years old
- Subjects I want to learn, but know little about.
Learning is a long journey and I hope this helps speed it up.