Reading — Warren Buffett’s key to success
I’ve written before about my lifelong love of books and reading. I believe the single most important thing I do every day is read. I believe the most important skill I developed as a young kid was the ability to read, particularly complex, extended narratives. I credit my Dad with encouraging my reading habit.
Reading helped me develop concentration and focus, opened up my mind to endless ideas, worlds, and possibilities, and taught me how to think and write and speak clearly. The only way I got a Computer Science degree and a law degree was with a lot of reading, a skill I had developed long before I began my college and post-graduate studies.
Warren Buffet, the most successful investor in history, says he spends most of his time reading and thinking. Not talking on the phone. Not in meetings. Not typing emails. Reading. And thinking.
President Obama famously spent his evenings reading, thinking, and writing.
If reading is the secret sauce for Mr. Buffett and President Obama, it’s a good bet that reading can be your secret sauce too.
Reading is thinking. Reading is focusing. Reading is meditating. Reading is learning and debating and pondering and connecting ideas.
Scanning your Facebook timeline or Twitter feed isn’t reading, at least not in the sense that I mean it. Scanning your social media feed is like eating a cookie after dinner. Sure, it tastes good, but it doesn’t really do anything for you and is probably bad for you in excess and over time. The main course was what mattered for your health and happiness.
I write and read a lot, and I write about reading a lot, for two primary reasons. First, I write mainly for myself and my kids. I write to get my own thoughts clear in my own head. And when I’m gone, I want my kids to have the benefit of what I think I’ve learned through reading and hopefully encourage them to read too.
The second reason I write about reading is because I worry that we are losing our ability to concentrate for extended chunks of time on complex subjects, to separate fact from fiction, to learn and grow and change. To immunize ourselves against propaganda and horseshit. The signs are everywhere if you just look. I know a lot of intelligent people who have been completely and totally hypnotized by horseshit and have lost their ability to differentiate fact from fiction. People I love and respect.
Think about it for a second. We just elected a man as President who brags about not reading books. Is it any coincidence that a politician who prefers reality TV over books based his entire campaign on sensationalism, nativist close-minded fear-mongering, fake news and propaganda, and outright lies? Is it any coincidence that the first month or so of his Presidency has been chaos and disorganization and flailing around? (full disclosure: Hillary Clinton was the worst presidential candidate in the last 50 years and didn’t deserve to win either. What kind of greedy disconnected arrogant so-called Progressive sells her name and fame to Wall Street gamblers for untold hundreds of thousands of dollars?)
Is it any coincidence that the first thing authoritarian regimes usually do is ban books they don’t like?
I worry that the electing someone who is completely uninterested in the reading books is a harbinger of a bleak future, a future where truth doesn’t matter any more and bullshit, fear, and nonsense reign supreme.
The antidote is reading. Real books by real authors, not ghost-written screeds by alt-right whack jobs that spend hundreds of pages saying bad things about everyone who doesn’t think the way they think.
Reading is the antidote to ignorance and fear. Reading is the best way to learn and open your mind and develop empathy and compassion for other human beings.
Reading is the number one key to success.
