On Reading
Just before I started reading So Good They Can’t Ignore You, I was trying to articulate to my wife why I hesitate sometimes to read business or self help books, but was struggling to get my point across. She started making fun of me and asked if it wasn’t an old enough book for me and basically implied I was being a snob. I probably am a snob. But, allow me to put keyboard to word processor (modern day pen to paper substitution?), to clarify my thoughts on the matter.
When I first set up this site in late 2020 and established a landing page for reading I wrote briefly about how I want to approach reading going forward. I wrote about some ways I want to better retain what I am reading such as writing notes and summaries and publishing them to this site. Another approach to reading I committed to was around book selection. The philosophy I am trying to follow, with some exceptions, is to read books that have stood the test of time, and to read books that not everyone else is currently reading.
If a book truly has strong ideas, or tells a good story, or has an impactful philosophy, it will stand out amongst the thousands of other books published around it. Over time, books that are less important or not in the zeitgeist will fall off our radars, and only the most important books will remain as standouts. I like the thought because it’s a good way to avoid the grind of trying to keep up with the hottest new titles. So time becomes a great filter that gets rid of fluff that is constantly coming out from thousands of people trying to give their philosophy on life, business, raising a family, etc.
As for not reading what everyone else is reading, part of the reason I wanted to follow this philosophy is I get a misguided sense of pride from deliberately avoiding things that are in trend. The major advantage and reason though is if everyone is talking about a book, they are all hearing and thinking about the same concepts and ideas, and I don’t want to think the same as everyone else. I know from investing that doing what the masses are doing tends to mean you are losing. Look at the volume on any major stock ticker. When a price is dropping rapidly, a bunch of people start selling. When the price rises rapidly, a bunch of people start buying.
Everyone seems to be reading Think Again, by Adam Grant right now. I don’t doubt its got some interesting things to say. It is kind of ironic though that millions of people are all learning to think differently in the same way.
In general, my hesitation with the self-help genre is there are just so many of these types of books being pumped out its hard to know which ones are truly worth the time.
I find this whole thought process similar to issues I have with movies and video games for example. We have gotten so good at marketing things these days, that it seems like we can put less emphasis on creating good content because we know that the money will still flow in. Marvel movies are the perfect example of this. Unadulterated trash churned out by Disney at a breakneck speed. Look at this terrible CGI and tell me I am wrong.
Battlefield 2042 would be the recent video game example. Huge marketing push. Huge hype. Terrible Game. After only being released a few months ago, it regularly only has a few thousand players online.
With self-help books, I find that they market themselves around a catchy phrase or thought to draw us in. If its got an interesting enough hook, and if the author has some memorable one-liners to say about that hook, the book generally does very well. But doesn’t it feel like half the time we read these books just for clout? So we know all the buzzwords to use? I feel like books are especially powerful because everyone likes talking about how much books they read. If we’re reading a non-fiction book, we make sure to talk it up in our social circles so everyone knows how much we are learning. I’m no exception. I designed this whole bloody website to track my reading.
My most recent example of being drawn in by a title was Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. I was excited to hear why generalists triumph. I got a number of interesting stories about people to prove his point, and thats about it. It just felt like a bit of a rug pull. And I am certain someone could decide to make an equally compelling book on why specialists triumph in a generalist world.
Many business or self-help books also make claim to volumes of research on the subject. The problem is, we know how easy it is to force our “research” to tell the story we want. And research also means different things to different people. Interviewing 5 dozen people is “doing your research” by some definitions sure. But even if all sixty people validated a point you are trying to make, it still doesn’t mean its true.
A decent read that dives into this a bit more is “The Halo effect” by Phil Rosenzweig. He spends a couple chapters bashing Jim Collins who is notorious for speaking to the stacks and stacks of research done to write his books. But Rosenzweig’s point is, just because you did a lot of research doesn’t mean the research is saying anything meaningful nor does it necessarily solve for the point you are trying to make. He points out that much of Collins analysis on companies is more akin to a motivational speech telling us to work hard and be positive, but the companies he selects to back up his claims are full of “halo’s”, which is to say, they have been selected after strong performance or some positive KPI and then used to prove some sort of point. One example was when he brought up Wal-mart and K-mart. All the business books and articles written on K-mart after it failed spoke to aggressive expansion or failed logistics or some explanation for what they did wrong. But in reality, Wal-mart and other retailers had all made aggressive expansion decisions and similar business decisions to K-Mart. K-mart was actually seeing positive financial and KPI growth across the board as well, just not to the same extent as Wal-mart and other competitors. But writers focused on what they already knew (that K-mart went under) and then applied all of these lessons to it as if they explained why it failed. Of course, contradictory articles praising Wal-mart for their aggressive expansion came out as reasons for their success.
Phil’s overall point is that business is incredibly complex and there are so many chaotic factors, that deriving these broad rules that we get all the time from business books is sketchy at best. And if the research is based on halos, it is not meaningful.
Authors of business books also tend to like to coin words or phrases. I think they do it to make their writing appear better researched and more impressive. Maybe like scientists who want a formula named after them, authors want some idea attributed to them as well. They go out of their way to assign jargon-y, business speak names to simple ideas as if its some first-time discovery. One that I hear a lot is “the flywheel effect” which Jim Collins coined in Good to Great. That may be an example of a phrase that is used regularly. But there are so many others that get pumped out by all these types of authors. Are we really supposed to memorize them all to give us some sort of social prestige?
Anyways. Though this is not a lot of writing, it has taken me over three hours to get this all down. I keep asking myself what I am really trying to say and I am not having the easiest time articulating it. I don’t want to be a stuck up loser who thinks he’s too good for a book, and I hope that isn’t the interpretation from my writing here. I guess if I had to summarize this entire post in just three words, it would be: Marvel movies suck.