Do you really read?

http://jasonevanish.com/2013/06/23/do-you-really-read/

by jevanish • 13 years ago

95 42 13 years ago

gruseom3• 13 years ago

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.

jevanish2• 13 years ago

I agree with you. Self awareness is really hard and it is a day-in-day-out struggle. I honestly had been sitting on this post in a draft and felt something was off but a friend encouraged me to get it out there.

The hardest part about the post was the balance between being instructional (you and we pronouns) and when/how much to talk about my own stuff (I). I don't think I nailed it by any stretch, but done beats perfect.

redler• 13 years ago

Here's a quote from James' Pragmatism and Common Sense lectures that expresses the idea:

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. [http://www.authorama.com/pragmatism-6.html]

gruseom3• 13 years ago

Thanks. That does seem related. I wonder if it was an isolated insight or if he went into this theme in depth.

jessedhillon• 13 years ago

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.)

gruseom3• 13 years ago

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.

valisystem• 13 years ago

"A great many people" : it seems that the author is excluding himself from the group, where his statement is just prejudice, making him inside the group. This is some kind of freak irony, and it does not feel intended.

ireadqrcodes• 13 years ago

tldr;

fideloper• 13 years ago

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

websitescenes• 13 years ago

This is so important in today's climate.

doctorpangloss• 13 years ago

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.

jevanish2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

throwawayreader• 13 years ago

This feels like one of the "startups and hustle make me better than you" that show up from time to time.

jmduke• 13 years ago

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.

bennyg• 13 years ago

Plus, knowledge in other domains is great for creativity. You never know what you'll use, or tie together, so random knowledge is inherently good to have. I also disagree with what you quoted.

dsjoerg3• 13 years ago

"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.

zzzmarcus• 13 years ago

Pot, kettle.

TillE• 13 years ago

Why exactly do you expect some random person on the internet to patiently explain the value of literature to you?

foobarbazqux• 13 years ago

"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".

oblique63• 13 years ago

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

This is a false dichotomy, both are helpful. However, there something to be said about stepping outside the 'filter bubble', and acquiring varied skills/interests/viewpoints is always helpful. Why? Because it is in learning novel things that the brain actually gets stimulated and reshapes itself to become more optimal (thanks to a little thing called neuro-plasticity). Right now, due to our inefficient learning processes and media bombardment, we all get so overstimulated that we feel like deer in headlights with poor time management skills, and we end up unusually paranoid about what we consume. There is something to be said about what could be ‘worthwhile’ to read for some people, but we seem to over complicate the algorithm by which we calculate this as if it were some kind of fragile balance between 'good and evil' that we need to actively maintain. It’s really quite simple: if you’re interested in something, read up on it! Simple as that. Furthermore, if some tangent sparks your curiosity along the way, follow up on that as well. The sheer fact that you’re even remotely interested in the thing you’re reading about will ensure some level of efficient learning, so go and indulge.

Due to the way memory works (recognition in particular, or ‘pattern matching’ memory), the brain has the capacity to operate like a fairly sophisticated machine learning algorithm, so keep feeding it data and don’t worry so much about what you’re gonna get out of it, cause your brain is gonna sort that all out later anyway.

jt2190• 13 years ago

Here's the sentence you quoted back in context:

  > Too often we read something, share it and talk about it,
  > but fail to retain its meaning. Maybe you retweeted 
  > something about taking care of employees, but then you 
  > failed to show interest and compassion for an employee 
  > that came into work visibly upset. Maybe you just shared 
  > an article about the importance of open communication, 
  > but then disregarded comments from someone who tried to 
  > bring up a problem with you. Regardless of what it is,
  > you’re wasting your time with all your reading if you 
  > don’t use it to drive action.

At no point does the author try to make a distiction between the quality of works published online from those published in books. His argument is equally valid with Vonnegut and Steinbeck as it is with HN stories.

ctdonath• 13 years ago

"Strange how much human progress and accomplishment comes from contemplation of the irrelevant." - Scott Kim

nsxwolf• 13 years ago

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

edw519• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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. :/.

mahyarm• 13 years ago

This is partially the reason why I read these news sites so much. Too many life changing things have come from a stray comment on slashdot, HN, reddit or similar in my life. Not to mention it's entertaining.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

Exactly. I think the article here is laboring under a hugely faulty implied methodology for the way human beings work. We aren't robots. We aren't going to read something, even something we agree very strongly with, and then suddenly change everything about our entire lives.

Human behavior is more often a matter of degrees and shades. It typically takes a while for things to sink in, and it typically takes a while for people to actually implement ideas they think are good.

What that means is that it's not just a simple binary matter of people reading something that should have an impact on behavior and then either it impacting their behavior a lot or not at all.

And that's true of everything, from political beliefs to personal beliefs and ideology to personal and professional behavior.

basicallydan• 13 years ago

  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• 13 years ago

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) 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.

weisser• 13 years ago

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.

hvass2• 13 years ago

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/

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.

alfiejohn_• 13 years ago

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.

bane2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

What's the Hong Kong book called?

bane2• 13 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/Gweilo-Memories-Hong-Kong-Childhood/dp...

hvass2• 13 years ago

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.”

mnemonicsloth• 13 years ago

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.

Helpful_Bunny• 13 years ago

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/

lotsofcows• 13 years ago

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

Do you really read?

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