I only read half a book in september...

Hey there!

It’s been another crazy week on my end. Everything’s picking up near the end of another year, so now I find myself in between 4 things:

• Indexing my forthcoming book (cover reveal coming soon)
• Working 40 hours a week in a day job
• Grading for my orange belt & competing in another karate tournament in October
• Coming up with ideas for a new podcast (currently getting the set ready)

See, life only gets crazier, and sometimes it feels like it’s downright impossible to find time to read and to educate ourselves.

Look, I am ashamed to admit that between moving to a new apartment, starting a new job, writing weekly, getting a book published, and martial arts, I’ve only read half of a book in September.

It sucks, because I thought moving to this apartment would have me sitting in an armchair every night, reading long philosophy books over John Coltrane’s Blue Train.

Instead, when I get home from work, it feels like the chore list never ends. Cooking leads to cleaning to grocery runs, grocery runs lead to looking up chairs on Facebook Marketplace, and then it all ends with me staring at a blank wall that needs some art on it.

But I do have to admit that taking a break from reading has been nice, and I would even say that taking a seasonal reading break is necessary for lifelong students.

That’s what I want to talk about today and give you a few ideas about how to live your life through the books you read, not in them.

The problem with reading too much 

I have a beaten-up copy of Bukowski’s collected poems, and one line from ‘The Genius Of The Crowd’ always confused the shit out of me.

‘Beware those who are always reading books.’

Huh?

When I was younger, I vowed to drink up all of the world’s best knowledge. I want to be well-read in philosophy, in business, in literature, in poetry while bragging that I’ve read Ulysses 3 times.

But lately, I realised that there’s something missing from this whole shtick of reading my way to a good life.

In fact, knowledge is useless unless it’s combined with life experience.

Think about all the books/media that have changed your life.

They didn’t change your life just because you consumed them and called it a day. No, they changed your life because they triggered a new way of looking at a certain area of your life.

One example from my life is cooking.

I grew up in a family of great cooks. My dad can whip up 4 plates served over perfect rice in an hour, and my mom makes the most insane dumplings from scratch.

So, whenever I tried to cook as a kid, I was always getting ‘suggestions’ that annoyed the shit out of me and turned me away from the art altogether.

But now that I have (for the first time) become the Executive Chef of my own kitchen in my own apartment, I knew I had to rewrite that story.

One night, I was scrolling Instagram on the floor after unpacking all my boxes, and a clip of Thomas Keller in The Bear came on. He said something that blew my mind.

‘We cook to nurture people.’

But for so long, cooking for me was all about living up to my parents’ standards, and I was excited to see what I could do if I looked at cooking through Chef Keller’s eyes.

That night, I had my partner over for steak frites. I prepped every ingredient with love and cooked them with precision. When I saw her stuffing her face with food I’d cooked after a long day of work, it clicked, and I’ve been in love with cooking ever since.

The same applies to all the books we’ve read.

A book changes us when the right idea combines with life experience.

So, in a way, reading a lot for the sake of it is a giant waste of time if those books don’t speak to your life directly.

In other words, there are no nice-to-have-read books, only those that are meant for us.

In fact, if our only goal is to read a lot to prove a point, sometimes we’ll become detached from reality and plunge into fantasy.

You know the type of people who live through books? They’re annoying as crap to talk to because we sense that all their ideas are just talk. They don’t seem like real people because they haven’t embodied any of the lessons from their readings.

Whereas if we deliberately combine life experience with reading, it will save us a lot of time and encourage us to do what an education is supposed to do in the first place:

To lead us to a better life.

And here’s a set of protocols to put this philosophy of reading into practice

Protocol 1: Awareness alone is curative