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Read What You Love Until You Love to Read.html
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Read What You Love Until You Love to Read.html
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<p>![[Naval-Ep16.mp3]]</p>
<p>You should be able to pick up any book in the library and read it</p>
<p>Read what you love until you love to read</p>
<p>
<strong>Nivi:</strong> Before we go and talk about accountability and
leverage and judgment, you’ve got a few tweets further down the line that
I would put in the category of continuous learning.
</p>
<p>
They’re essentially, “there is no skill called business. Avoid business
magazines and business class, study microeconomics, game theory,
psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics and computers.”
</p>
<p>
There’s one other comment that you made in a Periscope that was, “you
should be able to pick up any book in the library and read it.” And the
last tweet in this category was, “reading is faster than listening, doing
is faster than watching.”
</p>
<p>
<strong>Naval:</strong> Yeah, the most important tweet on this, I don’t
even have in here unfortunately, which is, the foundation of learning is
reading. I don’t know a smart person who doesn’t read and read all the
time.
</p>
<p>
And the problem is, what do I read? How do I read? Because for most people
it’s a struggle, it’s a chore. So, the most important thing is just to
learn how to educate yourself and the way to educate yourself is to
develop a love for reading.
</p>
<p>
So, the tweet that is left out, the one that I was hinting at is, “read
what you love until you love to read.” It’s that simple.
</p>
<p>
Everybody I know who reads a lot loves to read, and they love to read
because they read books that they loved. It’s a little bit of a catch-22,
but you basically want to start off just reading wherever you are and then
keep building up from there until reading becomes a habit. And then
eventually, you will just get bored of the simple stuff.
</p>
<p>
So you may start off reading fiction, then you might graduate to science
fiction, then you may graduate to non-fiction, then you may graduate to
science, or philosophy, or mathematics or whatever it is, but take your
natural path and just read the things that interest you until you kind of
understand them. And then you’ll naturally move to the next thing and the
next thing and the next thing.
</p>
<p><strong>Read the original scientific books in a field</strong></p>
<p>
Now, there is an exception to this, which is where I was hinting with what
things you actually do want to learn, which is, at some point there’s too
much out there to read. Even reading is full of junk.
</p>
<p>
There are actually things you can read, especially early on, that will
program your brain a certain way, and then later things that you read, you
will decide whether those things are true or false based on the earlier
things.
</p>
<p>
So, it is important that you read foundational things. And foundational
things, I would say, are the original books in a given field that are very
scientific in their nature.
</p>
<p>
For example, instead of reading a business book, pick up Adam Smith’s The
Wealth of Nations. Instead of reading a book on biology or evolution
that’s written today, I would pick up Darwin’s Origin of the Species.
Instead of reading a book on biotech right now that may be very advanced,
I would just pick up The Eighth Day of Creation by Watson and Crick.
Instead of reading advanced books on what cosmology and what Neil Degrasse
Tyson and Stephen Hawking have been saying, you can pick up Richard
Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces and start with basic physics.
</p>
<p><strong>Don’t fear any book</strong></p>
<p>
If you understand the basics, especially in mathematics and physics and
sciences, then you will not be afraid of any book. All of us have that
memory of when we were sitting in class and we’re learning mathematics,
and it was all logical and all made sense until at one point the class
moved too fast and we fell behind.
</p>
<p>
Then after that we were left memorizing equations, memorizing concepts
without being able to derive them from first principles. And at that
moment, we’re lost, because unless you’re a professional mathematician,
you’re not going to remember those things. All you’re going to remember
are the techniques, the foundations.
</p>
<p>
So, you have to make sure that you’re building on a steel frame of
understanding because you’re putting together a foundation for skyscraper,
and you’re not just memorizing things because you’re just memorizing
things you’re lost. So the foundations are ultra important.
</p>
<p>
And the ultimate, the ultimate is when you walk into a library and you
look at it up and down and you don’t fear any book. You know that you can
take any book off the shelf, you can read it, you can understand it, you
can absorb what is true, you can reject what is false, and you have a
basis for even working that out that is logical and scientific and not
purely just based on opinions.
</p>
<p>
<strong
>The means of learning are abundant, the desire to learn is
scarce</strong
>
</p>
<p>
The beauty of the internet is the entire library of Alexandria times 10 is
at your fingertips at all times. It’s not the means of education or the
means of learning are scarce, the means of learning are abundant. It’s the
desire to learn that’s scarce. So, you really have to cultivate the
desire.
</p>
<p>
And it’s not even cultivating you’ve to not lose it. Children have a
natural curiosity. If you go to a young child who’s first learning
language, they’re pretty much always asking: What’s this? What’s that? Why
is this? Who’s that? They’re always asking questions.
</p>
<p>
But one of the problems is that schools and our educational system, and
even our way of raising children replaces curiosity with compliance. And
once you replace the curiosity with the compliance, you get an obedient
factory worker, but you no longer get a creative thinker. And you need
creativity, you need the ability to feed your own brain to learn whatever
you want.
</p>
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