ℹ️ This is not a newsletter, nor is it a weekly update one can expect to be delivered every Sunday. These are just random thoughts or ideas I come across and pin down during the week.
If you organize your reading this way, your bookshelf won't be arranged by genre like a typical bookstore. Rather than having sections sorted by author, you will instead have sections for addressing different problems, likely sorted by clusters of books in order that you encountered them.
If you're a knowledge worker, think of training and improving as an athlete.
Tyler Cowen shared similar advice for reading. In this funny podcast he acknowledges that it took him 57 years to "learn how to read", and also advocates for compounded reading. Here are some notes I took from the interview:
People do not remember what you say, they remember how you say it.
—— Donald Trump
Not that I consider Trump to be a role model... but I found his Netflix documentary to be quite interesting. I didn't know about his background story, but what fascinated me the most was the way he understood how to bend reality to convey ideas.
Which brought me back to an interview with Daniel Ek and his obsession to optimize meetings. One does not think of meetings as something susceptible to optimization. But he realized that as an executive he spent most of his time in meetings. Hence the refining of these rituals was one of the most impactful things he could act on to boost his outcome.