What I learned from a year of reading
Hi friends,
I’m writing to you along with 9 other of my smartest, most interesting and intellectually hungry friends.
2020 has been a year of many things: good, bad and ugly. For me it has been a year of reading more than I ever did. I’ve been reflecting about this 8,400 pages journey and wanted to share what I learned (see below).
Reading across a range of disciplines from science, poetry, politics, business and literature inspired me to write. Throughout my career, I’ve always envied people who had found one thing they were passionate about and become really good at while I always thought of myself as just a generalist. I’ve realized that this was the wrong way to look at it. Some of the greatest inventions came from people who blended different fields together.
This is why I’ve decided to launch The Practical Polymath, a newsletter focused on practical advice and inspiration drawn from blending different disciplines together and from the minds of past and present polymaths.
I’m not particularly good at writing nor do I presume to have anything interesting to say so this is as exciting as it is terrifying.
If you want to follow me along this learning journey, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.
Florian
📑 Reading ≠ learning: We’ve all had that feeling of getting to the end of a page and not being able to recollect the gist of what we just read. I’ve been there often, in particular with non-fiction (which is 90% of what I consume). I’ve tried a few things from rewording an interesting idea in the margin to taking notes in a doc. This got me thinking about the format of a book as a medium for transmitting knowledge and ideas. In his article Why Books Don’t Work, Andy Matushak argues that we need to rethink the format of books as a medium to transmit ideas. I’ve been experimenting with Readwise which emails you daily with bits of text you’ve underlined in the books you read.
⛰ Information expires fast, wisdom is timeless: With everything going on in the past year, it’s been hard to get out of my Twitter feed. I can’t say that this has given me a sense of clarity about the world, quite the opposite. Some of last year’s books have on the contrary given me incredible insight and perspective into current events. Spillover, Animal Infections and the New Human Pandemic (which was written 9 years ago) opened my eyes to the ecological dimension of pandemics and the delicate dance between humanity and zoonotic diseases. The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s portrait of mid-century New York master builder Robert Moses, is an incredibly relevant account of how autocratic power can flourish within the institutions of democracy.
🔗 All knowledge is connected: My first instinct when I want to learn about something is to go and read books about that particular subject. Because of the way we are taught from early childhood, we tend to believe that knowledge is divided into silos: biology, psychology, architecture, art, sports, literature etc. In “One from Many”, the founder of VISA’s fascination with the natural world inspired him to build an entire theory about what’s wrong with modern institutions. This led him to create one of the most widely recognized financial services in the world.
🌄 Reading is the best morning workout: When I set myself a goal of reading 26 books at the beginning of last year, I quickly realized embedding it into my routine was going to be a challenge. As a parent, I could already forget about the weekends as a good time to read. And in the evening my brain is usually fried after a day of work (and there’s way too much good stuff on Netflix). I ended up settling on the early hours of the morning. It may sound counterintuitive at first to go from a state of deep sleep to absorbing ideas within 30 seconds. In fact, I found that starting the day with a mental rather than a mechanical task significantly improved my creativity and motivation.
🎇 Intellectual adventures are found off the beaten tracks: I have a weak spot for bestellers. Gates Notes, New York Times bestselling books of the year, of the month, of the week, I want them all on my Goodreads list. I suffer from Fear of Reading Out: what if I miss out on all those great books that everybody is talking about? And yet the most surprising books I’ve read this year were published between 1951 and 2000. This 1951 little gem of a snarky tourist guide to Paris with pictures by Robert Doisneau was not even on Goodreads, I had to create an entry for it. Beautiful!