You Don't Have Time to Read Books That Won't Change Your Life

Sept 6, 2024 edit: added one sentence to clarify the role of reading for pleasure.

The Internet Archive provides 44 million books you can borrow for free, and Amazon's English language catalog contains at least a few dozen million book titles for sale. These two catalogs don't overlap completely, but I'll take the IA number as a conservative estimate: 44 million is roughly how many books are available to you as an English reader today.

Let's assume that 90% of those are objectively irrelevant to you because they are too niche or specialized for your needs. That leaves 4.4 million books you could read and potentially get something out of. The "potentially" is important, because most of them won't do much for you. In fact, the vast majority of those 4.4 million will be a net opportunity cost for you, because they will suck your time away from reading the few among them worthy of being called Damned Good Books.

A Damned Good Book is a book that changes your life. As you read it, you become a different person.

It may be because it gives you knowledge that is both actually useful to you in practice and it sticks to your mind, entering your life-long mental toolkit like a new little superpower.

It may be that it offers you a new framing that immediately clicks for you, and you'll never see the world the same again.

Or it could gently plant an idea in your head that later flowers into something that makes a huge difference for the trajectory of your life.

Anyone who has read more than a few books knows what I'm talking about—they're the ones that give you pleasure at the deepest level, fulfilling much more than your immediate need to be entertained. But the frequency with which one encounters Damned Good Books varies from person to person. It depends on your age, cultural background, what you read before, what you're trying to do, and more. In my case, I started as a child with perhaps one Damned Good Book out of thirty titles I read, but I've gotten much better at choosing books since then. Now the number is closer to one out of six. How about you?

Unless you keep a neat record, it's not easy to come up with a number, but I can help you. First, roughly how many books do you read in a year?

You:
Something like
fivetwelvetwentythirtysixtya hundredzero per year.

Now think about the one hundred books you read in the past years circa (if you're younger than that, try to answer the following question by extrapolating to one hundred from the number of books you've actually read). Roughly how many of those have stayed with you, in one way or another, and will stay with you for the rest of your life? It's okay if you're not entirely sure. We only need a very rough estimate here.

You:
Maybe five or sotwelve or sotwenty or sothirty or sosixty or soa hundred or sozero
out of a hundred.

With Damn Good Books out of your last hundred, that means that you're catching one of them approximately every titles you try reading.

Damned Good Books are gifts from the universe to you. They're made for you, and each is timed to open itself to you when you need them—never too soon, never too late.

Damned Good Books are better than plain "books", because by changing you they allow you to grow, and to grow is the only way to move on to the next stage in your life, whatever stage you choose to make it. Changing is synonymous to being alive. If there is any non-changing to be done, you can leave it to the rocks: they can do it better than you anyway.

One might object that reading books for pleasure and to escape reality is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. I agree, with a caveat: you can do those things better with Damned Good Books. The pleasure of Damned Good Books is better than the pleasure of books, and likewise for reality-escaping. Damned Good Books are how you marry pastime with value.

We've found that one every books you read is a Damned Good Book. That means that, out of the 4.4 million books that you might try reading, 220,000 books would be capable of blowing your mind anew, and at exactly the right time you need it.

That's life-changing books. Let that sink in for a while. You'd need 1,100 six-shelf Ikea BILLY bookshelves to hold them all.

To me, that re-defines what "reading" means. It's a treasure hunt. A search among piles of inert rocks for the magic gems that will make the You of the future. I'm not here to dictate anyone's life goals, but if you were to choose, as one of your goals, to maximize the number of Damned Good Books you read before you die, I doubt you would regret it.

Maximizing that number means being ruthless in selecting which books you pick up in the first place, and brutal in quitting those that, after reading for a while, turn out to be less than damned good. This is an art, not a science, but it gets much easier once you learn to let go of your inertia and your weird sense of duty and your let's-give-it-a-fourteenth-chance mindset. Don't ask yourself "can't I read one more page?"—ask "is this already beginning to transform me or not?"

Even ruthless won't really be enough. Assuming you're a very fast reader, and made even faster by the sheer awesomeness of each of your Damned Good Books, you could perhaps read one every four days (including some time to quickly discard non-life-changing books). Then it's going to take you 2,411 years to read them all.

So don't let me hold you any longer. Go find the next one. ●