Read More Book is Not Silver Bullet
New reader who come to my website will guess that I’m a nerd who really like to read books and ponder in the ivory tower. Yeah, you can scratch that. If someone want to know why read more book (or, kinda similar, having better note taking system) is not silver bullet, I always come back to this tweet: https://x.com/ejames_c/status/1957404745397883086?s=20
The same as mentioned in the thread, I categorized reading many, many book to be “low order bit”. It’s not table stake for achieving my goal. But read more book is a proxy for having more useful idea. But that alone is not complete. We need to have useful idea AND know how to test/evaluate it. It’s so silly to thinking that can quote one random passage from Sapiens means you instantly become competent.
No, you need (as Cedric said)
- Read source material (books, or even paper). Get to the landmark book
- From believable people (bro there are millions of book in this world. You need to filter)
- Test the ideas in practice where possible
- Get feedback from believable people when not.
With that alone, any detail oriented person can understand that the ability to be in the state where you can test idea (your environment is suitable, competent enough to conduct the test) and have a list of believable people are the highest order bit.
To put it more concretely; even when I can read 10x book when I still work in Jakarta (I spent my whole weekend just read book, for example), the ability to execute it is still important — and something that I cannot do considering how fried I am when I go back home. Compared to my remote setting where I can still be ambitious but also have more energy to do other things. One of them is executing idea.
But, on the flip side, Jakarta has the dense talent network that offer me list of mentors that believable enough to help me solve my problem. While in my hometown, I only have very few.
The main message still stand though; read more doesn’t mean you can solve your problem. It’s not silver bullet.