I’ve Read Too Many Books

I think this started with a Lamborghini in a garage.

The Tai Lopez ad. The books. Knowledge being the important bit.

I was young. Apparently quite receptive.

Over the years, I reckon I’ve read more than 500 non-fiction books and spent over 10,000 hours learning things. Rough numbers. I lost count, and my memory of what I’ve learned is hardly a reliable accounting system.

It has changed how I think. Opened perspectives. Made things imaginable that weren’t imaginable before.

But somewhere along the way, I started collecting instructions for how to be.

And they don’t all agree.

One approach says focus. Blinkers on. Cut everything else.

Another says take ten times the action. Make a mess. Learn from what happens.

Then there’s peak performance. Change your state. Push yourself. Get more out of yourself.

Then I read something about letting go of all this forcing.

I can see something useful in each of them.

I can also feel myself being pulled in several directions at once.

Because underneath a method are beliefs. Assumptions about what matters, what a person wants, how a business works, what kind of life is worth having.

Those can come into your head along with the useful technique.

Then you’re sitting there trying to reconcile several people’s ways of living inside one actual person.

Which is me.

And reading another book doesn’t necessarily resolve that. Sometimes it introduces another convincing person.

The question becomes: which of these ideas works here?

For my nature. This problem. This business. The people involved. The circumstances we’re actually in.

Even if something worked wonderfully for the author, I don’t know all the conditions that made it work. I may not even want the life it helped them build.

That’s where self-knowledge seems different from knowing a lot.

I can understand someone’s model without knowing whether it suits me.

I have to try something. See what happens. Notice the result, and what it feels like to live that way.

I’d like a library of mental models I can use and experiment with.

I’ve sometimes treated it more like a collection of holy books.

That’s quite a lot of religions to practise simultaneously.

These days, I read much less. Another general book about success rarely feels like the thing I need.

If there’s a specific problem, I’ll go into it. Learn what helps me take the next step. Often I can explore it with AI, get moving, and see what reality puts back.

There’s another part of this, though.

Learning can give you a lovely sense of being intelligent.

I’ve read all these books. I understand these ideas. I’m the person who knows.

Then something happens outside the book and I discover I’m a bloody moron.

I’m getting more comfortable with that.

There’s room to be intelligent in some ways and a fool in others. If I have to hold onto one description, the fool feels lighter.

Someone calls you a fool.

Yes. We’ve established this.

You can laugh and carry on. There’s less to defend, and being wrong can tell you something.

Having written a book doesn’t settle that question for an author either. A person can know a great deal, have something worth saying, and still be a fool.

Maybe I’d enjoy reading more people who admit it.

That might be an interesting shelf to explore.

Then I’d still have to go and find out for myself.