Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

jovicailic.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 92 posts

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#41

Post by soperj »

300 wrote: post #18
quinndupont wrote: post #15

This person is either reading the lightest self-help type of books, or not really "reading" these books. I'm an academic, and my only job is to read books (and articles, etc), and I do my job at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I don't even read this many books. My advice for getting genuinely intelligent about a topic: read hard books, intensively, and leave the buffet-stats-counter stuff to those who just w…

After reading ~10 different authors on self-help, you realize they're all saying the same thing. So no, your assumption is not true. Yes, I did read a lot of light self-help books in the beginning, but their number in total is less than ~40. It's totally not important how many books you read, but their quality, we agree about that :) That's why I mentioned it's better to read more times the same book, than more books…

So over 10% is self-help books.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#42

Post by Paul_S »

sotojuan wrote: post #5
Paul_S wrote: post #2

I decided to read a book a day this year. So far I'm ahead at 336 and here are my counter opinions. "* It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5 different books on the topic once." Flat out no. Unless you're a freaking machine. Reading different books covering the same topic keeps me interested more. I don't mind the repetition then because I get the warm "I know that" feeling. "* Ey…

I agree that it's really easy to find time for reading. For us in tech, just replace your HN/Reddit time with reading and you'll be surprised how much you can read!

I have a strategically placed book at the office. Every time I go to get tea and I'm waiting for it to brew or waiting for the meeting to start I read a few pages. It sounds ridiculous but I'm confident I'll finish that book within a year - purely by adding up the brewing/waiting time.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#43

Post by peter303 »

quinndupont wrote: post #15

This person is either reading the lightest self-help type of books, or not really "reading" these books. I'm an academic, and my only job is to read books (and articles, etc), and I do my job at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I don't even read this many books. My advice for getting genuinely intelligent about a topic: read hard books, intensively, and leave the buffet-stats-counter stuff to those who just w…

One book every five days is both fairly remarkable yet not overly demanding for an intellectual. If books were my only source of reading, I would read that much too. But I read journals, newspapers and blogs too.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#44

Post by jyriand »

300 books in 4 years, basically it's one book per week if my math is correct. But still it seems like some kind of consumerism, where the main goal is to scrape together as much information as possible, hoping that you can use some of it in the future.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#45

Post by marketanarchist »

jyriand wrote: post #44

300 books in 4 years, basically it's one book per week if my math is correct. But still it seems like some kind of consumerism, where the main goal is to scrape together as much information as possible, hoping that you can use some of it in the future.

More than that, 300 / 52 / 4 = 1.44 books/week.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#46

Post by Paul_S »

chegra wrote: post #21

It would be interesting to see the list of actual books read.

If you go to goodreads you can find thousands of people reading ~80 books a year with their lists publicly available. If you want to see what software engineers read just click on a popular software book and keep clicking on profiles that have read it until you find one with enough books.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#47

Post by marketanarchist »

quinndupont wrote: post #15

This person is either reading the lightest self-help type of books, or not really "reading" these books. I'm an academic, and my only job is to read books (and articles, etc), and I do my job at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I don't even read this many books. My advice for getting genuinely intelligent about a topic: read hard books, intensively, and leave the buffet-stats-counter stuff to those who just w…

Isn't reading academic books and articles very different from average nonfiction books though?

In any case, I'm doing a book a week project myself and don't find it that challenging or time consuming.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#49

Post by brudgers »

peter303 wrote: post #43
quinndupont wrote: post #15

This person is either reading the lightest self-help type of books, or not really "reading" these books. I'm an academic, and my only job is to read books (and articles, etc), and I do my job at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I don't even read this many books. My advice for getting genuinely intelligent about a topic: read hard books, intensively, and leave the buffet-stats-counter stuff to those who just w…

One book every five days is both fairly remarkable yet not overly demanding for an intellectual. If books were my only source of reading, I would read that much too. But I read journals, newspapers and blogs too.

I agree that reading a book a week is not impossible. However, the author mentions reading ~1 hour per day. That's also doable for books that can be consumed at ~60 pages per hour, and for some topics (and some fiction) that's also not impossible. But for challenging books, particularly technical books and 'literature', 60 pages per hour is probably 2x-5x too optimistic.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#50

Post by johnnydoe9 »

mayermail1977 wrote: post #26

Interesting. The first point resonates with the famous quote made by Bruce Lee. "I fear not the man who has practiced 10000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10000 times."

That works for the kicks but not the book on a single topic though IMO, not only would reading the same book more than a couple times be boring but you wouldn't learn a whole lot.
Post reply on HN