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What I’ve Learned Reading and Summarizing 100 Books
It’s a lot.
I’ve learned a few things about life over the two years and a half it took me to read and summarize one hundred books.
Here there are.
1. There Are Only One or Two Sentences Worth Reading In a Book
Most books should have been a blog post.
Tim Denning
Most books have one or two interesting ideas.
These are often encapsulated in one or two sentences — the things that make you go “aha”!
The rest is repetitions or examples that illustrate a principle you’ve already understood (Eg: Robert Greene’s books).
There are exceptions (Nassim Taleb), but exceptions are by default, rare.
Don’t feel guilty to quit reading a book.
99.9% of them are too long.
2. Everything Is Connected
After a dozen of books, you begin to find the same principle in two unrelated books — exciting!
You realize that all knowledge connects.
This realization is great to spot falsehoods too.
Principles you learn about that only apply to their own discipline are 99% likely to be false.
3. The Amount of Knowledge That There Is Is Beyond Comprehension
Google Books once calculated that 129 864 880 books had been published since 1440…but it didn’t take into account self-published books and books published after 2010.
If you consider that these books only encapsulate the things we know, you realize that there’s *a lot* of knowledge out there.
But this isn’t necessarily obvious.
To see the things you don’t know, you must first learn about something new and realize how vast the topic really is.
People that don’t know anything don’t realize they don’t know anything.
