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Reading

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Mar 15, 2019
5 min read

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  • Bill Gates
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQM71ea0cHI
      • "I don't let myself start a book that I'm not going to finish. (...) It's my rule to get to the end."

      • The video was taken down, but I was able to find a transcription:

      • I don't let myself start a book that I'm not to finish.

        When you are reading, you have to be careful that you really are concentrating, particularly if it's a non-fiction book. Are you taking the new knowledge and attaching it to knowledge you have? For me, taking notes helps make sure that I'm really thinking hard about what's in there. If I disagree with the book, sometimes it takes a long time to read the book because I'm so much in the margins. It's actually kind of frustrating: 'Please say something I agree with so I can get through to the end of this book!'

        There's this one, it's a fiction book,called Infinite Jest. I'm trying to decide if I start it or not, because I watched the movie The End of the Tour. I loved it. David Foster Wallace comes across as a super interesting broad-thinking person. If the book was a two or three hundred-page book, there's no doubt as soon as I watched that movie I'd dive in. But it's quite long and complicated and I don't want to make an exception. It's my rule to get to the end.

        Over time I will make the switch, but when I'm just sitting there at night reading, often a paper magazine or the book, I'm used to that. It's ridiculous because I have a whole book bag that goes on my trips with me and it's Voluminous and antiquated.

        If you are reading books like these you'd want to be sitting down for an hour at a time. Otherwise, just getting your mind around, "Okay,what was I reading?" This is not the king of thing you can do five minutes here, ten minutes there. Magazine articles fit or short YouTube videos fit into those little slots. And so every night I'm reading a little over an hour, so I can take my current book and make some progress. (Transcription from here)

      • I'm curious to know if he was reading an hour a night when he was running Microsoft. Given that he would only take a week off every year to read journal articles, etc, it sounds like this hour-a-day reading is something he's only doing now that he has 'retired'.
      • He doesn't let himself read a book that he won't finish, but if he has a "book bag" that goes on trips with him, does that mean that he will allow himself to read more than book at once?
  • 2014.10.03 - YouTube - Louis Rossman - Why kids hate reading & why public school is at fault.
  • "Reading" isn't just some monolithically-good thing. It depends on what you're reading.
    • Schopenhauer: 
  • write about how you need to figure out exactly how to determine how / when you should read something. eg when should you try to memorize info like Anki (or like you did with the LSAT), and when should you just try to refer to it (like with StackExchange)? This'll prob. be important for WD.com
  • I'm reading the Vue.js docs and copying the main ideas into my wiki, and I'm noticing that having to scroll down and click around when reading the real docs makes it harder for me to follow; it interrupts my train of thought. I like having all of the main ideas right next to each other the way they are when I have them in my wiki.




reading for finance:

1. Don't judge the importance of the information by the amount of space/time devoted to it - Note that extremely important ideas may come and go in a single sentence; it's like you're out hunting ducks and once they fly out you only have a fraction of a second to nab them. I realized this while re-reading my LSAT guide and seeing that some extremely important ideas only took up a sentence, while other far less important information sometimes took up a lot more space in the guide.

2. Look for similarities in the advice given by multiple highly successful people - This is 




  • reading is done for different reasons at different times, a lot like how sports are done for different reasons at different times: sometimes it's just for fun, sometimes it's to get in shape, sometimes it's to make money (an expo event or race or something), and sometimes it's for glory (olympics). reading can be done for pleasure or to gain new ideas about how to proceed in a part of your life.
  • if you are reading to gain knowledge from a book, you should probably not read the same way that you do when you read a novel for pleasure (i.e. reading straight through as if you were living the events described). your goal is instead to maximize the amount of knowledge you gain for the amount of time you invest in the book. a good way to do that is to circle or write down any ideas you find significant or useful; these are the gold nuggets you're looking for amongst the rest of the book. if you were hunting for gold nuggets in a river you wouldn't just set them down any old place on the ground after you found one, because then you'd be liable to forget them later when it was time to leave. for the same reason, if you find a great idea in a book, you should immediately note it (circle it or write it down someplace you can be sure you won't forget it) so that you don't risk losing it by forgetting about it.
  • your goal when reading for knowledge / ideas should be to find ideas that will change your behavior in very practical & predictable ways. it may be better to look for ideas that you will have time to recall when you need to make the relevant decision. while saying that i'm imagining a fork in the road, and that the the idea i get from that book will make me switch paths from what I would have done otherwise.
  • gaining knowledge about something from a book is not the same as gaining knowledge about it through other kinds of experience (e.g. learning about how to fly planes from a book vs. actually getting hands-on experience flying planes). at the moment i think people sometimes overestimate the value of knowledge from books and underestimate the value of knowledge through other means.
  • a useful way to make sure you're processing the stuff you're reading is to make sure you're visualizing every idea that's thrown out at you.
  • If a book can be read out-of-order, and you're finding what you're reading boring, skip to a later chapter that looks more interesting. Once you're more interested in the subject matter of the book, I'll go back and re-read the stuff at the beginning that wasn't interesting at first. This sometimes results in my reading books backwards.


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