How to Get the Most Out of Reading (A Stoic Guide)

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0:42The Pod 6 starts at$1 ,999. That's the lowest price 8Sleep has ever offered. And you can use code DAILYSTOIC right now at 8sleep.com slash DAILYSTOIC for up to$200 off the Pod 6. and you'll get 30 days at home to try it, free returns if it's not for you. I read a lot. A couple hundred books a year for the last two decades, give or take. And I think because I have a bookstore, because I'm a writer, the question I get asked a lot is like, how do you read so much? But whenever I get asked that, I can't help but think it's the wrong question. Because it's not really about quantity, it's about quality.

1:16The question is, how could I be a better reader? How could I get more out of the books that I read? And as it happened, the Stoics, who are all great readers, had a lot to say about this. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Strategies from the ancients about how to read more, yes, but most importantly, how to be a better reader and how to get more out of the books that you read.

1:43It's really important that we understand this is not about quantity. It's about quality. There's so many ways that you could just stuff more books into your brain. You could read audiobooks on high speed. You could take some speed reading course, which is usually a scam. You could skim. You could read lots of really short books. But it's not about getting to a number, right? It's about reading great stuff. There's an exchange between Epictetus and one of his students, his students bragging about having read all of Chrysippus. And he said, you know, if Chrysippus was a better writer, you'd have less to brag about.

2:16Chrysippus wrote something like 700 essays in books, not all of them were good. So I think it's really important that we see the books that we're reading not as trophies that go on the shelf, not as bragging rights, but as a really important, even sacred activity where we're trying to get the best stuff into our brain. I don't try to rush through other things that are pleasurable and important. No, I do them slowly. I do them seriously. I take them seriously because they matter. Seneca says too many people have been affected with the pointless enthusiasm for worthless knowledge. And he talked about how actually what you want to be doing is lingering on the works of the master thinkers, taking it slowly, taking it methodically.

2:59Also, let's talk about rereading books, right? Going back to the idea over and over and over again until you really get it. Epictetus would say, you know, I can't call someone hardworking or even well-educated just because I know that they are reading. He said, I have to know what they are reading. It's just absolutely important. This is not a game of quantity. It's a game of quality. I do read a lot because I get more time to do it than most people. But if you're going to take the time to do something, let's take the time to do it right.

3:31When Epictetus is saying that it's not that you're reading, it's what you're reading, I think we can add to that. It's also how you're reading. And I don't just mean the speed. I mean, are you taking notes? Are you looking things up? Are you an active reader? You should be disagreeing. You should be underlining. You should be going down the side roads. You should be exploring the ideas that the person is introducing you to. So the Stoics were diligent readers. They were curious readers. They were deep thinkers. They didn't just stay at the surface. They weren't passive, right? Reading is a conversation and you have to be an active participant in that conversation.

4:13The big mistake people make is they only read stuff they agree with. They only read authors that they like. And that might be comfortable, but it keeps you the same. Seneca talked about how we should read like a spy in the enemy's camp. And it's interesting that the philosopher Seneca quotes the most in his writings is Epicurus, ostensibly his greatest philosophical rival. Admiral Stockdale, the fighter pilot, is sent in his late 30s to Stanford University. And it's there at Stanford that he is introduced to stoic philosophy that does change the course of his life. But actually, the biggest thing that sets him up for success, that saves him when he becomes a POW, is a course he takes at Stanford at the height of the Cold War called comparative Marxist thought.

5:00He reads all the communists in their original. He reads Marx, he reads Lenin, he reads Stalin. This was controversial stuff in the early 1960s. Even his parents were worried about him. Would he get radicalized? Would his brain get broken? But he's doing exactly what the Stoics are saying. He's literally reading like a spy in the enemy's camp. Then when he is subjected to communist interrogation techniques, when they try to break him, he knows their ideology better than they do. You have to read books that challenge you, read books that make you uncomfortable. If the history books you're reading are fun and reassuring, you're not reading history, you're reading propaganda.

5:37The books you should pick up should open your worldview, should get you to see things that you didn't see before, get you to see things differently than you saw before. You should understand your own country, you should understand your industry, your profession, you should understand all of it differently as a result of the authors that you seek out. You don't have to agree with them all the time, but you should be reading people that challenge you. And you might think as someone who writes in study stoicism that I mostly read the Stoics. No, I've also read Epicurus. I try to read philosophers who disagree with the Stoics.

6:08I also want to open my mind to the Buddhists and the Confucians, and I've read the Bhagavad Gita. I'm actually actively seeking out people other than the Stoics more often than I'm reading from the Stoics because this not only opens me up to new things, but it helps me understand what I agree with and like about the Stoics even more.

6:32And look, when we talk about challenging books, we don't just mean ideologically challenging. What I love to dive into is a big biography. There's Chernow's Grant, Hamilton's Mark Twain book, this series on the civil rights movement by Taylor Branch's epic. Robert Greene gave me this series on Winston Churchill, a couple thousand pages cumulatively as a wedding present. One of the series I'm proudest of reading, not just Robert Caro's The Power Broker, but series on Lyndon Johnson. This is a year's worth of reading for most people. It took me months to get through these books. And it's not even all the way through Lyndon Johnson's life yet.

7:19The last book, The Passage of Power, it stops when Vietnam is starting. But the point is you should tackle big, ambitious, audacious books. Books that are going to take weeks to get through or months to get through. Books where you lose your bearings, right? Read Russian literature. Read those epic novels. Read the things that are challenging to read because they are just feats of time and energy and stamina. Read books above your level. Read books that ordinarily you'd need a college professor to walk you through. Just like when you lift heavy things, it makes you stronger. When you read books that are hard and difficult and challenging, you get better.

7:56And I think this is true for the Stoics also. Like, I believe Marcus Aurelius is the easiest Stoic to start with. Probably one of the harder Stoics to read is Musonius Rufus, which we have here. Not enough Stoics have read. Then, of course, there's Cleanthes and Chrysippus. There's little snippets that we have of different Stoics. You can read Diogenes' book, The Lives of Eminent Philosopher, which has biographies of the different Stoics. Like Epictetus, it's easier to start with the in Caridian, which is sort of a summary of his teachings, but then you've got to go to the discourses. And the discourses are tough.

8:32But one of the things I think that's interesting about Stockdale, who was so moved and changed by Epictetus, is he said that while he's on his last three carrier deployments, he was reading not just Epictetus and not just the Stoics, but he was reading the Odyssey and the Iliad, because Epictetus had said that students needed to be familiar with those works too. So you read one book and you get a hold of it. And then, well, what are the influences on that author? And then you want to go deeper and deeper and deeper. So pick those challenging, difficult books because you get stronger for wrestling with them.

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11:44Ryan Holiday: It's just a lot. And when you're in over your head, it's hard to get out from under it. Well, join the millions of customers who trust HomeServe for 50 % less for your first year. Go to homeserve.com slash stoic. That's homeserve.com slash stoic for 50 % less savings compared to renewal price and void in Florida. I love books about ships. I love books about shipwrecks. I thought this book would be amazing. It's called The Imperial Cruise. It's about this trip that Theodore Roosevelt sent his vice president on to explore and then pacify the Philippines. And, you know, it was okay. I didn't hate it.

12:26But I made it 50 or so pages in. And I just said, you know what? This isn't working for me. Great readers know when to quit a book. My favorite rule is 100 pages minus your age. I've roughly made it there. My 97-year-old grandmother should have quit this book earlier if it wasn't working for her. Why do we quit books? because life is short, the Stoics would say. Memento mori. Seneca talks about how nothing should take your time without giving you an adequate trade in return, right? If you're not learning something, if it's not challenging you, if you're not growing in some way, stop reading, pick up another book, right?

13:05Life is too short to read bad books. I think the Stoics would be very clear about that. So be okay, be empowered quitting a book that's not working for you, you can always come back to it later. And there have been books that I didn't think were right for me, I didn't think were good for me, that later turned out to be not just perfect, but profoundly influential, exactly what I needed in that moment. So don't be afraid to quit bad books. This is my copy of Best and the Brightest, which I just read for this book that I'm reading on. And you can see I marked up literally almost every page. But this is actually the second time I tried to read this book, because the first time I bought this copy and it didn't really do it for me.

13:46I made it a hundred and oh here's where I quit. I quit on page 189. So it wasn't right for me at the time. I didn't say oh he sucks I'll never read that guy again. I read some of his other books too. This just wasn't what I needed to read at this moment but this was what I needed to read at this moment. And so you quit books but you can always come back to them. The Stokes would say we never step in the same river twice. These are the same books. Nothing has changed, but I changed in the interim period, and that's what counts.

14:21So I was showing you that I fold pages of these books. Why do I do that? This is the note card system that I learned from my teacher, Robert Green. So I read books. I'm an active reader. I'm taking notes. I'm folding pages. And then what I'm doing, I'm transferring the information from this book to my note cards. These note cards are how I organize my own writing, the books that I'm writing. But I also have one of these just for life advice. I have one for parenting. I'm always trying to collect information that will be of use to me. General Mattis, former Secretary of Defense, four-star general in the Marines, carries Marcus Relius' meditations with him on 40 years of deployments.

15:03He gets advice as a young man from the philosopher Eric Hoffer. He meets Eric Hoffer at a book signing, and Eric Hoffer says, make sure you write down everything interesting that you find. That's what you have to do as a reader. That's what you have to do as a person. Keep a commonplace book. Collect the thoughts, the wisdom, the ideas that strike you so you can access them easily. Marcus Reyes' Meditations, in a way, is his commonplace book. It's the things that he read. It's the things he was reading. It's the things that struck him and stayed with him that he's recording. and we're lucky enough all these thousands of years later to be able to access that.

15:42Your kids will be grateful to you if you do this. Your grandkids will be grateful to you. But most importantly, your future self will be grateful. There are stuff I find in my note cards and the pages that I've marked in books that turn out to be exactly what I needed personally or professionally. Years in the future, I could not have imagined it. But if I hadn't taken the time to make the notation, to make the note card, I never would have been able to find it again. The Stoics wanted you to be a great reader. Seneca talked about how through reading, through philosophy, we annex all the wisdom of the past into our lives.