I’m Sorry But There’s No Shortcut for This (And That’s a Good Thing)

It’s clearly a timeless tendency because Seneca tells us a story about it from two thousand years ago. 

People have always wanted to get something for nothing. They’ve always wanted to get the results without doing the work. 

Especially when it comes to knowledge. 

“Wanting to appear a well-read man,” Seneca writes about a rich but lazy Roman named Calvisius Sabinus, “he thought up the following short cut: he spent an enormous amount of money on slaves,” each one tasked with mastering a different body of work. 

One had to know Homer by heart. Another had to master Hesiod. He had a slave for Sappho, another for Pindar, and one for Simonides—one for each of the ancient Greek poets that an upper-class Roman was supposed to know inside and out.

At dinner parties, Sabinus kept these learned but enslaved Romans at his elbow, ready to feed him quotes, references, and facts to impress his educated friends. And he would insist, Seneca tells us, that summoning knowledge on demand from one’s staff was no different from summoning it from one’s mind. Indulging this notion that any readily available capability was effectively one of your own, a friend suggested Sabinus take up wrestling.

“But I am weak and frail,” Sabinus replied. 

“Don’t say that,” the friend teased. “Consider how many perfectly healthy slaves you have!”

I know it isn’t, but I like to think of this as a parable about AI. It would be nice if someone could do your learning for you, if something could do your thinking for you…but that’s just not how it works. 

Even now. Even as LLMs can do incredible things. 

Because as I’ve said before, the point isn’t to have the information, it is to be the person who has done the work to get the information. You can pay someone to lift something for you…but that won’t make you strong. 

I think about this with my own writing. I am in the middle of working on a biography of someone who wrote thousands of letters, gave hundreds of speeches, sat for oral histories, published his own books and was the subject of countless newspaper reports, classified documents and contemporaneous accounts…and so did the people he was closest to or worked for and with. It would be wonderful if I could just download this into my brain—or I guess my research assistants’ brain—but there is really no way to escape the great Robert Caro’s dictum that you have to “turn every page.”

So my researcher can help me track stuff down, scan stuff, put it in little binders, but ultimately, I have to touch it all. Every damn page. I have to read it all. 

But I don’t mind. I don’t mind because 1) Reading is amazing. I love doing it. Why would I want to skip the best part of my job? 2) Because it is my job, I’m pretty good at it.  

I was lucky in that I had someone teach me how to read well. Marcus Aurelius talked about how “mastery of reading requires a master.” For Marcus, his teacher Rusticus was that master—the one who taught him “to read attentively—not to be satisfied with ‘just getting the gist of it.’” 

For me, Robert Greene was my master. I started as his research assistant, and his rigor as a reader and researcher was legendary. He taught me to go way beyond the “gist.” He taught me to hold what I read—and what I brought him—to a very high standard. Finding the perfect quote or story for whatever he was working on wasn’t enough. Where did it come from? What was the context? Was the source itself legitimate? Does it hold up across other sources? Was I settling for the first thing that seemed relevant or confirmed what I wanted? 

He sent me down rabbit holes. He asked me to go find papers and old works that were, in the days before Google Books, harder to locate. He had me transcribe interviews (something no one does anymore). He introduced me to writers and thinkers I had never heard of. He taught me how he used notecards and how he organized his library. Most of all, he modeled for me what a disciplined, curious and well-read person can be. 

To be a great reader, it’s not enough to read—you have to question, challenge, verify, and mark things up. You have to put books through the wringer and authors on trial. You have to go chase things down, follow footnotes, look up references, look up words you don’t know. You have to have a practice of capturing information and organizing it so it can be drawn on when you need it later.

Sadly, too many people are not taught how to be great readers—and never find the masters who can show them. That’s the idea behind Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge—which we are re-launching right now. It was painstakingly designed to distill everything I’ve learned about being a great reader—from Robert, from trial and error, from the habits of other great readers I’ve gotten to know, from studying how history’s greatest readers read—to help you learn in a few weeks what took me nearly two decades to figure out.

Read to Lead takes place across 6 weeks at a pace of one challenge every three days (15 challenges and more than 30,000 words of exclusive content), with each challenge built around a specific practice for becoming a better reader. And no, there are no hacks, tricks, or shortcuts. You will not learn how to be a speed reader—that’s a scam. We are not going to show you how to use AI to get out of having to pick up a book. We are not going to tell you to play your audiobooks at 3X speed. We are not going to show you how to shut off that little voice in your head so you can supposedly race through pages faster.

The whole point of reading is that it’s hard, but that the hard is worth it. There is a payoff and that payoff is priceless wisdom. Reading is not about impressing people or winning some game of mental gymnastics. It’s not about winning trophies for your shelf. It’s not about collecting random pieces of information. It’s about accumulating a mass of true wisdom—that you can turn to and apply in your actual day-to-day life.

Valuable things are usually hard-won. Wisdom, a sound and strong mind, is one of them. “The greatest educational fallacy,” James Stockdale would say (himself sent to Stanford as an adult, where he learned to think critically and philosophically), “is that you can get it without stress.” 

No, the road to wisdom is long and rocky.

It’s one beset by obstacles, dead ends, and pits of despair.

One with staggering peaks and terrifying wonders.

One where there is always more ground to cover.

One that, above all, you cannot have anyone—or anything—else travel for you.

P.S. If you’ve never had a Rusticus or a Robert Greene show you how to be a great reader, I tried to build Read to Lead to give you a way to learn from those kinds of masters.

Across 15 challenges (at a pace of one every three days), I’ll walk you through the best of what I’ve learned about reading: how I read, how I choose what to read, how I retain more of what I read, how I work my way through difficult books, and—most importantly—how I take what I read and put it to use in my actual life.

Along with the 15 challenges, you also get access to a private community where you can connect with fellow readers, an instant 20% discount at The Painted Porch Bookshop, and, of course, lots and lots of book recommendations.

And I’ll also be hosting a live Q&A session on September 23 (just sign up by September 22 to get your invitation). It’s one of my favorite things to get the chance to talk about all things books and reading with everyone in the course.

I’d love for you to join us!