Reading Books CAN Be Useless If YOU Are Useless
Every reader at some point in time thought reading books was going to improve their life. Reading sounds like a no-nonsense slam dunk at self-improvement. What gives? Why have I, and you, read so much and it does so little in our lives?
Because thinking is the means, not the ends.
Books and the action of reading is little more than the action of thinking. We can’t live life without thoughts, and without thoughts we can’t figure out how to do anything, but thoughts are often no more important than processing the image of your coffee mug when you look at it. A thought on its own is useless information. Anti-information in some cases.
Thoughts have to compound and return interest. When I read a non-fiction book that’s 1000 pages of researched information, I panic a little. There’s no way I’m going to remember all of this. Studying the book won’t do anything. Referring back to it does nothing. If you think in words, your thoughts are limited by time, meaning, the time it takes to think out the thoughts. If you try to study and memorize passages, facts, and anything else from a long book, you are limiting yourself by constraining knowledge to thought-time.
There are only special cases when you should do this, and even then you probably don’t want to. Instead, your studying, your reading, your thinking must focus on an end. An end is a result. When you read a thick non-fiction book written by a scholar, some result must be at stake. Maybe each chapter has its own result. Maybe there isn’t a result until the end of the book. Textbooks are different from monographs in that they contain results all over the place. Even chapters are divided up by their ends. Think of physics or math textbooks. Those books deserve to be studied and memorized.
Some books are poorly written and have no ends. They’re meant to be read for the pleasure of reading and gaining insight into something. Insight is not an end, by the way. Epiphanies are not ends. Wisdom is not an ends. They are all means to an end and useless on their own.
Also, even if a book has a result that can gleaned from it, this doesn’t mean its result makes any difference to you. I used to read a ton of history books because I thought I was going to be a history teacher. There was a direct result from reading a history book that matched the result of my profession where I would need to know more history than other people. Now that I am not a history teacher, nor ever became one, all of that reading feel useless after the fact. Sadly, that is because it was. I was wasting my time in anticipation of something that never came. Sure, I enjoyed the pleasure of knowing historical facts and stories and coming into contact with some good writers and researchers, but the information leaks out and disappears over time since it isn’t being used for any end.
This is why your reading is often useless. Studying what you read isn’t any better. Remember, the ends of the book have to align with the ends of your personal goals in life.
Take Bruce Lee for instance. I often compare Bruce Lee’s reading list to Art Garfunkel’s. Art and I read alike. We read whatever we fancy and our reading list will contain literature, random non-fiction, a modern novel here and there, something philosophical, something oddball. It’s all over the place with no goal or direction. Then take Bruce, whose reading list was single-minded and a clear means to an end, which was to become a better fighter. He read many books on fighting styles, from fencing to boxing to wrestling. He read many books on working out and nutrition. He read a lot of Chinese philosophy. And… that’s about it. There was one novel I noticed in his reading list. Just one. Everything he read was all about his martial arts and acting.
Art Garfunkel had no ends to his reading. He’s already achieved his life goals and reads for pleasure. Bruce had nothing but ends in his reading. It was either this book serves my goal of becoming what I want to be or I never touch the thing.
If you want books to be useful to you, you have to be useful. You have to figure out how you are going to be useful, examples being: programmer, director, entrepreneur, sales professional, teacher, entertainer. Whatever, it could be whatever, although I don’t think “unskilled laborer at minimum wage job” counts.
If you don’t figure out how you’re going to be useful and then find books to aid you in usefulness, books will forever be useless to you. A final example and then I’ll dismiss class. Take a Christian. I use Christian instead of some other religious person because I am American. The Christian has their bible. They should probably read it if they want to be a good Christian, right? If a Christian doesn’t read a bible and they don’t attend a church, how are they not a useless Christian? They don’t know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. By reading the bible they gain some insight they can then apply to their life. But if they read the bible and don’t try to follow any of it, don’t practice it, and don’t profess to believe any of it, it’s just as useless to them as if they never read it.
Any book can be like that for us. Reading a book, in and of itself, is not useful or helpful, if that’s what you want out of it.
About Me
All you need to know when it comes to me writing about books is that I’ve read 1200+ of them.
Check out my Goodreads if you want to know what I’ve read: Adam’s books on Goodreads (1,288 books)
