No One Is Excused From This | You’re Reading Books Wrong. Here’s A Better Way.

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: No one is excused from this. It might seem a bit out of character for a powerful general, a fierce warrior, to go everywhere with a book tucked under their arm. But in ancient Rome, this was the figure that the great Scipio Aemilianus cut. He was known for training in philosophy as arduously as he trained at arms. Flash forward to General James Mattis, a four-star general in the Marines, famously said that at no rank is a Marine excused from studying. In fact, he argued that it was essential that soldiers learned from the past, from the experiences of others because the alternative was filling up body bags as they figured things out on their own.

1:00Ryan Holiday: Reading is a form of magic. It is time travel. It is a way to steal a march on our enemies. Through it, through the pages of a book, we gain the wisdom that others earned quite painfully. Through philosophy, as Seneca said, we can annex all the knowledge of the past into our own lives. Who would be so arrogant as to think they don't need to do that? Who would be so stupid as to want to learn by trial and error what they can learn from the trial and error of others. Books are literally manuals for living. They contain the wisdom of the collective human experience. Reading someone's thoughts, their feelings, their advice, their directions is a kind of shortcut for us.

1:39Ryan Holiday: The advice, the facts, the perspective, the thoughts, this was things they took the time to write down so that others could benefit from them, so that others wouldn't have to make the same mistakes, so that others could live better lives learning lessons this way rather than just repeating it themselves. Yet what do most people do? Most people don't read. Most of us don't read enough. No one, no marine, no leader, no citizen, no parent, no one who wants any measure of success is excused from studying. Not now, not ever. We must drink deeply from history, from philosophy, from books, from journalists, from historians and geniuses.

2:18Ryan Holiday: We must study the cautionary tales and the screw-ups. We must read about failures and successes. We must study and read constantly as a practice. Being a good reader isn't an easy thing. It's different than being taught how to read. That's something we talk about in the Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge, which today is your very last day to join. Tomorrow, we're doing a Q &A with thousands of Stoics all over the world as we do a deep dive into the challenge. I'd love to have you join us. And if you sign up right now, You can get 20 % off all the books in the challenge if you buy them from the painted porch.

2:52Ryan Holiday: I can't wait to see you in there. I'd love for you to sign up for Daily Stoic Life so you get this challenge and all the challenges for free. That's at dailystoiclife.com. But you can find out more at dailystoic.com slash read to lead.

3:13Do you ever feel like you should be getting more out of the books that you're reading? you spend money on a book, you spend time on a book, maybe you're even underlining or taking notes, but a couple months later, it's gone. You've lost it. Or worse, maybe you never had it at all. It just went right over your head. The reason this happens to some people and not to others is that great readers have a system. They have a process. There is a methodology to how they digest and process, and then most importantly, retain and apply what they read. I'd like to think I'm one of those people I identify as a professional reader.

3:47And I don't just mean that because I'm an author and I need to read for my own books or because I own a bookstore, but because I take reading very seriously. It's made me a better human being. It's made me a better parent. It's made me a better professional. It's made me a better entrepreneur. And so I have a methodology. I have a process that's allowed me to not just read a lot and to read widely and to read things that are difficult and complex, but to take that information and to use it in my actual life. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's video, some of the best strategies and tactics for being a great reader.

4:27Let me start by showing you a book that changed my life. So this is my copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which was recommended to me when I was about 20 years old. And what's remarkable to me about this, this totally unique book, The Private Thoughts of the Most Powerful Man in the World, was itself the product of a book recommendation. You see this here, Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome, thanks his philosophy teacher, Rusticus, at the beginning of meditations, for teaching him how to read attentively and not be satisfied with just getting the gist of things. He's teaching him the methodology and the practices for being a great reader, not just a surface level understanding.

5:06And he says, and for introducing me to Epictetus's lectures and loaning me his own copy. Here is my copy of Epictetus. These are two books that changed my life. This is actually the copy, just to make this even more full circle, that Admiral Stockdale was given by his philosophy teacher in 1962 as a graduate student at Stanford. He's leaving for his deployment, almost certainly going to the South China Sea. the war in Vietnam is just breaking out. And his teacher reaches up to a shelf and says, I have something for you and hands him this edition of Epictetus and says, I think this might be of value to you, which is really what reading is all about.

5:47There are these great books out there. There are books that have exactly the ideas and the things that you need to be who you're capable of being. And you've got to read those books and you've got to make use of them, which is, by the way, exactly what Stockdale did over his next several deployments. He said, every free moment that he had that wasn't spent flying or on paperwork was spent reading this book and trying to get what he needed out of it, which ultimately is what he draws on when he shot down over Vietnam, going into what he knows is either going to be death or imprisonment and torture and solitary confinement, deprivation and exile and everything in between.

6:26Which leads me to, I guess, the first part, which is you've got to find those books, right? It's about finding the write books. How did I get introduced to Epictetus and to Marcus Rullis? I was at a conference. I was 20 years old and I went up to the speaker afterwards and I said, hey, do you have any book recommendations for someone my age? What should I be reading? Which, by the way, is a question that goes back to Emerson. Emerson said, you should be approaching wise and smart people and asking, what have you read? What I would definitely not advise you to do is read every new book, to read every trendy book, to read every bestseller.

7:02I'd urge you to read the books that have stood the test of time. My wife and I and a bunch of our friends right now are reading Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. When Thucydides sat down to write, he said, I'm not writing a book for this moment. I'm writing a book that will stand the test of time, maybe even last forever. Here we are 2 ,500 years later, still learning lessons from it. So don't ask yourself, what's everyone else reading right now? But go, what are the people who I really admire that I respect, not just of this moment, but for all time? What were the books that shaped them?

7:35What's a problem I'm dealing with? And what's an analog moment in time where people have dealt with problems like that? So I find so often that what we're talking about right now lacks the perspective and the history that going back 100 years or 500 years or 1000 years, allows you to see. You want the partisanship to go away. You want some of the preconceived notions to go away. And you want to read great texts that can really teach you something. As ultimately we see with Mark Sreelus' meditations and how Epictetus influenced him, the right book at the right time to the right person can change the course of history.

8:17One mistake that rookie readers make is that they don't quit enough books. Finishing a book isn't an accomplishment in and of itself. I think sometimes people are more concerned with like checking a box or being able to put something on their Goodreads account than they actually are with reading something and getting something out of it. There's this funny stoic story in this regard too. There's this one young student who's bragging about how he's read all the works of Chrysippus, who not just wrote at length but wrote a lot. Epictetus, overhearing this, said, you know, if Chrysippus was a better writer, you'd have less to brag about.

8:56Just because a book is difficult, just because a book is long, doesn't mean that it's good, right? It might mean that the author is indulgent. It might mean that the author had a bad editor. It might mean that they just don't know what they're talking about. It might be that they suck. People who aren't great readers obsess over finishing. They want to impress people with what they read or just because they started they think they have to finish. No, great readers quit books all the time. There's actually a great rule in this regard. It's 100 pages minus your age. I'm going to give a book a lot more leeway than my 97-year-old grandmother is because I can afford it.

9:33But the point is just because you started a book doesn't mean you need to finish it, especially if it's not good. My job as a writer is not just to express what I have to say, but also to hold your attention and to teach you and to make the time you are giving me worth your while. Life is short, right? You're only going to get to read so many books in your time. And it's not just about how many books are you going to read total, but what books are you going to reread? I've read Mark Sherelyse's Meditations well over a hundred times. There are novels I've read five or six or seven times because although the books don't change, who we are when we pick them back up is something different.

10:13And so we can take something new out of them. And that's the ultimate caveat when I talk about quitting books too. There are books that I quit because they weren't working for me then. I didn't understand what was happening. I couldn't get the point. But then when I went and read about other things, or I was at a different phase of my life, I picked them back up. And you know what? They were waiting for me. And I got exactly what I needed it from them in that moment. So when I'm reading, I'm reading with a pen in my hand, not just to take notes, but reading should be a conversation. It should be a dialogue between you and the author.

10:51Actually, McCullough talks about this in his biography with John Adams. John Adams was a master of the art of what we would call marginalia. On one book about the French Revolution, John Adams wrote 10 ,000 words of notes, right? So you can see in my edition, I took plenty of notes. Another American president who was a big practitioner of the art of marginalia was Harry Truman. Merle Miller got his hands on Harry Truman's copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. And there are various passages where he wrote notes. This is one of Truman's friends, Judge Albert Ridge. He says he was always talking about the Roman lawgivers.

11:29He knew all about them. and he had read all of Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman Empire several times. He was always reading two or three books at a time and always making notes in the margins, especially in history books. Frequently, very often, he knew much more than the writer. And he says his favorite word was bunk. He would write like bunk if he disagreed in the corners, which I love. The point is an author is making an argument and you don't have to accept that argument. In fact, you can disagree with it. You can push back on it. You can write things that you want to question or look up later.

12:02You should be testing the ideas. And there's a reason that they call philosophy the great conversation. It's not a one-way chat. They are talking to you through the ages, through the pages, and you are talking back with them.

12:16You read a book. There was great stuff in it. Where did it go? You lost it. So when I read, what I do is I take notes, obviously. This is a book about Vietnam. I was researching. saying these are all the books that I have read recently that I have to process. And for processing what I do is I take those ideas and I put them into note cards. Actually, these are the note cards from my very first book, which I started writing in 2011. These are the note cards which I was going through today. I take what I like about a book and I transfer it to note cards. Sometimes it's a whole passage that I'm typing up.

12:53Sometimes a few words that come up, but the idea is I'm transferring this information into note cards. And I have written thousands and thousands and thousands of note cards over the years. Every one of my books is made up of these note cards. I have thousands of blank ones for projects I'm working on now. And I'm recording this information so I can organize it and turn to it later, which by the way, is a system I learned from Robert Greene, my mentor. He showed me how you keep what's called a commonplace book, recording and extracting the things that are of value to you, that are of use to you.

13:28It's actually a great book about this that I recommend called The Notebook. But the point is, it can't stay in the books. You got to take it out of the books and put it somewhere where you can organize it and access it easily.

13:43The next part of this system is about putting it all to use. But before I get into that, I wanted to tell you about something. As I said, one of the things I've noticed about successful people particularly successful readers is they have a system they have a formula truman who we were talking about earlier he said that not all readers are leaders but all leaders have to be readers so how can you invest in becoming a better reader where can you learn how to do this stuff at a much deeper level than we've been talking about in this video i'd love to have you join us in daily stoics read to lead course it is a six week deep dive into books into reading and into building the skills you need to become wiser, stronger, and better.

14:24This is a bookstore, obviously. I love recommending books to people, but that's not enough. I don't just want to give you a big stack of books that you should read. I want to tell you how to read those books, and I want you to learn from reading those books how to be a better reader for the rest of your life. And that's what we've done in the Daily Stoic Read to Lead course. And so if you'd love to join us, and if you sign up before it, September 22nd, we're going to be doing a live call where I'll answer some of your questions on reading. You can do all that at dailystoke.com slash read to lead.

14:58So Seneca said that the whole point of philosophy was to turn words into works. He said that by reading, you can annex all the wisdom of the past into your own life. But obviously, if you're not applying it, what good is it? I want you to think two things. One, when you're reading, ask yourself, how would I use this information? is this actually of use to me in any way or am I just collecting trivia and information am I just reading to impress people then I also want you to think okay what would I do in this person's shoes how can you see yourself reflected in the people and things that you're reading about how can I apply this to what I'm doing so ask yourself if you're reading a biography and you see them make this huge mistake you see where ego is getting in their way ask yourself where is my ego getting in the way.

15:46Where am I acting like that? When you read a book about parenting, it should be, hey, how am I going to put this into practice? You underline something from Marcus Reulius about, you know, keeping your temper in check and not losing your cool. And then a few minutes later, you are tested in that very thing. This is the time for you to go, hey, I'm going to try that thing that I just read about. One of the last pages is December 22nd in the Daily Stoic. It quotes Seneca from his letters. He says, it is disgraceful for an old person or one inside of old age to only have the knowledge carried in their notebooks.

16:19Zeno said this. He says, what do you say? Cleanthes said that. What do you say? How long would you be compelled by the claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim. Something posterity will carry in its notebook. So I hope reading books encourages you to write and to write better. Not everyone needs to write a book, but you could write an article. You could write a post on social media. You could write a memo to your team. You could write letters to your own children. You could write a note to your spouse. The point is to take the things that you have learned, to put them into practice, to learn from that, and then to synthesize all of this into your own knowledge, which hopefully you communicate and pass on to the next generation so they can learn from your experiences as well as their own.

17:07One thing that's really important to remember as a reader is that you shouldn't just be reading books that you agree with and you shouldn't just be reading about things that you know about, right? Books should be doors, not mirrors, it's been said, right? It should be a window into another world, into somebody else's experience, not just reflecting back to you what you want to see or what you already contain within yourself. This is the banned books library that's next door to my bookstore where people can take or leave books that have been banned or challenged that are controversial, the books that are banned and controversial that people have strong opinions about, that authorities think you shouldn't be able to read, or that the church has tried to take away or suppressed at various points in history that communist governments have suppressed, or whatever the reason is, those are the books that you should be reading.

17:58Not because they're always correct. In fact, that's precisely the reason. There are books in this book library that I vehemently disagree with, some that I find abhorrent and repugnant, but that didn't prevent me from reading them. That didn't prevent me from having the conversation in the pages. And in fact, in reading something that I disagree with, that I didn't like, I was challenged to rethink my own thinking. You know who Seneca quotes more than any other philosopher in his writings? It's Epicurus, ostensibly the head of a rival school of philosophy. He says, I want to read like a spy in the enemy's camp.

18:35He says, I'll quote a bad author if the line is good. The point is, read people you disagree with. Don't just read another book about a topic that you're a world-class expert in. How did you become an expert in the first place? By reading about something that you didn't know about, that at one point you didn't even know you were interested in. So great readers read widely. They don't just read for confirmation. In fact, they actively seek out disconfirmation. They want to be challenged. They don't straw man the ideas that they disagree with. They read the steel man, the best versions of the arguments they disagree with.

19:11And that's how they get better and smarter and wiser. Okay. So if I had to summarize this in three points, I'd say number one, read well and read widely. Number two, don't just read, but take notes, extract, organize, synthesize this information, take it out of the books and put it somewhere that you can use it. Which leads me to the third and the final and the most important rule for reading. You have to apply it, right? We're not reading to impress people. We're not trying to collect random sentences or trivia. We are reading to become better people, better professionals, better parents, better citizens.

19:51That's what this is all about. And then as a result of that change, of the things we've learned, go make the world different. Go make the world better. That's what great readers do.