by Slava Akhmechet

I try to read a lot, though I’m not nearly as voracious a reader as people who have a reputation for it. I have no idea how Marc Andreessen or Patrick Collison read as much as they do, especially given the enormous demands on their time. The most plausible explanation is that they’re aliens with ungodly information processing abilities. I’m human, so I shoot for 40 pages every day, and fail maybe a third of the time. That works out to about 10,000 pages or ~20 books every year.

Reading twenty books a year gets you a lot. Consider: one book gives you more knowledge about a subject than almost every other person on the planet, because people don’t read. Two books on the same subject give you more knowledge than almost any reader, because people don’t read two books about the same thing. How many people who read The Power Broker went on to read a second book about Robert Moses? I’d wager not many.

Beyond two books on a subject, there is a long utility dip. People who bothered to read more than two books about Robert Moses, are either obsessed with him or study him for a living, which means they’ve read much, much more about him. So two books on a subject, at least with respect to competitive edge, is an inflection point. After you read two, you get diminishing returns.

There is a way to get around this limitation. A single book is a pinhole view of the world set up by the author. You have no input into its contents, and therefore cannot change the orientation of this view. But you do choose the books you select. That means you can stitch together multiple pinhole views into a unique lens to examine the world — one that no one else will have unless they use the same list of books to stitch together the same lens.

For example, you can look at the world through history of technology that became ubiquitous. Here is one possible list of books to stitch together this lens: The Victorian Internet, Empires of Light, The Wright Brothers, The Network, Hackers. Very few people in the world read all five of these books. Even within Silicon Valley, where everyone’s living depends on creating new ubiquitous technology, your understanding of how technology becomes ubiquitous will be in the 95th percentile (and likely higher) if you read these five. You will now be armed with a unique instrument that few others possess, and assuming twenty books per year, it only took you three months to acquire.

Another example is to look at American history and the dynamics of failure by studying biographies of U.S. presidents who sought reelection and lost. There were ten: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, Benjamin Harrison, William H. Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and now Donald J. Trump. It may be difficult to stomach ten presidential biographies in a row, but it’s doable to read five. That’s enough to pick up a new lens. Another three months; another sophisticated instrument to examine the world at your disposal.

I settled on clusters of five and almost never read a single book in isolation. Less than five feel lacking; more than five gets repetitive. Every cluster has a goal of the form “study X through Y”. Study American history through technological expansion, or study failure through one term presidents are just a few examples. I try to be creative and make Y unusual. For instance, everyone likes to read about presidents who are believed to be successful. A simple trick is to inverse it and read about unsuccessful ones instead. Or skip the presidents altogether, and read about vice presidents. It doesn’t matter what Y is because you’re trying to study X, and it’s more fun to make Y unusual.

I don’t bother diversifying books within a cluster by time period, cultural or linguistic background of the author, or anything like that. I simply try and find the best books on the subject. Sometimes they turn out to be diverse along some axes; other times they’re homogenous. I never read forewords or prefaces and always finish every book in a cluster. I prefer paper to digital, and used books to new ones. I never take notes or, god forbid, create flashcards. My goal is to suck the juice out of a book, not to hold on to pieces of the carcass. If I ever need to remember a specific detail, it’s always waiting for me on the shelf.

This system gives me four new instruments per year, each capable of inspecting the world in a different way. Rather than pick the instruments at random I try to be strategic and collect them into a mental lab. I visualize the lab as a room with multiple stations. Each station has a collection of related instruments on it. When I’m faced with a problem I can go to the right station and examine the problem through the instruments available on that station. All this is physically materialized on my bookshelf. Some day when I become less mobile, I plan to dedicate a literal room to it.

I don’t maintain lists of books I want to read, and don’t plan a sequence of instruments to acquire in advance. Once I’m done reading a cluster of books, I ask myself: what instrument can I add to double the utility of my lab? Another way to phrase this question is “what is the most important subject that I know the least about?” It’s easy to think of many possible answers to this question; I then pick the answer that seems the most interesting, construct a new cluster of five books, and recurse.

Four instruments per year may not seem like much, but consider: in five years you will have about twenty mental instruments, all of which interrelate and reinforce each other. In ten years you will have an impressive lab of forty instruments. And it will be unique— no other mental lab on the planet will be able to inspect the world in the way that yours can.

Because the instruments are constructed from books, they are endlessly upgradeable. Sometimes you might choose to upgrade an existing instrument to increase its power and get higher resolution, rather than acquire a new one. You can do that one book at a time. To use the examples above, you can read another book about ubiquitous technology, or another book about a one term president.

If you organize your reading this way, your bookshelf won’t be arranged by genre like a typical bookstore. Rather than having sections for e.g. biographies, essays, novels, military history, all sorted by author, you will instead have sections for addressing different problems, likely sorted by clusters of books in order that you encountered them. The arrangement won’t make sense to anyone except you. But you’ll be able to find what you need instantaneously, and your capacity to examine the world from different perspectives will dramatically increase.

Waiting five, ten, fifteen years to build a mental lab may seem like an impossibly long time. But you don’t have to wait. It’s a pleasure to read about the Wright brothers, or proliferation of the telegraph, or early computer culture! And in a measly three months you’ll have acquired a fresh way of looking at the world. Already you will be a different person. Then you keep going, and keep looking for new instruments to double the utility of existing ones. And in one year? You will look back at today’s version of yourself and find it unrecognizable.

TL;DR: Read ~40 pages/day, assume 30% failure rate. That’s 10k pages and ~ 20 books annually. Pick a problem, and read clusters of five books to study that problem from a unique perspective. Visualize each cluster as an instrument to inspect the world. Collect instruments into a mental lab, with various stations for related instruments. You can upgrade the instruments one book at a time. Have your bookshelf reflect this mental image. Win the decade, not the day. Start now and never stop.

我是如何阅读的

我尝试多读书，尽管我并不像那些以此著称的人那样是一个贪婪的读者。我不知道马克·安德森（Marc Andreessen）或帕特里克·科利森（Patrick Collison）是如何在如此繁忙的时间中读那么多书的。最合理的解释是，他们可能是拥有非凡信息处理能力的外星人。我是人类，所以我每天的目标是读40页，但大约三分之一的时间会失败。这样算下来，每年大约能读到10,000页，或大约20本书。

每年读二十本书能让你获得很多知识。考虑一下：一本书能让你对某个主题的了解超过地球上几乎所有其他人，因为人们不读书。关于同一主题的两本书能让你获得的知识超过几乎所有读者，因为人们通常不会读关于同一主题的两本书。有多少读过《权力经纪人》（The Power Broker）的人接着又读过关于罗伯特·摩西（Robert Moses）的第二本书？我敢打赌，没多少。

在某个主题上，读超过两本书之后，知识的收益会迅速降低。那些愿意读超过两本关于罗伯特·摩西的书的人，要么对他痴迷，要么是以此为生的研究者，这意味着他们读过的书会更多。因此，在竞争优势方面，关于某个主题的两本书是一个转折点。读完两本书后，收益递减。

有一种方法可以绕过这个限制。一本书是作者设定的世界的一个针孔视角。你对其内容没有任何输入，因此无法改变这个视角的方向。但你可以选择你所选的书。这意味着你可以将多个针孔视角拼接成一个独特的视角来审视世界——这是其他人所没有的，除非他们使用相同的书单拼接出相同的视角。

例如，你可以通过普及的技术历史来观察世界。以下是一个拼接此视角的可能书单：《维多利亚时代的互联网》（The Victorian Internet）、《光的帝国》（Empires of Light）、《莱特兄弟》（The Wright Brothers）、《网络》（The Network）、《黑客》（Hackers）。世界上很少有人读过这五本书。即使在硅谷，那里每个人的生计都依赖于创造新的普及技术，如果你读了这五本书，你对技术如何变得普及的理解将处于95百分位（可能更高）。你将拥有一个独特的工具，其他人很少具备，而且假设每年读二十本书，这仅需三个月就能获得。

另一个例子是通过研究那些寻求连任但失败的美国总统的传记来观察美国历史和失败的动态。这十位总统是：约翰·亚当斯（John Adams）、约翰·昆西·亚当斯（John Quincy Adams）、马丁·范布伦（Martin Van Buren）、本杰明·哈里森（Benjamin Harrison）、威廉·霍华德·塔夫脱（William H. Taft）、赫伯特·胡佛（Herbert Hoover）、杰拉尔德·福特（Gerald Ford）、吉米·卡特（Jimmy Carter）、乔治·H.W.·布什（George H.W. Bush），以及现在的唐纳德·J·特朗普（Donald J. Trump）。连续读十本总统传记可能会让人感到难以忍受，但读五本是可以做到的。这足以让你获得一个新的视角。再花三个月；又一个复杂的工具供你用来审视世界。

我选择五本书为一组，几乎从不单独阅读一本书。少于五本会觉得不够；多于五本则会显得重复。每组的目标都是“通过Y研究X”。例如，通过技术扩展研究美国历史，或通过一任总统研究失败，这只是几个例子。我尽量富有创意，让Y变得不寻常。例如，大家都喜欢读关于被认为成功的总统的书。一个简单的技巧是反向思考，转而阅读关于失败的总统的书。或者完全跳过总统，阅读关于副总统的书。Y是什么并不重要，因为你是在研究X，而让Y变得不寻常更有趣。

我不在一个组内按时间段、文化或作者的语言背景等进行书籍多样化。我只是尽量找到该主题上最好的书。有时它们在某些方面可能会多样化；有时它们则是同质的。我从不阅读前言或序言，总是完成每组中的每本书。我更喜欢纸质书而不是电子书，喜欢二手书而不是新书。我从不做笔记，也不，天哪，制作抽认卡。我的目标是榨取一本书的精华，而不是保留残余。如果我需要记住某个具体细节，它总是在书架上等着我。

这个系统每年给我提供四个新工具，每个工具都能以不同的方式审视世界。我不是随机选择工具，而是尽量有策略地将它们收集到一个心理实验室中。我将实验室想象成一个有多个工作站的房间。每个工作站上都有一组相关的工具。当我面临一个问题时，我可以去正确的工作站，通过那个工作站上可用的工具来审视问题。所有这些在我的书架上都得到了物理体现。总有一天，当我变得不那么灵活时，我计划为它专门腾出一个房间。

我不维护想读书的书单，也不提前计划要获取的工具顺序。一旦我完成了一组书的阅读，我会问自己：我可以添加什么工具来使我的实验室的效用翻倍？换句话说，最重要的主题是什么，而我对它了解最少？想到这个问题的许多可能答案很容易；然后我选择看起来最有趣的答案，构建一个新的五本书的组，并递归。

每年四个工具可能看起来不算多，但考虑一下：五年后你将拥有大约二十个心理工具，它们相互关联并相互增强。十年后，你将拥有一个令人印象深刻的四十个工具的实验室。而且它将是独一无二的——地球上没有其他心理实验室能以你所能的方式审视世界。

由于这些工具是由书籍构成的，它们是可以不断升级的。有时你可能选择升级现有的工具，以增加其能力并获得更高的分辨率，而不是获取新的工具。你可以一次读一本书来做到这一点。使用上面的例子，你可以再读一本关于普及技术的书，或者再读一本关于一任总统的书。

如果你以这种方式组织阅读，你的书架将不会像典型书店那样按体裁排列。与你的书架上没有传记、散文、小说、军事历史等分类，而是会有针对不同问题的部分，可能按你遇到这些书的顺序分组。这样的排列对其他人来说毫无意义。但你将能够瞬间找到你需要的东西，而你从不同视角审视世界的能力将大大增强。

等待五年、十年、十五年来建立一个心理实验室可能看起来是一个不可能的漫长时间。但你不必等待。阅读关于莱特兄弟、或电报普及、或早期计算机文化的书是件愉快的事情！而在短短三个月内，你将获得一种全新的观察世界的方式。你将成为一个不同的人。然后你继续前进，不断寻找新的工具来使现有工具的效用翻倍。在一年内？你会回头看今天的自己，发现自己变得面目全非。

总结：每天读约40页，假设30%的失败率。这每年大约是10,000页和约20本书。选择一个问题，阅读五本书的群组，以独特的视角研究该问题。将每个群组视为审视世界的工具。将工具收集到一个心理实验室中，设有不同工作站供相关工具使用。你可以一次通过一本书来升级工具。让你的书架反映这种心理图像。赢得十年，而不是一天。现在就开始，永不停歇。