(2019-03-17) Chin Lessons Learnt From Reading51 Books In2018

Cedric Chin: Lessons Learnt From Reading 51 Books in 2018. If you're reading this, you probably work a demanding dayjob, and you probably don’t have a lot of time to read.

Here’s what I’ve learnt from the experience.

Use Narrative to Your Advantage

I started reading biographies and other partially-narrative non-fiction books, driven by the notion that such narrative-driven books would be easier to read during the evenings after a long day at work. This turned out a lot better than expected: I finished Titan (an 800 page biography of J.D. Rockefeller) in this manner, and then moved on a number of narrative-driven non-fiction picks, the most important of which was Creative Selection — a book on Apple’s software development in the time of Steve Jobs.

Finding Interesting Questions

Perhaps the most surprising thing I’ve learnt in 2018 is that the really interesting questions in a given subject area aren’t obvious to an outsider. It usually takes a book or two for the questions to emerge (Asking Questions)

One trick that I’ve found rather helpful is to frame a reading project as a journey for interesting questions

provide a motivating drive to read around a book

Let’s say that you’re interested in the field of judgment and decision making, and you’ve just started out on the literature. Picking a provisional list of interesting questions to guide your reading is often a good first step

I think this frame of ‘find interesting questions to ask, and then search for the answers’ is generally useful, and it's how I conduct much of my reading today

Novels felt effortless to read; non-fiction idea books took quite a toll on my energy levels. This mattered to me because my reading occured at night on weekdays

The last thing that I’ve found super helpful during my 2018 attempt was the act of tracking my reading.

The number is the head-fake, not the goal

The goal is knowledge; the number is merely what gets you there.

I’ve found myself mildly annoyed when checking Twitter or even when reading long-form articles over the past couple of months; books tend to be more enjoyable — especially if framed as a hunt for answers to interesting questions.