Transcription
If you currently only read one book at a time, you seriously need to stop that right now. I have read thousands of books in my life, and out of all the experiments that I've run with my reading, being able to effectively read multiple books in parallel is one that has allowed me to read so much more, so much better, and so much faster.
Now, as someone who used to have a strong emotional, almost moral conviction that it was absolutely unacceptable to start a second book without finishing my first, I now believe that being able to overcome the emotional and mental barriers that I had towards this, and being able to effectively read multiple books at once, is an absolute superpower when it comes to effective learning and also having genuinely enjoyable and self-sustaining reading habits.
If you're like old me and think I'm completely insane, please hear me out because this might actually change reading for you. Let's get straight into how to train your emotional and rational brain to read a lot at once.
Now, firstly, I'm going to talk about training our emotional brain. The reason I call this the emotional brain is that very often the barriers that I used to have to my reading looked something like, "I'm not in the mood for reading" or "I don't feel like it." What this can actually be translated to is, "I don't feel like reading this book right now."
If we only have one option or one book, we end up never reading at all. Lots of the people that want to read more and ask me questions are almost always in the middle or at the beginning of a book that they started last week, last month, or ten years ago that they just never finished, and they never felt like going back to.
Lufthan, who was one of the most prolific writers and creators ever, when he was asked how he managed to do so much and didn't he burn out and want to throw away his manuscripts, what he said was yes. If he ever ran into a wall, he would just work on a different project because he realized that there's no point in kind of pushing through into creative or learning work, but rather switching to something else.
If he can do this for writing, I surely thought I should try this with reading, and it definitely works. Instead of reinventing how much I love or hate reading, depending on the book that I'm currently on and on my mood at the time, I just accept that my mood fluctuates constantly, and sometimes I'm just not in the mood for reading that specific thing.
I know that this is not just me because there is a whole host of studies that show that even throughout a single day, on average, there is a huge fluctuation in our mood. Sometimes I'm melancholy or less focused or more sad or more happy, and these kinds of emotional wavelengths and needs are things that I try to fill with specific books, rather than plastering the same book on every single time.
This also encourages me to take more of an emotional approach when it comes to books and see, depending on how difficult the language is or whether it's fiction or non-fiction, what’s the best version of me that can show up for the book. I think of a two-way emotional connection with it: Am I in the mood for this book, and what mood will this book put me in?
As I become more in touch with my emotional self and with the emotions in books, I am showing up as the more interested and motivated version of myself. As a huge fan of motivation, I know that this means that I'm a lot more focused, a lot quicker, a lot more effective and creative in taking in information and enjoying the experience. Rather than powering through something, feeling forced to do it, feeling silly and slow and disinterested, which then can lead to this background thing brewing in my brain that maybe I'm just a bad reader or I just don't enjoy doing this thing.
This emotional enjoyment and connection with books is something that I take one step further by adopting something from people who follow religion. Perhaps this might be one slight way to convince you to read a second book if you still strongly believe that it should only be one at a time.
I really, really adore how people who read things like the Bible or the Quran will read them almost every day or every week, and they will read these things repetitively. It kind of creates this safe space and this thing that you can escape to and take in every time that you need it, improving the overall quality of your life. As Pascal also said, "You should always keep something beautiful in your mind because it helps you deal with the bleakness of reality."
Now, I don't want to call all reality bleak, but I do think that there is a huge benefit in realizing that we have this book, whether it might even be a fairy tale from when we were younger or a fictional story that we adored from school. Anything that creates this beautiful space of escapism for us, that we can just leave as a background book that we play on repeat again and again and again.
A book that this year I go through all the time, at least once a week, is "The Untethered Soul." This is a book that I've reread so many times, but it really calms me down when I'm very anxious or overstimulated or I just want to relax. "Afternet winter," it’s inside to be ill-adjusted to a deranged world; it is not a breakdown.
As funny as it is, I think we all have a requirement for some grounding, and books can really provide a strong thing for us. Some science to this is what Huberman would call a linchpin behavior, which is basically creating positive associations with something that then allows us to want to do more of it.
So, if we have just one book that we adore and we are reading always in the background, it makes it more likely for us to pick a different book and to slowly fall back in love with reading again.
Now, I'm moving on to the second point, which is training our rational brain, and I believe this is where a lot of the issues come in. What I hear a lot, and what I used to firmly believe, is that we don't do a book justice if we are reading it alongside something else. I thought I would obviously forget where I've left things off, and I'm not going to be as focused, and that I'm never going to finish anything, and it just dilutes my experience and my attention.
I think this can happen, but it also can definitely be avoided, and I'm going to try and tell you how I do this effectively. So, when we were back in school, for example, we used to read a lot of books at the same time. I had a biology book, a chemistry book, a physics book, and a math book. These were effectively different topics, and I could remember where I left off. I never thought math was biology or vice versa.
I think this is something that I do when I read multiple books now. I don't mix genres, and what that means is that even though I technically can read sometimes 10 or 12 books at a time, I don't really read two fictional romantic stories at once because I want to mix them with one another.
Now I'm going to show what this specifically looks like for me, but before I do that, I just want to mention Girard's Law, which basically states that every complex system also evolved from a simple system that worked. So, basically, I'm not recommending that you go from one book to all of this, but that slowly adding one book at a time can lead you here.
Basically, I'm almost always reading one good new fiction book, one bad new fiction book, one good old fiction book, one non-fiction book which is good, one non-fiction book which is bad, one good philosophy book, one bad philosophy book, one interesting science book which may be old or new, and some background book which is kind of for my soul or to keep me happy and grounded.
I might also have one or two books in any genre that have just been recommended from other people for me to read. This is kind of all of the things in my potential library. What I do is depending on my mood or what I'm feeling like at the moment, I might just pick one out of them.
In my personal mental categorization, there's no overlap here, actually, and I can very distinctively imagine what these books are and the categories they fall into. So they don't technically interact with one another in such a way that I would no longer understand a book or that would be damaging.
Whatever this categorization looks like for you, depending on the types of books that you read, you can also create something personal that looks like this. What this does is that at any given time, I'm potentially in the mood to read one of these things.
Another extra layer that I add to this distinctiveness is to read them in different ways. Just by virtue of the fact that some of these books I need to take more notes on or less notes on, or that I want to read when I'm traveling or when I'm late in bed at night and I don't want two strong lights, I tend to use five different ways of reading, which are physical books (which is also my favorite), audiobooks, or I can read on my iPad, on my laptop or on my Kindle.
Because these are also connected to different sources, I then also kind of attach the book to the physical thing that I'm using with it so I can effectively distinguish them from one another. What's very important for the rational brain is that I find when I’m reading multiple books at once, I get very, very creative and I have a lot more context and richness in the storytelling or in the scientific content of the book if I mix them with one another.
For example, at the moment I am randomly reading two different books. One is on morality and one is on the stress of eating. For whatever reason, because I read them both in one day, I created a much closer connection with these books that wasn't necessarily there before.
So, for example, I am thinking of morality in terms of food morality, but I’m also thinking of the ethics of our food industry. This kind of combination adds a huge layer of richness and a lot more creativity to the books than was within them themselves.
I often find when I'm cross-matching books in this way, I can think of the philosophy of the behavior of the characters or I can think of the morals in physics, or I can think of the ethics in poetry. This sort of cross-combination means that I am approaching these books with a lot more enrichment, and this really, really helps establish my learning in a way that is so, so powerful.
Not only does it create memories and connect books very effectively together, but it also means that I am seeing these books in a very unique way. I have a lot more commentary or thoughts or feelings about them than I would have had if I was reading them in isolation.
I find this to be such a powerful way to learn more and to get more from the books that I'm reading. I think if I wanted to be, I could be very intentional; I'd read two books at the same time almost intentionally. I don't do this; I just randomize and do whatever I feel like reading, but I think that this is super, super effective and a huge area of potential if someone wants to look into this more.
As Store said, "Humans probe the cause of things even if there are none." As I'm reading, I like to take cause and effect from one book to the other and really enrich my mental experience and my learning that comes with them. I think that this is something that I was definitely missing when I was reading one book at a time.
My last training for effectively reading multiple books, or reading in general, is something that I've only accepted very recently. This is the fact that there are certain things that I don't memorize, and there are certain things that I do memorize.
I'm really, really bad with names and quotes and specific words, but I'm really, really interested and curious and I can memorize things like concepts and frameworks and thoughts and different sorts of creative processes. So I fully accepted that I'm completely outsourcing my memorization.
I highlight and underline lots of books, and I have a full video that I kind of go into detail about my quite simple method for taking notes effectively from books. This is something that I do very guiltlessly because I know there's no chance that I will remember this. It didn't happen when I read one book at a time, and it definitely doesn't happen when I read multiple books at a time. But the frameworks are things that I can fully integrate and learn a lot better.
It's very important to draw a line between what we can and cannot memorize, and I'm constantly testing my limits with trying to memorize more, read more, read less, slower, and faster. I feel that this approach is a lot more effective to find your optimum, whatever that looks like.
Lastly, if you made it this far and you're also interested in optimizing things and learning and becoming better, I really want to thank the sponsor of this video, 80,000 Hours, which has absolutely nothing to sell you but everything to teach you.
Very interestingly, 80,000 hours is a book that I summarized and commented on way before I even had a YouTube channel, back on my website, back in the day. Basically, what this is, is a book, a newsletter, a podcast, the cost of a bunch of research from Oxford University, which looks into what are the best ways for us to spend our life and spend our time.
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Looking into their different resources, see what are the best ways to make the world a better place for ourselves and for the future, and how to spend our life in the meantime. If you're unsure what to do with your life or with the 80,000 hours of working job time that we have, there's going to be a link in my description that will send you a career guide or some thoughts and prompts around what to do with yourself.
I would really recommend checking that out if you want to. Otherwise, thank you so much for making it with me so far. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Be kind to yourself and others, and don't believe everything you think. Thanks, bye!