5/28/17
Let me be forthcoming because I have a very strong bias when it comes to reading.
I love reading and so does your mother.
When we first moved into this house, during the first week we asked each other what our favorite room was. We both, very quickly, said the library. You’re being born into a family of bookworms.
There are so many reasons to love reading. First, it’s so captivating; there are so many great stories that take you all across the world, universe, and fantasy worlds. They take you into the most joyous moments of a character’s life, or, let you feel the terrible feelings safely, before you live them yourself. Books are an enchanted place.
Reading is fun, an emotional release, and a vacation, or a spaceship, or a time machine. The best books are masterpieces of art. Reading a good book, and I mean a good book, across any genre, is a joy.
And to top off all of that, I have so many wonderful memories because of books and reading. Your Dada and Dadi read with me and would take me to the library, all the time, wherever we lived. They would read to me and we would read together. There are cassette tapes (ancient technology, I know) of us reading together, which I cherish. I’ve received so many books as gifts, which were shared with so much love, likes once from your mom, aunts, and uncles.
And the best discussions I’ve had come from reading books. In college, high school, adulthood. Books have made my life so much richer.
Beyond these wonderful, beautiful things about books, there are many practical benefits, especially as it relates to becoming curious and becoming good. But before I go into nuances, be sure that the joy or reading itself would be enough to justify spending time with a good book. Reading is necessary and beneficial for other reasons, but reading needs no practical purpose to justify it. More than anything, read because it is beautiful.
Reading - and by that I mean not just casually reading, but really reading - is absolutely essential for developing curiosity and in turn goodness. It is a potent way to do two extremely important things: answering unresolved questions and wonderings that you have, and, nurturing the inspiration for new questions that lead you to explore and discover. Reading a good book or essay is to digest a potent and concentrated morsel of insight, precisely because someone had to write it. Writing is a process that takes ideas and strips them of their excess. A well written book has nothing but truth left on the page.
Writing is much like making a sauce in that sense. The sauce has many delicious ingredients - water, wine, cream, parsley, garlic, or others, depending on the sauce. But in the process of making a sauce, the chef must take great care to cook it so that the excess liquid is evaporated away and the sauce thickens. What remains is more concentrated, flavorful, and with a better texture.
Writing does the same for ideas and stories, at least when the writing is done well. A good writer, evaporates all the unnecessary “water” leaving only the parts of an idea that are aromatic, flavorful, and potent for the mind. Consequently, reading good writing is an extremely efficient medium for cultivating curiosity - the process of writing leaves a good book with only the most valuable, nutritious, and delicious parts of an idea.
Writing then, is a great labor in service to you, the reader, because it evaporates away all the unnecessary elements. But as a reader, you still have a tremendous labor of your own.
Reading, when done well, is hard work. There’s a difference between reading and really reading. Here’s more of what I mean by that.
The first litmus test between reading and really reading is that of purpose - are you reading for comprehension, reading for the pages, or reading to learn?
Reading for comprehension isn’t a terrible reason to read. Comprehension implies that you are simply reading to understand and remember what the author is saying You’re reading to understand the basic who, what where, when, and why. When you read this way, you’re not reading for deeper thought or a nuanced understanding of the idea or story. In these circumstances, reading for comprehension, you just want to put some information into your head and be able to recall it coherently.
Reading for the pages, on the other hand, is something to avoid. It’s not worth your time, and if you’re reading for the pages it probably means you are cutting corners, or worse, reading to feign intelligence (which at it’s root, is a power-seeking behavior).
What I mean by “reading for the pages” is that you are reading to finish the book or essay as fast as possible and “get it done.” The goal of reading for the pages, rather than learning or even comprehension - at least for me, when I’ve done it - is less about gaining something from the text, but being able to signal to other people that I’ve read it.
But what is the point of doing that? If I were to steal someone’s respect or recognition, why do that by reading for the pages? Reading, even if done for the pages, still takes lots of time. Why not just read a summary of the book if I were to do that? Why not just feign the appearance of reading a book? (The best reason I can think of (for reading a summary or feigning appearance of reading a book) is because the feigner knows reading a book and sort of reading a book aren’t the same thing. They are socially, and perhaps morally, different enterprises. Conflating the two feels deceitful not only to others, but to yourself. Which, to me, is the most dangerous kind of deceit.)
Reading to learn, however, is an entirely different enterprise. The intended outcome when you read to learn, is not just literally understanding what the author is saying. Rather, the intended outcome is changing your self in some way, whether that is deepening your understanding of an idea, seeing the world in a new way, or changing your mind about something. If something about you, however is small, is not changed, you have not learned.
In that way, reading to learn is absolutely exhausting. Reading to learn (the type of reading I mean when I say really reading) takes tremendous focus. You must be listening to the author and providing them your undivided attention. That means eliminating all distractions, and ignoring the concerns of your day-to-day life for awhile. When you are really reading, the book must be your only concern because we mortal men tend not to be good at multitasking. The world is a distracting place, so creating the focus required to really read is really hard.
When reading to learn, it is also best, in my experience, to read slowly (your mother is good at this, if you watch her read something you can tell by the way she moves her eyes that she is methodical and absolutely incisive of what she’s reading). Reading slowly allows you to not only absorb and comprehend what the author is saying, but question it and even explore it through a daydream. When reading slowly, you create the opportunity to reflect on what you are reading and ask questions like:
Why?
Does that seem believable?
Why would the author mention that?
What is the author not saying?
How does this relate to the overall thesis of the book?
Why did the author use this particular word?
How is the author biased?
What works has the author built upon?
How could I build on this idea?
How does this idea play out in real life?
How does what the author is saying affect my life?
You cannot even ask these important questions (they are important questions because these will not only help you to understand but to change) let alone reflect on them if you do not go slow.
(Which means you should slow down reading this. Not to imply that this is a good book! You’re the judge of that).
Moreover, really good books that are deep with emotion or rich with ideas and provocative arguments aren’t always easy to read. They take time. It’s not only okay but probably should be expected that you have to read passages over and over again (or the whole book, there are only a few titles that I’ve re-read - Profiles in Courage, the Baghavad Gita, and maybe East of Eden are the only three I can think of). Sometimes, I’ll read a challenging section two or three times, and if I’m using that time to go deep with it, it’s well worth the trouble.
This perhaps isn’t obvious, but what you read matters a lot. Like, a whole damn lot. As I’ve learned working on technology and data projects, “garbage in, garbage out.” What you put into your mind will affect what comes out of it. But I’m not suggesting that you only read dense, esoteric, nerdy books that are from a limited amount of “appropriate” subjects. On the contrary, I think you should read whatever you like (and I highly suggest you mix fiction and non-fiction. I spent many years of my life avoiding fiction, and it’s wonderful and transformative to read both) and mix subjects and genres between ones that you are already interested in and ones that expand your horizons. There are plenty of wonderful and thoughtful books that are on seemingly impractical topics.
As an example, I’m currently pawing through a collection of short stories gifted to me by Miss Emily, a friend of mine from high school. She gave it to me years ago. It’s been sitting on my shelf for years and I finally picked it up. Despite being Russian literature from the 1800s, it has been a remarkably illuminating and relevant read, with prose that in some moments simply leaves me arrested and feeling whimsical at the same time
The point is, there are amazing books on many different topics and from many different genres, and from the authors that you wouldn’t expect.
But there are also terrible books. And by terrible I mean books that it’s plain to see that the author did not do the hard work of developing an original, valuable, thought. Or terrible meaning the author hasn’t put in the work to produce clear, deliberate, enchanting prose.
To me, terrible is less about topic and more about quality and honesty. Going back to the example of making a sauce, I’m talking about a careless cook, not a recipe with ingredients I don’t happen to fancy. (That said, there are books that are well written but are intellectually dishonest, biased, or tell what you what you already believe solely for commercial purposes. These are terrible and also dangerous, because they help you to learn something that is untrue or immoral).
For many years, I made the mistake of reading narrowly selected topics. This was in two ways. I would read books about the same topics, usually about business or government. Or, I might read books I was more interested in telling people I was reading, rather than what I was actually interested in reading (these were usually about business and government, too). To me this is just another form of reading for the pages, because the books I chose in both of these scenarios is driven by the expectations of others, rather than my own desires.
This seems bizarre to say, but I mean it sincerely: do not fear reading widely about a wide set of topics. If you read a quality book, something about it will stay with you and enrich your life and the lives of others around you, regardless of the topic. More often than not, reading across disciplines will give you a mental model that helps you make sense of a difficult idea in your primary area of interest. (I’ve mentioned a lot about intellectual diversity, there’s no better person to share why diversity matters than Scott Page, one of the professors I was really lucky to have during my undergraduate studies. We have a few of the books he’s written on our bookshelves at home.)
For example, your Aunt Alyssa gave me a book last Christmas which uses computer science concepts to inform how humans make decisions. It was brilliant and what I’ve read has helped me make sense of how we organize the cookware in our kitchen and how to conduct a search to fill a job at work. (The idea of a cache, was the concept helpful in the kitchen - stuff we don’t use often should go in the cupboard instead of on the counter. There’s also an algorithm for optimal stopping that’s useful to keep in mind when filling a position. The book, Algorithms to Live By is on our bookshelf, too).
You’ll probably notice that I’ve almost exclusively told you about reading books, as opposed to reading blogs, newspapers, magazines, or anything else. I’ve actually started to shy away from those except for blogs, local newspapers, and the Economist.(I think blogs are great because they occupy niches and go deep on a topic rather than appeal to a mass audience. I have cycled through many authors and subjects over the years, like interstellar travel, data visualization, marketing, strategy, personal memories grief, and others. I like the Economist because it has a very unique perspective - it’s globally-focused, comes out weekly so it’s not chasing stories frivolously, and it’s hilariously cheeky. Most daily publications I’ve found, mix in a lot of fluff stories to get clicks and have bombastic headlines to get attention. The Economist avoids this). There’s a simple reason for this emphasis on books, I’ve found that the quality of a piece of writing is inversely proportional to how hard it is to write and how long it takes to write. In that way, daily publications are usually rather low-quality - if the publication is covering yesterday’s news, the writer quite literally can only put a few hours work into writing.
There are certainly exceptions with some excellent blogs, newspapers, and podcasts, but I’ve come to generally prefer books. When you finish a really rich, challenging book, it feels like you’ve done something special, too.
But let me return to the central question, as we must always do. What does this all have to do with curiosity and choosing goodness?
When I was growing up, personal computing was emerging, as was the internet. The world, even now, is continuing to go digital. One of the antecedents of this idea became to think of the mind as a computer and to describe the functions of the brain as functions of a computer’s component parts.
But, in my time, I’ve come to see the brain as much more than just a biological information processing machine. (The scientific consensus seems to be that we know very little about the brain, consciousness, and the mind. Which will probably change a lot during your lifetime. That’s very exciting). The mind, the abstract thing that creates new ideas and is susceptible to inspiration and wonder, is something that is not fixed or static. It evolves itself. The mind is not a machine, it grows.
Curiosity is that voracious appetite for a mind to grow and evolve itself. Curiosity can and must be nurtured, lest it stop. Without curiosity, the mind becomes more and more like a machine - fixed and non evolving. In that way, curiosity is something foundational to keeping us human - it inoculates the mind from becoming stiff and like a machine.
Really reading is a terrific way to nourish curiosity because of how adventurous an activity it is. When you take a good book and really read it, it forces you to pay attention and consider new possibilities. Really reading forces your mind to work in ways that it hasn’t before and stay flexible. Really reading does such more than simply adding information to your memory bank, it keeps your mind from becoming a memory bank.
Really reading is also terrific for cultivating curiosity because of how much ground you can cover in a book - books transcend time, space, and even reality in a relatively short amount of time. Books don’t replace real-life experiences (and we’ll get to why later, real-life experiences are foundational to courage) but in books you can try something out. Reading a book can be like an experiment or an adventure. By reading, you can expose yourself to different circumstances and ideas, which allows your mind to consider many different questions and perspectives.
That negotiation of ideas, emotions, information, and perspectives seemingly magically cultivates a voracious appetite for you and your mind to grow. Reading a book book leaves you wanting more, which leads to more reading, which leads to more learning, which leads to wanting more, and so on.
Perhaps this is a pessimistic view of the world, but in your day to day life, nobody will make you reflect about goodness or how to choose it consistently. The world, and in particular the country, you are being born into has a sophisticated structure of laws, institutions, and incentives - none of which specifically prioritize or reward goodness or good character. I don’t even suggest that this is always intentional or even undesirable - our institutions depend on being able to measure things for them to be managed, which is hard to do with goodness.
As I’ve told you before, it can take a lifetime to begin to grasp goodness and how to choose it consistently - if goodness is hard to even define, how can it be measured, managed, codified, prioritized, and incentivized? This again, is why I want to share these letters with you - and try to share in them some of the traits and tools I’ve found helpful, in hopes that they are helpful to you to figure out how to consistently choose goodness, over the course of your lifetime. But again, for good reason or not, despite being an unbelievably important topic, no person will compel you to reflect on goodness.
But books, my son, they will. Good books that you really read, are a wise, honest friend that pushes you to consider the most difficult questions that can be asked of human beings in this universe. Books can be fearless in ways that we mere mortals cannot, because they do not die, which allows their most important elements - their truths - to be timeless and immortal.
Plato, Steinbeck, Lahiri, Orwell, Aristotle, Drucker, Kennedy - these are men and women I’ve never met, that have pushed me to think about the world, about goodness, justice, courage, and my own identity and existence in profound ways. They are people, through their writing that have - with the greatest care and love - compelled me to endure interrogation of gravely important questions in a way that only compares to the people who love me most in the world.
In this way - because of their ability to make those who read them, and I mean really read them, consider the topics and questions that humans struggle to raise with each other - books are superhuman.
I’m sure I will tell you many times as you, and the rest of your siblings we pray we get to bring into this world, that some of the happiest memories of my life are times reading with your Dada & Dada. These memories, some of my earliest, are ones that I have thought of often when your Dada went ahead last year. I’ve been trying to hold onto them as long as I can.
So, I promise you my son, that I will try my hardest to help you love reading, just as your Dada and Dada did for me and your Mimi and Granddad did for your mother. I can’t wait to read with you. I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to do it.
But I want you to know that loving to really read is so much bigger than just you and me. Reading is more than getting good grades in school or entertainment. Once you really read a good book, it gives you another ally on your journey to choose goodness. And that’s what matters most of all.
Love,
Your Papa
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If you’re interested in reading more of the Choosing Goodness project, I’d love to send you a quick e-letter when I share additions. Please leave me your contact information and I’ll be sure to keep you posted.
To see all the posts in this series, click here.