How about you read some Einstein instead?

The following quote by Donald Knuth has always resonated with me:

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”

I’m not so much against email but very much against trying to stay on top of things.¹

Trapped in the Never-Ending Now

“I’m not interested in your new work. I wanna see your best work.”

- Jerry Seinfeld

Humans have a well-documented recency bias.

Watching a football game happening right now feels exciting.

Watching the recording of a game that happened last week feels like chewing stale gum.

If you see someone scrolling social media, virtually everything they look was produced within the last 24 hours.

If you see someone reading a newspaper, it was almost certainly published that day.

If you see someone listening to a podcast, it’s likely a brand new episode released that week.

If you see someone watching a movie or a show, it's usually something brand new.

If you see someone reading a book, it’s probably something written, at most, a few months ago.

People prefer fresh content and all platforms happily optimize their algorithms to serve it.

As a result, everyone is trapped in a Never-Ending Now.

The Lindy argument

The desire to stay on top of things seems hardwired into our psychology.²

And yet, once you take a step back, it all seems pretty insane.

The endless cycle of ephemeral content feels exciting in the moment but is quickly forgotten.

What are the odds that something produced recently will stand the test of time?

How likely is it that any of the new stuff is better than the best works humanity has produced over centuries?

Research on the Lindy effect tells us: not very likely.

“If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not "aging" like persons, but "aging" in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!”

- Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Reading at the level you want to think

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” - Haruki Murakami,

Common advice for writers is to read at the level you want to write.

Before writing anything, read a chapter written by someone who writes the way you would like to write.

This, in my experience, works exceptionally well.

A related observation that I've found equally valuable is to read at the level you want to think.

When I read stuff written by shallow thinkers, my thoughts remain shallow.

When I read works by deep thinkers, my thinking naturally deepens.

My mind adapts to match the complexity and depth of the material I consume.

Popular content is easily accessible by definition and hence tends to be simplified and watered-down.

This is why the content you will be served by default is shallow.

Don’t live in the present

Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches. Check out the bestseller list for April 1935 or August 1978 if you don’t believe me. Originality is partly a matter of having your own influences: read evolutionary biology textbooks or the Old Testament, find your metaphors where no one’s looking…

- Rebecca Solnit

A few clicks away

Just like Donald Knuth, I have no interest in trying to stay on top of things.

Instead, I'm trying to get to the bottom.

And it only takes a few clicks to access the best works humanity has ever produced.

So why am I wasting my time reading mediocre “top of things” content?

This struck me when I was doing some reading on scientific creativity recently.

In one blog post, Maria Popova quotes from a book by Jacques Hadamard, who surveyed guys like Albert Einstein, George Polya, and Claude Lévi-Strauss to understand how they came up with ideas.

Jacques Hadamard himself was a Tier 1 mathematician. This book undoubtedly would contain deeper and more interesting insights than anything Amazon's or Google’s algorithm would serve me when I type in "creativity" or "scientific thinking."

There are more deep books like this out there than I could ever read.

Books like Ideas and Opinion by Albert Einstein are not just worth reading, but worth returning to again and again.

A ton of books, like, for example, Henri Poincaré’s Foundations of Science are freely available online.

A fantastic starting point to find more timeless works is this list of 100 Books that shaped a Century of Science American Scientist published a while ago.

I just need to remember that I have the option to ignore the freshly produced content algorithms shove right in front of me and seek out timeless works that have proven their worth over decades.

To make sure I don't forget, I just placed a little sticky note on my desk that says:

“How about you read some Einstein instead?”

1. Unlike Donald Knuth I think email is a wonderful tool for anyone trying to get to the bottom of things too. It’s still massively underappreciated how easy it is nowadays to get in touch with virtually anyone.

2. There is definitely a mimetic element to it. You want to read and watch what everyone else is reading and watching right now. See, for example, Ads don’t work that way.