Do

Do. If you cannot do, read. If you cannot read, listen. If you cannot listen, watch.

No matter what, just keep moving.

Every now and then, people around me would pose the question of, ‘how do I get into reading?’

I am neither a book worm nor an academic professor, but I do really enjoy learning through reading books.

In the earliest chapters, my response to such a question would be to rifle off my personal favourite books which I had encountered up to that point in time. Over time, the style of this initiating response has slowly shifted towards first developing a better understanding of the underlying problem that the person asking such a question is trying to fix. This has evolved out of my observation that the definition of ‘great books’ can be intimately subjective, and how much of ‘great’ relies on perfect timing — on chance.

The one book that had elevated my own life early on was Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, but I now believe this has way more to do about the where and when of who I was at the time than the what. The thing that puzzled me back then was the visceral feedback from my many (naïve) attempts of gifting the very same book to the people around me who I cared most about — which largely involved watching with dismay as the book repeatedly fell flat onto its face without leaving behind even a single ripple as it dropped.

‘It must be the receiver’s fault,’ became the guiding principle in my mind.

As I grew older and read more books, I started to notice this indifference, this lack of curiosity, play out in my own self. I would encounter recommendations of other people’s favourite books or the ‘timeless classics that everybody should read’, and then find myself in plenty of boring experiences after diving wholeheartedly into these suggestions. This confronted the original principle in broad daylight. I was now, again, lost.

If these books were as great as everybody was saying, why were they so boring to me? Eventually, this has pushed me towards a principle that looks something like ‘drop boring books without guilt.’ The pressure and focus has shifted from trudging through books cover to cover towards actively seeking out the spark of curiosity and enjoyment.

Another pivotal moment was in encountering Tim Urban’s ‘The Tail End’, where he builds up a hypothesis on the shortness of life by measuring it in terms of specific activities and events. These are some of the examples:

By the time one is 34, there might only be 60 winters left.

If one reads 5 books a year, there would only be time for 300 books left to read.

If one eats pizza once a month, there would only be about 700 more chances to eat pizza.

“During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of five times a year, each for an average of maybe two days each time.

10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood… if the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang out with mom and dad. Less than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.”

— Tim Urban

Reading ‘The Tail End’ helped me recognise that quality does matter when it comes to selecting books to read and, more broadly, spending one’s time. There is always going to be infinitely more books than a single mind can absorb and consume in a lifetime. What, then, should be done with this?

Further down the windy path, this brought me towards starting up an experiment called ‘The Offline Space’, with the core premise of bringing the highest quality books to commonplaces where people naturally gather.

The concept was a pop-up bookstore that displayed a curated selection of 15 to 20 high quality, publicly vetted, Lindy-proven books and powered by an automated payment terminal.

I was fortunate at many points during this journey, especially in setting up partnerships with entrepreneurial owners of local cafes to house The Offline Space and having a supportive circle of friends who were always there to back me and my still-nascent idea. While the leap into starting something from scratch was terrifying and intimidating at first glance, there was a lot of risk tampering behind the scenes that made it less so. In hard terms, this meant that the idea was capped on the downside and all my eggs were not placed in that single basket — it was an experiment.

It turned out to be one of the best, most meaningful, things I have done with ~$2500 to-date. So many ideas tested, lessons learnt and conversations had —  all of which started from making the decision of seizing the chance at doing the thing with my own hands.

While I did get to sell plenty of books to a regional town that was in-lack of a physical bookstore, one of the painful lessons through this journey was in re-learning the role that chance has to play in books playing a meaningful role in people’s lives.

Almost as a reincarnation of the earlier lessons, while The Offline Space had quality at the front of mind and was easily scalable, it also lacked the leverage of volume and probability that comes with a traditional large inventory. The subjectivity of timing matters a lot in determining the ‘greatness’ of any one book, and a small, curated selection only serves to undermine the probability that a book would strike a chord with potential customers.

So, back to the original question.

‘How do I get into reading?’

“Read what you love until you love to read.”

— Naval Ravikant

Another key is to avoid feeling pressured into thinking that reading is the only viable medium for learning too.

Explore all the various mediums and find out where the spark of curiosity might be for yourself. Sure, books do hold a strong standard when it comes to learning, but it should not mean ‘read or stagnate’.

If the thing that you choose to do is boring to you, it would be an immense task to sustain any sort of reasonable cadence and intensity over the span of a lifetime. And this is the sort of momentum that compounds interest over time, not the two-week diets or the ‘finish a book a week’ short-lived projects. Do what works, for you.

P.S At around the same time as building up The Offline Space, I was also curating a car enthusiast community from 1 to >500 members through organic growth — as if I did not already have enough things on my hands at the time.