Read What You Love Until You Love to Read
Naval
Naval Ravikant
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2019
⏱️ 5 minutes
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Summary
You should be able to pick up any book in the library and read it.
• Read what you love until you love to read: 0:00
• Read the original scientific books in a field: 1:44
• Don't fear any book: 2:43
• The means of learning are abundant, the desire to learn is scarce: 3:54
Transcript: http://nav.al/love-read
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before we go and talk about accountability and leverage and judgment, you've got a few tweets further down the line that I would put in the category of continuous learning. |
| 0:12.5 | There essentially, there is no skill called business, avoid business magazines and business class, study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers. |
| 0:25.6 | There's one other comment that you made in a periscope that was you should be able to pick up any book in the library and read it. |
| 0:31.9 | And the last tweet in this category was reading as faster than listening, doing as faster than watching. |
| 0:38.6 | Yeah, the most important tweet on this, I don't even have it in here, unfortunately, which is the foundation of learning is reading. |
| 0:46.0 | I don't know a smart person who doesn't read and read all the time. |
| 0:49.6 | And the problem is, what do I read? How do I read? Because for most people it's a struggle, it's a chore. |
| 0:55.0 | So the most important thing is to learn how to educate yourself and the way to educate yourself is to develop a love for reading. |
| 1:00.9 | So the tweet that is left out, the one that I was hinting at is read what you love until you love to read. |
| 1:06.7 | Is that simple? |
| 1:07.9 | Everybody I know who reads a lot loves to read and they love to read because they read books that they loved. |
| 1:14.6 | It's a little bit of a catch 22, but you basically want to start off just reading wherever you are and then keep building up from there until reading becomes a habit. |
| 1:23.0 | And then eventually you will just get bored of the simple stuff. |
| 1:25.8 | So you may start off reading fiction, then you might graduate to science fiction, then you may graduate to nonfiction, then you may graduate to science or philosopher mathematics or whatever it is, but take your natural path and just read the things that interest you until you kind of understand them and then you naturally move to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. |
| 1:45.2 | Now there is an exception to this, which is where I was hinting with what things you actually do want to learn, which is at some point there's too much out there to read. |
| 1:53.6 | And even reading is full of junk. There are actually things you can read, especially early on that will program your brain a certain way. |
| 2:00.1 | And then later things that you read, you will decide whether those things are true or false based on the earlier things. |
| 2:06.2 | So it is important that you read foundational things and foundational things I would say are the original books in a given field that are very scientific in their nature. |
| 2:15.9 | So for example, instead of reading a business book, pick up Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. |
| 2:20.6 | Instead of reading a book on biology or evolution that's written today, I would pick up Darwin's Origin of Species. |
| 2:27.0 | Instead of reading a book on biotech right now that may be very advanced, I would just pick up the eighth day of creation by Watson and Crick. |
| 2:34.4 | Instead of reading advanced books on what cosmology and what Neil deGrasse Tyson Stephen Hawking have been saying, you can pick up Richard Feynman six easy pieces and start with basic physics. |
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