Splash No. 252 - Reading Plan
Summer of 2019
I’ve moved towards reading more after learning about Ted Gioia’s extremely intense reading plan and how it affected his life:
Once I got into my forties, with all this deep learning behind me, it somehow gave me an aura of gravitas I’d never possessed before. People started treating me differently—and not because I made any demands. Not in the least. I’m not the kind of person to make demands.
In his reading plan, Ted made it a point of reading long, difficult books and slowly trudging through them to seek their meaning and lessons. He pushed himself to gain a greater understanding of the world (literary and beyond) through this practice, and it paid dividends. I don’t really have an interest in becoming that worldly or informed about everything, but I’m struck but the enormous gap in the consumption habits of Ted (someone I deeply admire) and that of my own, which has lately largely been dominated by mindless social media posts.
Recently, my social media consumption shifted from largely being YouTube, to more short-form video and short-form text. It’s as if my small attention span suddenly grew even smaller than it already was. And after having a few too many days with greater than six hours of screen time and clearly seeing how Ted got to where he is as a writer, I sought to remember how to read again.
First, I focused on reading higher quality short-form content, by reading all the emails in my inbox. This sounds facetious, but my inbox used to be filled with a ton of great newsletters that are incredibly mind-expanding and well-written (I’ve largely migrated to the Substack app now for those). This part took weeks, since I’d developed a huge backlog of newsletters to read during my recent travels. For whatever reason, I couldn’t let myself feel fully open to focusing on anything else until I cleared it out. It felt like something was buzzing at the back of my mind as long as I knew there were articles to be read in there.
As I started clearing my inbox, I sought to finish the books on my nightstand that I had started and began listening to random audiobooks that were suggested to me in my library app. Within a week, I had finished a book I started over a year ago, a short ebook, and two audiobooks. Unfortunately, three out of the four were not good books, but reading anything felt like an improvement over Reddit posts regardless. The poor quality of these works once again made me reflect on the difference between Ted and myself. I wonder how many of the books he read as a part of his reading plan were bad. I imagine that few were, since they mostly consisted of some of the most widely lauded books of all time. Even though there’s a constant stream of new books, there must be a reason that those ones stood out and were able to aid his growth in such a way.
On the other side of this re-entry back into the planet of reading, I think I’m moving towards finding a better strategy in my approach to reading. I’ve already realized that reading before bed instead of mindlessly scrolling does wonders for my sleep quality, but I also feel like the lack of really high quality literature on my bookshelf has made it harder for me to sit down and write when I need to. It’s not just the content of the work I consume that makes it easier, it’s the act of sitting down and reading that trains my brain to do hard but worthwhile things.
I’ve read 11 books this year, which I wrote down as my overly accessible Goodreads goal, as a way to avoid focusing on short books to hit a high number. Now, it feels like the real challenge can start, as I try to push myself to read longer work. Maybe I won’t start with War and Peace, but something longer for sure. And of course, I don’t imagine I’ll only stick to incredible old classics, since some of those just don’t seem that interesting to me. I’ll need some literary fiction and romance and mysteries and fantasy works to keep me going. But I want to read more deeply than I ever have before.
Drops of the Week
COMPILATION - Disclosure VIPs - i love when Disclosure remixes their own songs and they've compiled a few of their VIP remixes!
POEM - "Time Spent" by Dustin Pearson - "We’re told we’re bonding when we spend time/with our friends, but what to make/of my friend’s memories in which my face goes/missing?"
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Eyes on the page,
Nikhil