If you asked whether I am a wide reader or a close reader when it comes to books, I would say I am probably the wide-reading type.
(Wide reading and close reading are not really opposites, so these "camps" barely exist anyway.)
Once I have read a book, I usually just copy out the points I thought were important or write a short reaction; I rarely go back through the whole text.
To begin with, I treat reading as entertainment, and I do not have much of a sense of purpose. I am not reading in order to apply things to work or daily life. (Specialized books are the exception.)
That said, reading is still clearly a powerful way to gather information. There is plenty of knowledge worth taking in.
Still, after reading so many books over the years, I had a sense that the knowledge you get from them — especially business books — had hit a kind of plateau.
The return on time invested had fallen off quite a bit compared with before.
So lately I have been reading novels.
And yet, recently, I went back and reread several of my favorite business books.
When I did, I found new things — wait, was this in here too? — and it was a surprisingly fresh reading experience.
Even with business books, I will keep picking up new ones when something looks interesting, but that was when I really felt that once you have found a book that hits you as "the one," you should read it again and again.
Suppose you meet a classic and take away some truth that feels like the real thing. You will often put that into daily life or business.
That truth is like a best practice: whether it helps universally or not, it is clearly better to have it as a thinking axis than not to have it.
As I wrote before about best practices, thinking along best practices matters a lot. When you already have so much to think about, best practices play the role of discipline.
By leaving one layer to best practice, you get the benefit of focusing on higher-layer thinking.
And here is the point of this post: I have lately started to notice that you probably cannot recall a large number of those best-practice thinking axes all at once.
Say you have a favorite business book. When you actually face a problem, you will likely remember almost none of the book's gist — and almost none of the parts you thought were especially important. Even if you do recall something and use it as a thinking axis, one or two ideas is probably the limit.
Sadly, when you think, you are not always in a flow state suited to thinking — and maybe my head is just weak — but the human brain is not built that conveniently.
One reliable approach might be to make something like a checklist for each situation, so you can always look it up.
(Ex: this best practice for finance, that one for hiring, and so on.)
Even with something as universal as philosophy, turning it into flesh and blood and recalling it at an unconscious level is extremely hard — and you will likely get stuck at the stage of applying it to the situation in front of you.
Even so, just having one or two of those best practices is already a powerful weapon, and people and organizations that hold that kind of thinking axis in each domain are strong.
For now, when I find a classic that feels like "the one" (it does not have to be a book), even if people call it thinking-stopped, I want to read it over and over until I can recall it as my own thinking axis.
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