I once heard a (perhaps apocryphal) story about a professor of mine at UVA. A student had asked him how many books he read a year and he said he would happily read a whole book, and view it as worth his time, if he took from it only one single idea that he could use in his teaching.
I like that idea. I try to read like that. Actively. Voraciously.
I think the word voracious is accurate here because mostly what I have for reading is an endless appetite. Sometimes I think this behavior is useful. Sometimes I think it’s a symptom of a problem.
A few synonyms for voracious: enthusiastic, eager, desirous, rapacious, unappeasable.
Sometimes I don’t read for the intellectual stimulation or pleasure of it, but because there’s a part of me that is searching for that one idea that will save me. That one idea that will finally allow me to see things as they truly are. Or I’m reading so that I’ll have so much stuff crammed in my head that I’ll always have at least one idea that might help someone I’m working with.
As I’ve described in this newsletter before, I’m a sufferer of too many interests.
Oddly, one of the outcomes of this malady is that I don’t always know what I’m interested in. Or perhaps, I don’t always know the best way to manage my interests.
Recently I’ve been talking to clients about this as well - how do we decide which interests to pursue?
I tend to have this conversation with people who have lots of interests and struggle to concentrate their time in a way they feel is productive, or those who have a lot of demands on their time and are constantly having to parse through potentially interesting opportunities.
This situation can create a feeling of mind melting overdrive. The desire to know or to learn can feel good. Being in demand can feel good. But at times it can also feel like your brain is being drawn and quartered.
Sometimes trying to find a solution to this problem is itself the problem.
Wanting to have a plan for how to navigate these questions can create more strain than simply maneuvering as they come. Exerting effort to try to pin down your interests - what you will and won’t say “yes” to - can make it even harder to attend to what you actually want to say yes to.
Here are two other things that make it a challenge:
Making choices to optimize for an image of yourself that you’re trying to create in the minds of other people (or one other person).
Doing things you don’t want to do, or even know you shouldn’t do, out of a sense of obligation to other people (or one other person).
In the first case you’re crafting an answer to the wrong question. You may succeed in building the image, but you’ll almost certainly find yourself atop the wrong mountain if/when you do. And in the second case, by prioritizing other people’s expectations of you rather than your own expectations of yourself, you’ll likely fill up your time with obligations such that you don’t have the time/space for your actual interests.
To this problem I say, in the words of Rick Rubin:
“pay attention to your network of friends, the things that you read, everything that you take in, what you watch. Are you being true to yourself today? Are you being true to who you were when that relationship started or when that interest started? […] I try my best to stay true to who I am in the world today and doing my best to support who that is.”
In this framework I might encourage myself, for example, to read a bit less. Rather than constantly searching for a new idea, pause and see what thoughts poke through, see where my natural interests take me in the absence of so much external input. What is it that I actually want to be reading about anyway?
I think of this as being more like a do-nothing farmer.
Now, do-nothing farmers don’t do nothing per se. But they do less. They observe the conditions around them, they adapt themselves to the natural crop production that occurs in their local environment.
They allow the system to orient itself. To the extent that they intervene, they are only working to cultivate the environment in which things might emerge.