Reading as a creative act

notes on intellectual work

Ink Valley by Jacek Yerka

I’d like to describe how my attitude towards reading has shifted in the past few years, in a direction that has made me a more effective thinker and writer. It’s a shift from reading as passive entertainment to reading as creative activity. This is specifically in the context of “intellectual work”—the kind of work I try to do in this newsletter, which is to explore ideas, understand them deeply, and explain them well. In the past year I’ve had notable success with “contributing to the online conversation,” through e.g. this post that made it to the front page of hacker news and this post that sparked lots of animated conversations on twitter. I credit a large part of this success to my shifting habits around reading.

The notes below are largely written in second-person “you should do X or Y” language, but none of the advice is meant to be taken too seriously; take this as a list of invitations to consider and see how well they work for you.

Reading is fundamentally not about the book; it’s not about going through the contents of the book in linear order and absorbing them. The thing that matters most in reading is your response to the text you’re engaging with and the questions you’re trying to answer. That’s how you should be thinking about reading – rather than being primarily occupied with what the author is trying to say, shift your focus to your own questions and response to what the author is saying. Treat reading like a conversation. What do you find clear and what do you find confusing? Is what the author’s saying right or wrong? How does this tie in to the other ideas and questions you’ve been thinking about?

Focus your efforts not on “finishing books” but on “answering questions.” Keep the questions you’re trying to answer top of mind. Every now and then, make a list of all the things you’re most curious about, and as you ponder the questions you can list the books or papers that seem relevant for each. The questions are primary; the books and papers are secondary. (Once you’ve formulated your list of questions and reading trails, you don’t necessarily have to take any action on it. It just helps to bring all the subconscious stuff to the surface, so that it can more effectively guide your intuitive choices around what to read next.)

Your reading list will be effectively infinite. Don’t attempt to keep this list organized. I used to maintain an organized database of more than a five hundred book recommendations in Notion, categorized by topic and author etc, and I barely touch it these days. Nowadays whenever there’s a book or paper I’d like to read I just make a note about it in my daily notes. But importantly, I don’t just jot down the name of the book/article – I also jot down why I’m interested in reading it in that moment. What question do I imagine it will answer? How do I expect the book to change me? I find that clearly stating the feelings and reasons behind my interest helps me prioritize more effectively, and it helps me relax about the high likelihood that I will never read the thing I’ve just jotted down.

Notice and relinquish your psychological attachment to the “book” as a form. The book is not the point of intellectual work (neither is the paper); it’s merely a tool that can be used in the service of it. It’s been incredibly helpful for me to slowly purge my romantic preciousness around the book as a physical object. In the past I’d keep all my books in pristine condition, never highlighting or annotating them (even for my PDF files!). Nowadays I highlight and annotate like a madman, though I’m still a little too obsessive about keeping my physical books tidy.

Don’t get too attached to your notes either. I’ve expended lots of effort on making my notes pretty, organized, and extremely thorough (see e.g. my notes on Beginning of Infinity or Bear’s neuroscience textbook), and this hasn’t proved particularly helpful to anyone. Aesthetics matter, but only for the things you or others are likely to look at often; most of your notes won’t meet this condition.

More thoughts on note-taking. In the past, when I took notes I was primarily focused on faithfully restating what the author said. This involved summarizing and saving lots of long passages from the book. Restating what the author said in your own words is good, but saving long passages is generally not – again, you likely won’t use those passages for anything in the future. (Unless you found a passage so good to the point of getting emotional about it, or you think it serves as a useful example of “good writing” to analyze for its technique.) In addition to summarizing, it’s very important when taking notes to editorialize – what do you actually think (and feel) about what they said? Was it thrilling or was it annoying, and why? Try to be specific – rather than “that was interesting,” try “I was interested in his depiction of Scholasticism and how wildly different it is from our current worldview.”

I’ve made this mental list of “what matters when reading,” which helps me avoid spending too much time on the wrong thing. In order, what matters most to least is:

• the output of your reading process (i.e. essays)

• the existence of the ideas in your brain

• the notes you take in your notebook

• the list of books you’ve finished

This is another instance of making the consumption less central and the act of creation more central. Your notes on the book are more important than the fact that you finished the book; but also, the way the ideas integrate into your mind (and actions) is more important than any stale notes you take; but further, it’s important that the ideas affect not just your mind but also other people’s minds. This is an act of service! You are trying to be a channel for good ideas in the competition against mediocre and bad ideas.

Now, one might complain that this way of thinking is very utilitarian: does reading only matter to the extent that it helps you write essays and change other people’s minds? Yes and no; I still read purely for leisure (currently enjoying American Pageant, A Tale for the Time Being, Alberts’ Essential Cell Biology, Hofstadter’s Surfaces and Essences). But also, I care about writing good essays, and I care making our culture better, and that requires a slightly different mindset than pure leisure when it comes to reading.

Let me give an example: before I started writing the Michael Levin essay, I set an explicit intent to understand what Michael Levin’s work is about and why it’s important, with a background goal of potentially writing an essay about it if I find something interesting. Now, this is a very different goal from “I just want to read Michael Levin’s papers for fun.” If the goal is fun and leisure, then I like going through papers linearly and just enjoying myself. But when the goal is answering a specific question, I take a much more active approach (in line with everything I’ve described): I’ll jump around between materials more, I’ll constantly be making note of the “questions I currently have and what to read next to answer them,” and I’m thinking often about “what are the most interesting tidbits I might want to include in a potential essay.” The point is, it’s a much more effortful process. If I just wanted to have fun I could spend an entire year just meticulously reading all of Michael Levin’s papers, and that could be nice,¹ but doing so would be antithetical to the objective I had. The point is to be clear with yourself about when you’re doing “work” and when you’re doing “leisure,” and cleanly separating the two.

Another important shift when reading is to not get “bogged down in prerequisites.” This is the impulse to make sure you’ve “caught up on all the literature” and “gotten all the required background knowledge” before you even contemplate asking questions of your own or contributing your own ideas. It’s understandable to think this way – there is so much that has been written, clearly every question we want to ask must have already been answered somewhere, right? Except no – there are many answers out there that the experts have not figured out yet, and that even you – yes, you, an amateur – can figure out. You can give yourself permission to do your own research, and just assume that you might be able to move to the “frontier of our knowledge” without a decade of preparation. Maybe you will be wrong, in which case you’ll learn something new; but if you are right, you will have discovered something groundbreaking.

Being more engaged and creative as a reader is a one specific instance of having more agency in general. It’s taking the driver’s seat with regard to your intellectual growth rather than merely letting someone else dictate it. My hope is that you learn this lesson earlier than I have. There is so much to discover, there are still ideas out there that are easy to find. Go forth and explore.

1. One other learning throughout all this is that I’ve come to appreciate the effortful, research-oriented mode of reading as fun in its own right. It’s just a different kind of fun from “passively reading to get immersed in a text.”