|
I see your point and I think the messaging about books is often a bit wishy washy, however I really do think books are a different beast. I read a lot of biographies of legendary figures. Whether its Stalin, Oppenheimer, Teddy Roosevelt or Robert Moses, they are nearly always big readers. They tend to treat it quite seriously too. Not a few books per year, but 50-100+.. Teddy Roosevelt had 4 hours~ of his days' schedule blocked off for reading particular books, during an election campaign! For me (and I believe, for them too), reading is serious business and the rewards really are great. This is not 'curl up by the fire with a nice story' and I will suddenly incur some magical benefits. Rather there are some things that are not easily achieved otherwise. Books allow you to efficiently deep dive and when you dedicate lots of hours to it, you can really make staggering progress. Reading all of the books on a particular topic becomes an achievable task. I could spend some hours scouring the internet trying to learn about a particular topic, or I could blast through a 200-300 page book on the topic. When you start treating books as your primary source of learning about new topics, and you build up a sort of grit for getting through books, you become a bit of an information processing machine and it is a bit magical. I nearly always have a stack of books on my desk now and I just plow through them one after another. I would never absorb so much useful information reading articles on the internet or watching videos. Books are #1 for efficiency.. Right now I'm primarily reading Shirer's The Rise And Fall of The Third Reich.. It's a massive book (1100+ pages) and will take me over 2 weeks. It's hard to imagine how I could possibly get this much information on the same topic any other way. Try and find some documentary series? Follow my nose on wikipedia clicking around? Crap options, mostly. If I do this with two or three more books, by almost any measure, I have become somebody who knows a lot about WW2 and nazi germany. Now follow process with many other topics.. |