I had the most magical experience a few weeks ago.
It wasn’t exactly time travel, but it felt like something close.
I was sitting down to work on a chapter for my next book (btw, the third book in the Stoic virtue series comes out in June. I’m working on the fourth now). I had decided to write a chapter on the importance of keeping what’s called a commonplace book.
I sat down at my desk, pulled out my notecards, and found an old, worn notecard mentioning something that Joan Didion had written about notecards from a chapter in her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I walked over to the shelf and pulled it down and of course, there it was, a beautiful essay in that book called “On Keeping a Notebook”, written in 1966.
I got goosebumps, not just because it was exactly what I needed, but because I happened to be sitting, at that very moment, in Joan Didion’s chair (I bought it at a charity auction after her death). How did I know, nine years ago when I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem, when I took the time to jot that little reference, that it might be of use to future-me?
“Why did I write it down?” Didion herself asks in that essay. “In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember?”
I don’t know, you never really do, but the process of finding, years later, the perfect thing that I had recorded in the margins of a book or a notebook, has happened to me so many times now that I’ve begun to question the time-space continuum.
When I was writing Courage is Calling, for instance, I decided I would write about the Spartans at Thermopylae. I went to my shelf again and found there, in my Penguin Classics edition on page 477, what was effectively a highlighted outline of everything I needed to write this section…which had sat there silently for nearly twenty years. I didn’t even think I would be a writer when I read that book! I was just reading something that I thought was interesting!
This happens time and time again. One of my favorite books to re-read is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I love Gatsby not just because it’s an incredible book, one of the great works of the English language. I love it because it was one of the first books I ever loved. I was assigned to read and write an essay on Gatsby in my sophomore English class and I still have that copy. So when I re-read Gatsby, I’m not just talking to Nick Carroway and Jay Gatsby and Meyer Wolfsheim and Scott Fitzgerald himself, I am also talking to 16-year-old me. I can see the food I spilled while I read it at the kitchen table of my parent’s house. I can see my teenage handwriting in the margins.
I can also see the things I noted when I re-read it in college. I can see the notes I took when I read it in my twenties. I can see how I barely noticed the passages on page 73 the first few times I read it and I can see myself flipping back through the book to find them in 2016 when it suddenly hit me that the scene with Meyer Wolfsheim–a stand-in for the gangster Arnold Rothstein, fixer of the 1919 World Series–would be perfect for the opening of the book I was writing about Peter Thiel’s secret lawsuit, the book that would become Conspiracy.
Even as I write this paragraph right now, I have Gatsby on my desk to revisit some of my favorite pages. I’m struck again by those first few sentences that I’ve read dozens of times: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Wherever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.” Those words have different meaning to me today than they did five years ago, let alone when I first read them at 15. Now I have kids, now I have a better sense of my own advantages in life, now I know how hard it is to write something that good without sounding preachy or lame.
The poet Heraclitus talked about how we never step into the same river twice. By that he meant that the river is always changing, glowing evermore towards the sea, and we ourselves are changing, growing, getting older. The pages of a book don’t change, but we change, the world changes around them–we’re able to see and perceive things differently.
That’s one of the things that Didion notes in her essay on notebooks. Notebooks, she said, are a way “to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.” They are blasts from the past, reminders of how easily “we forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”
I’ve talked before about my notecard system–which I learned from Robert Greene–so I won’t bore you with it here (here’s a video about it). But the reason I try to be an intentional reader, why I try to take notes and record and store what I read, is because I have seen the magic that comes from it, personally and professionally.
The best time to have started a notebook or a commonplace book would have been many years ago, but the second best time would be now. Start small–record what strikes you, quotes that motivate you, stories that inspire you. Don’t think too hard, just follow your curiosity. When you read a book, write in it, fold the pages, really engage with the material. Preserve this moment in time. Capture what you’re thinking and feeling. Your future self will thank you.
“It all comes back,” Didion writes at the close of her essay. More often than not, it will come back to you in ways that you couldn’t have planned for, but that you prepared for.
As a fellow time-traveler, I can tell you she’s right.
It’s a weird thing to say, but I guess I’m a professional reader. That’s really what authors are. A book is made of books. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book,” Samuel Johnson said.
I’ve written 15 books now, which has meant reading many thousands of books in the process. Once a month for the last 15 years, I’ve recommended many of those books in the Reading List Email. And in 2021, I opened my own bookstore filled with my all-time favorites.
So the question I am asked most often is:
How do you read so much? What’s the secret?
The answer is not “I’m a speedreader.” As I’ve written before, speed reading is a scam. The answer is that I have a system, a process that helps me be a productive reader. It’s not my system exactly, as I’ve taken many strategies from history’s greatest readers. Nor is this a system designed around speed or quantity. Reading is wonderful in and of itself, why would I try to rush through it? No, I try to do it well. I try to enjoy it.
In this email, I thought I would detail some of the rules I’ve come to follow over the years. They don’t all make me faster, but they do make me better.
–Do it all the time. Bring a book with you everywhere. I’ve read at the Grammy’s and in the moments before going under for a surgery. I’ve read on planes and beaches, in cars and in cars while I waited for a tow truck. You take the pockets of time you can get.
–Physical books only.
-It’s not that I have a problem with audiobooks–if it gets you reading, I’m all for it. I just think there’s something very special about the physical form. I just read a great book about this actually called Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf.
–Hardcover over paperback.
–Bring a pen with you too. Reading is better if you’re taking notes.
–Keep a commonplace book. As Seneca wrote: “We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application—not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech—and learn them so well that words become works.” (Here’s a video on my commonplace book method).
–Err on the side of age. Classics are classics for a reason.
-Beat them up. Books are not precious things. As an author, I love it when people hand me a book to sign that has had real miles put on it. When people hand me a pristine copy and tell me it’s their favorite, I assume they are just flattering me. It’s obvious what my favorite books are…because they’re falling apart (here’s my copy of Meditations for instance).
–In every book you read, try to find your next one in its footnotes or bibliography. This is how you build a knowledge base in a subject—it’s how you trace a subject back to its core.
-That comment from (the disgraced and indicted FTX founder) Sam Bankman Fried about how every book could be a 900 word blog post is preposterously stupid. The whole point of reading is to really understand something. So if all you’re after is the ‘gist,’ skip books and stick with blog posts.
–If you see a book you want, just buy it. Don’t worry about the price. Reading is not a luxury. It’s not something you splurge on. It’s a necessity. Even if all you get is one life-changing idea from a book, that’s still a pretty good ROI.
-That might sound privileged, but Warren Buffett considers the foundation of his multi-billion dollar empire to be a book. At 19-years-old, he bought a copy of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. We don’t know exactly what he paid for it, but in the early 1950s, a hardcover typically went for $1.30–the best investment he ever made, he’s said. Today, Buffett’s worth $108.7 billion, having given away some $37 billion to charitable causes. Not a bad ROI!
–Some people might recoil at categorizing a book that way, but as a lover of literature, I have no problem with it. I myself wouldn’t be writing this to you today if I hadn’t bought a paperback of Meditations in 2006 for $8.25 on Amazon. That book of philosophy taught me not just about life, but also schooled me in the art of writing, in working with and managing people, and gave me the speciality which I now write my own books about. Again, not a bad ROI.
–Don’t just read books, re-read books. There’s a great line the Stoics loved—that we never step in the same river twice. The books don’t change, but you do.
–As I said, speed reading is a scam. You just have to spend a lot of time reading.
–If a book sucks, stop reading it. The best readers actually quit a lot of books. Life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy reading.
–The rule I like is ‘one hundred pages minus your age.’ Say you’re 30 years old—if a book hasn’t captivated you by page 70, stop reading it. So as you age, you have less time to endure crap.
-Embrace serendipity. So many of my favorite books are just random things I grabbed at bookstores (this is why I say don’t sweat buying a book–just roll the dice). That’s what bookstores are for, what I’ve tried to build mine around. It’s a discovery engine better than any algorithm.
-Don’t just build a library, build an anti-library—a stack of unread books that humbles you and reminds you just how much there is still to learn. It’s a sign of what you don’t yet know. It’s also a resource there whenever you might need to do a deep dive into that topic.
–Emerson’s line was, “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.” When I was a teenager, I got in the habit of doing this. Every time I would meet a successful or important person I admire, I would ask them: What’s a book that changed your life? And then I would read that book (in college, for instance, I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Drew, who was the one who turned me on to Stoicism).
–Speaking of Emerson…in his essay “Reading,” he put down his three rules: “1. Never read a book that is not a year old [because only good books survive]. 2. Never read any but famed books [same reason]. 3. Never read any but what you like.”
-Speaking of Ask the Dust, I read that because my friend Neil Strauss said in an interview it was his all-time favorite novel. He also turned me onto Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, which he had also raved about. When people rave about something, don’t dismiss it. If someone says a book changed their life? Consider it seriously. They’re talking about something powerful.
-I find myself sometimes reluctant to read something that’s super popular. That snobbishness never serves me well. More often than not, when I get around to those bestsellers I kick myself–they were bestsellers for a reason! They’re great! Don’t be a book snob.
–If you want to understand current events, don’t rely on breaking news. Find a book about a similar event in the past. Read history. Read psychology. Read biographies. Go for information that has a long half-life, not something that’s going to be contradicted in the next bulletin.
–Ruin the ending. I almost always go straight to Wikipedia and figure out the plot–especially if I am reading something tough like Shakespeare or Aeschylus. Who cares about spoilers? Your aim as a reader is to understand WHY something happened, the what is secondary.
–One of the things that people in publishing know is that readers tend to skip prefaces and forewords. This is crazy! Those things are there for a reason. They often have a ton of helpful and interesting stuff about the context around when the person was writing, who the work ended up influencing, and other tidbits that sometimes stick with you longer than even the work itself.
-”Don’t be satisfied just getting the ‘gist’ of things,” is what Marcus Aurelius learned from his philosophy teacher Rusticus. One of the reasons I try to spoil the plot, make my way through the intro and the preface, read reviews and articles about the books I’m reading, watch videos about them, and read other books on the topic is because I want to really understand what I’m dealing with. If I don’t, if I only want a surface take, why read a book at all?
–When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information?
-My favorite line from Harry Truman is, “not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” When we read, we aren’t learning to impress people, to win some game of mental gymnastics. It’s to get better, to find things you can use in your real life. If you’re looking to expand what you do with the books you’re reading, I highly recommend our Read to Lead course. It’s been taken by over 10,000 people, and is our most popular for a reason.
–Read widely and from people you disagree with. The Stoics believed that we should actively engage with anyone who can be a source of wisdom to us, regardless of their origin. If there is wisdom out there to be had, we’d be wise to avail ourselves of it.
-Pretentiousness is bullshit. Epictetus once heard a student talking proudly about having made their way through the dense works of Chryssipus. You know, Epictetus told him, if Chryssipus had been a better writer, you’d have less to brag about.
–Look for wisdom, not facts. We’re not reading to just find random pieces of information. What’s the point of that? We’re reading to accumulate a mass of true wisdom—that you can turn to and apply in your actual life.
-Another line from Seneca is about how people get too caught up in the facts and figures and they miss the message. I totally agree. On the literary snobs who speculate for hours about whether The Iliad or The Odyssey was written first, or who the real author was (a debate that rages on today), he said, “Far too many good brains have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge.”
–If a book is good, recommend it and pass it along to other people.
It’s the last one that I follow the most. I’m proud of the books I’ve been able to champion and turn people onto over the years. I feel like I am paying forward what the Gregory Hays translation of Meditations did for me (I loved it so much I put out my own edition you can grab here).
I love looking around my bookstore and seeing titles that I don’t see in other bookstores very often. Just recently, Ann Roe’s publisher of Pontius Pilate told us they had to do another printing because we’d raved about it too much. I heard something similar about William Seabrook’s Asylum. That’s the job of a reader and a writer–to find great stuff and suck everything you can out of it as you read it and re-read it.
And to help others do the same.
I hope these rules help you help yourself and help others.
Reading is a good thing. A good thing too many people don’t do enough of (or any of it all…) So obviously doing lots of it is good, right? This is why people try to figure out how to speed read (a scam, I say!). This is why they show off their huge libraries (guilty!). This is why they listen to audiobooks at 2x or 3x speed.
“Less is more? Quality over quantity? Not with books!”
But not all reading is created equal. As Epictetus said, “I cannot call somebody ‘hard-working’ knowing only that they read.” He said he needed to know what and how they read. Sure, reading is better than a lot of other activities, but you can still do it poorly or for poor reasons. “Far too many good brains,” Seneca said, “have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge.”
To be a great reader, it is not enough that you read, it’s how you read. These 13 strategies by no means make a complete list, but if you implement even a couple of them, I’m comfortable guaranteeing you’ll not only be a better reader for it, but a better person too.
Stop Reading Books You Aren’t Enjoying
If you find yourself wanting to speed up the reading process on a particular book, you may want to ask yourself, “Is this book any good?”
You turn off a TV show if it’s boring. You stop eating food that doesn’t taste good. You unfollow people when you realize their content is useless.
Life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy reading. My rule is one hundred pages minus your age. Say you’re 30 years old—if a book hasn’t captivated you by page 70, stop reading it. So as you age, you have to endure crappy books less and less.
Read Like A Spy
One of the most surprising parts of Seneca’s writing is how that avowed Stoic quotes Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism. Even Seneca knew this was strange as each time he did so in his famous Letters, he felt obliged to preface or explain why he was so familiar with the teachings of a rival school.
His best answer appears in Letter II, On Discursiveness in Reading, and it works as a prompt for all of us in our own reading habits. The reason he was so familiar with Epicurus, Seneca wrote, was not because he was deserting the writings of the Stoics, but because he was reading like a spy in the enemy’s camp. That is, he was deliberately reading and immersing himself into the thinking and the strategies of those he disagreed with. To see if there was anything he could learn and, of course, to bolster his own defenses.
Keep A Commonplace Book
In his book, Old School, Tobias Wolf’s semi-autobiographical character takes the time to type out quotes and passages from great books to feel great writing come through him. I do this almost every weekend in what I call a “commonplace book”— a collection of quotes, ideas, stories and facts that I want to keep for later. It’s made me a much better writer and a wiser person. I am not alone. In 2010, when the Reagan Presidential Library was undergoing renovation, a box labeled “RR’s desk” was discovered. Inside the box were the personal belongings Ronald Reagan kept in his office desk, including a number of black boxes containing 4×6 note cards filled with handwritten quotes, thoughts, stories, political aphorisms, and one-liners. They were separated by themes like “On the Nation,” “On Liberty.” “On War,” “On the People,” “The World,” “Humor,” and “On Character”. This was Ronald Reagan’s version of a commonplace book. Lewis Carroll, Walt Whitman, Thomas Jefferson all kept their own version of a commonplace book.
As Seneca advised, “We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application–not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech–and learn them so well that words become works.”
Re-Read The Masters
You were in high school when you read The Great Gatsby for the first time. You were just a kid when you read The Count of Monte Cristo or had someone tell you the story of Odysseus.
The point is: You got it right? You read them. You’re done, right? Nope.
We cannot be content to simply pick up a book once and judge it by that experience. It’s why we have to read and re-read. As Seneca put it, “You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.” Because the world is constantly changing, we are changing, and therefore what we get out of those books can change. It’s not enough to read the classics once, you have to read them at every age, every era of your life. We never step in the same river twice, Marcus Aurelius said, and that’s why we must return again and again to the great works of history.
Read Fiction
There’s an interesting thread running through in the writings and teachings of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus that can zip right past you if you aren’t reading closely. What is it? What did all these great men share? They heavily relied on plays, tragedies, satires, mythologies, and other works of fiction to clarify their thinking and their own writing.
Epictetus draws on characters like Achilles and Agamemnon from the Iliad, Admetus from Euripides’ Alcestis, and a long list of others from Greek mythology. Marcus Aurelius quotes from the comedies of Aristophanes, the tragedies and plays of Euripides and Sophocles, and says we should read fiction “to remind us of what can happen, and that it happens inevitably—and if something gives you pleasure on that stage, it shouldn’t cause you anger on this one.” Seneca liked to quote the works of the great Roman poets Virgil and Lucius Accius, the legendary Homer, the playwright Plautus, and he wrote many brilliant plays himself.
Yet, many people—even those with a voracious reading habit—make the same mistake: They hardly, if ever, read fiction. They even brag about it! They’re too busy. They don’t have time for “art.” There’s plenty of “real” stuff—the characters in fiction that bear little resemblance to the world we know? I don’t have time for it. But fiction, like all wonderful art, is filled with beautiful bits of insight about the human condition. It can change your life and teach you just as much as any non-fiction book. Actually, no, it can teach you more! It can shine a light on universal truths that non-fiction, bounded by the facts and figures of its specific world, often cannot (to say nothing of the research that connects literature with improved empathy, reduced stress, and hone social skills).
Read Before Bed
Speaking of reading fiction, the great William Osler (founder of John Hopkins University and a fan of the Stoics) told his medical students it was important that they turn to literature as a way to nourish and relax their minds. “When chemistry distresses your soul,” he said, “seek peace in the great pacifier, Shakespeare, ten minutes with Montaigne will lighten the burden.” He told his students to read to relax and to be at leisure. To keep their minds strong and clear.
Instead of turning to the TV or to Twitter, let us follow Osler’s advice:
“Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half-hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity. There are great lessons to be learned from Job and from David, from Isaiah and St. Paul. Taught by Shakespeare you may take your intellectual and moral measure with singular precision. Learn to love Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Should you be so fortunate as to be born a Platonist, Jowett will introduce you to the great master through whom alone we can think in certain levels, and whose perpetual modernness startles and delights. Montaigne will teach you moderation in all things, and to be ‘sealed of his tribe’ is a special privilege.”
Ask People You Admire For Book Recommendations
Emerson’s line was, “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”
When I was a teenager, I got in the habit of doing this. Every time I would meet a successful or important person I admired, I would ask them: What’s a book that changed your life? And then I would read that book. (In college, for instance, I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Drew, who was the one who turned me on to Stoicism.)
If a book changed someone’s life — whatever the topic or style — it’s probably worth the investment. If it changed them, it will likely at least help you.
Look For Wisdom, Not Facts
We’re not reading to just find random pieces of information. What’s the point of that? We’re reading to accumulate a mass of true wisdom—that you can turn to and apply in your actual life.
You have to read and approach reading accordingly. Montaigne once teased the writer Erasmus, who was known for his dedication to reading scholarly works, by asking with heavy sarcasm, “Do you think he is searching in his books for a way to become better, happier, or wiser?” In Montaigne’s mind, if he wasn’t, it was all a waste.
Don’t Just Learn From Experience
“If you haven’t read hundreds of books,” the soldier-philosopher General James Mattis says, “you’re functionally illiterate.” Human beings have been fighting and dying and struggling and doing the same things for eons. To not avail yourself of that knowledge is profoundly arrogant and stupid. To paraphrase Mattis, it is unconscionable to fill up body bags while you get your education only by experience. It’s worse than arrogant. It’s unethical, even murderous.
Well, the same is true for much less lethal professions. How dare you waste your investor’s money by not reading and learning from the mistakes of other entrepreneurs? How dare you so take your marriage or your children for granted that you think you can afford to figure this out by doing the wrong things first?
Too much depends on you for you to learn solely by experience—you have to also learn by the experiences of others. Drink deeply from history, from philosophy, from the books of journalists and the memoirs of geniuses. Study the cautionary tales and the screw ups, read about failures and successes. Read constantly—read as a practice.
Because if you don’t, it’s a dereliction of duty.
Study The Past To Understand The Present
“I don’t have time to read books,” says the person who reads dozens of breaking news articles each week. “I don’t have time to read,” they say as they refresh their Twitter feed for the latest inane update. “I don’t have time to read fiction—that’s entertainment,” they say as they watch another panel of arguing talking heads on CNN, as if that’s actually giving them real information they will use.
Being informed is important. It is the duty of every citizen. But we go about it the wrong way. We are distracted by breaking news when really we should be drinking deeply from the great texts of history. Because the truth is that most truths are very old. In fact, it’s these timeless truths that teach us more about the future and about our current times than most of our contemporary thinking.
The actor Hugh Jackman said in an interview that he gets his news by keeping his eye on the big picture—going through the Ken Burns catalog and reading books like Meditations. “That’s the way you should understand events and humanity,” he said, “with that sort of 30,000-foot view.” If you want to be informed, study the past.
Aim For Quality, Not Quantity
The philosopher Mortimer Adler talked about how the phrase “well-read” has lost its original meaning. We hear someone referred to as “well-read” today and we think someone who has read lots of books. But the ancients would have thought someone who really knows their stuff, who has dived deep in a few classic texts to the point that they truly understand them. “A person who has read widely,” Mortimer says of the modern reader, “but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised.” The early 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes joked similarly, “If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.”
You don’t have to read hundreds and hundreds of books. In fact, most people who make it their goal to read a certain amount of books each year inevitably fall off pace, get discouraged, and stop reading altogether. You’ll both read more and get a better return on your investment if you do what the Stoics advised. As Marcus Aurelius would say, don’t be satisfied with just “getting the gist” of things you read. “Read attentively,” he said. Read deeply. Read repeatedly. Aim for quality, not quantity.
Get Out Of A Dry Spell
The path to wisdom is not a straight one. The journey is long and circuitous. It’s a windy road with twists and turns, ups and downs, highs and lows. Maybe you’re in the middle of one of those lows yourself right now, at the bottom of the valley. This can be a scary place to be, because without the proper perspective it can feel like you’re going to be stuck there forever. You take a few steps in one direction, and it feels like you haven’t gotten anywhere. The top of the mountain is just as far away, if not more distant.
There is a term for this phenomenon: being stuck in a slump. A reading slump always pops up for me, for instance, during a book launch when it’s nearly impossible to concentrate enough to read. I’m busy. I’m fried. For a variety of reasons, the result is always a reading dry spell. But I’ve found I’m able to get back into it by rereading something that has really spoken to me in the past. Instead of expecting a random book I pick up to really speak to me, I go back to something that has already spoken volumes…and find out how much more it has to say. I’ll grab a new translation of Marcus Aurelius and see him from a different view. I’ll go reread a favorite novel, such as A Man in Full or The Moviegoer or Memoirs of Hadrian.
Join A Program
In 2018, we did our first Daily Stoic Challenge, full of different challenges and activities based on Stoic philosophy. It was an awesome experience. Even I, the person who created the challenge, got a lot out of it. Why? I think it was the process of joining a program. It’s the reason personal trainers are so effective. You just show up at the gym and they tell you what to do, and it’s never the same thing as the last time. Deciding what we want to do, determining our own habits, and making the right choices is exhausting. Handing the wheel over to someone else is a way to narrow our focus and put everything into the commitment.
The 2022 live course will take place across 5 weeks at a pace of 2 emails a week (~30,000 words of exclusive content). Additionally, there will be weekly live video sessions with me! It’s one of my favorite things to get the chance to interact with everyone in the course—I would love to have you join us.You can learn more here! But it closes May 16 at Midnight so don’t wait.