Something about the way they looked at life resonated with me, probably because I was dating an extremely troubled tech bro who was also constantly telling me how I might fix my life (and his).īack then, in those miserable days of 2017, I had also started writing book reviews. Eventually, I stumbled across a whole ecosystem of self-help bros telling me how I might fix my life, and started reading them religiously. Circa 2017, I spent day after day reading shitty blog posts that doled out relationship and self-improvement advice-guiltily, by myself, and in an incognito tab, the way most people consume porn. Mostly, it started with a bad relationship.
You may be wondering what on earth I-someone who, insofar as I’ve made a professional name for myself, has done it as a book critic-was even doing in this part of the internet.
Months into a pandemic that seemed to have no end, I stumbled across this course and wondered: How exactly would a self-help bro teach me how to read better? Might I gain some clarity on what life-improving benefits we actually derive from reading? And what would I be like when I emerged from this 13-day course a fully optimized reading bodhisattva capable of absorbing a book’s infinite wisdom with a single glance? I got out my credit card. Ryan Holiday is also the creator of Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge, a $50, 13-day course developed in 2019 whose promotional page promises that the course will teach me how to “Remember more of what you read to reach your true potential” and “Make more time for reading by replacing dead time with reading.” The page features no less than four red “Buy now” buttons. What would I be like when I emerged from this 13-day course a fully optimized reading bodhisattva capable of absorbing a book’s infinite wisdom with a single glance? “We’re not just looking random pieces of information. He advocates reading extremely long books, buying books over borrowing them from libraries, and taking extensive notes by hand on index cards, which he then files away into categories. Holiday writes about his own reading habits with messianic fervor. He runs a website called The Daily Stoic, which publishes articles on “How to Plan Your Day Like Marcus Aurelius,” and from which you can buy a pewter bust of Seneca or a medallion that says “Memento Mori” on it. He’s also a vocal proponent of Stoicism-as in, the ancient Greek school of philosophy.
The king of reading as a form of self-improvement, though, is undoubtedly Ryan Holiday, the author of Ego Is the Enemy, The Obstacle Is the Way, and Stillness Is the Key, as well as books on marketing, “media manipulation,” and the trial that ultimately took down Gawker Media. “You get 90% of the meaning with about 50% of the words.” Manson, too, maintains his own lists of “Best Books of All Time.” “Scan for important words only,” he advises.
James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, reads 20 pages of a book every morning and maintains several “Best Books of All-Time” lists, including a list of “Books with the Most Page-For-Page Wisdom.” Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, lays out in one of his blog posts how to read faster and remember more of what you read. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.Īt some point in the past few years, I’ve noticed that a certain kind of wildly popular self-help guru-male, young, obsessed with optimizing one’s life-has gotten particularly intense about reading.