The 20-Year-Old Point-of-View: Half a Year
It’s been 26 weeks since I decided I was going to try to read a book a week. I’m happy to say that, despite the odds, I’ve since completed 26 books in that time.
Looking back, it all started after I casually mentioned I was thinking about getting into reading regularly to one of my friends. She commented that there was a myth that C-level employees (CEOs, CFOs, CTOs) of large companies often read a book a week. I thought to myself, well, I certainly had more time on my hands than a CEO. Why not give it a shot myself?
So I started looking for books to read. Being (and still being) a young and somewhat gung-ho idealistic visionary, I stuck to the areas of reading that I thought could bring me the best bang for my buck in terms of time invested per applicable knowledge gained. Therefore, I stuck largely to the genres of Psychology, Business, Self-Help, Sociology and Science. In essence, I wanted to learn how to live and lead a better life, and if by consuming several hundred hours of an esteemed researcher’s work in a 300-page book was the way to do so, I might as well do so early on.
But exactly how much did I read? Good question. I measured my reading speed after finding out Bill Gates reads an astonishing 150 pages per hour, and found that I’m at a roughly 60–70 page per hour pace. So doing a bit of math, if we take the average length of a book I read is about 300 pages, I’ve spent roughly 130 hours, or 4.4% of my waking hours, this past half year flipping pages in bed, at cafes, and on Greenlake. And I don’t even like reading.
Perhaps the thing that’s been most beneficial from all this reading has been the ability to build a better mental framework of the world. There are of course the benefits of surface-level suggestions like charging your phone in the living room and methods for making hard decisions. But the greatest effects of all this reading have been in increasing the versatility of my mental framework. When a colleague of yours has a conflict with their boss, being able to draw upon the domains of knowledge from experts in business, leadership, decision making, psychology and sociology helps paint a more nuanced image of the situation, and allows you to make better informed opinions and suggestions on such matters. When a friend struggles with depression, instead of only being able to provide a meek “Hang in there,” you begin to understand more of the context and factors at play, and provide better support because of it. I may not be a therapist, but I sure as hell can do better than “Why are you so sad? You’ve got so much going for you!”.
This is not to say being knowledgeable and well-informed is the end of the story. In fact, if one does nothing but build this framework of the world and does nothing with it, it actually tends to create more worry and anxiety, due to a loss of agency. Therefore it’s personally important to me that everything I read must, somehow, make its way into how I act. For instance, I know for something like a longboard, it would be better to choose one that my gut instinct liked the best rather than mulling over a dozen brands with hundreds of boards to choose from.
But acting upon knowledge also has its share of problem. For one, if one can recognize an issue, understand its components, but doesn’t have the mean to act upon it, it can become worrisome. There’s also the problem of overthinking: one can spend an hour thinking of a multitude of perspectives to think about a given situation, when the first two would’ve sufficed for the action eventually taken. Finally, I also get in trouble, perhaps regularly, when trying to solve a problem when I was unwelcome to (shout out to all my friends who have endured unsolicited advice throughout the years).
So, reading has given me a better framework of the world, for better or for worse. It’s hard to imagine that half a year ago I was in the place I was, and it’s even stranger to imagine that maybe in another half year I’ll be as far from here as I was from there. A lot of things have yet to be learned, and I am still very, very far from finishing it all.
A special thanks to the following people for supporting my journey.
- My Mom and Dad, for providing both financial and personal support for my expensive new habit
- My Older Sister, for encouraging me to branch out to areas I wouldn’t have otherwise
- My Friends, who’ve been gracious enough to provide me with suggestions discussions, and being the main audience of these articles
Well, that’s it. With another half a year to go, I guess I’d better get back to it.
Reading List, By Author, 7/2/2021.
- Ted Talks, Chris Anderson
- Dare to Lead, Brene Brown
- Quiet, Susan Cain
- How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
- Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil
- Atomic Habits, James Clear
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey
- Dedicated, Pete Davis
- Digital Body Language, Erica Dhawan
- Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke
- Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert
- How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates
- Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
- Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell
- Leadership Effectiveness Training, Dr. Thomas Gordan
- Originals, Adam Grant
- Think Again, Adam Grant
- Give and Take, Adam Grant
- Ask Iwata, Iwata (Hobonichi)
- Thinking: Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
- Noise: An Error in Human Judgement, Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein
- Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Your Turn, Julie Lythcott-Haims
- Fierce Conversations, Susan Scott
- The Everything Store, Brad Stone
- How to Be Miserable, Randy J. Paterson
