There's an unquestioned agreement that reading books is a productive way to spend time, which you notice in the peculiar criticism adults sometimes make of children - if a kid is called a couch potato, you can bet he's holding a remote control, not a book. This specific example goes away as you get older but we don't seem to overturn the conviction that reading a book is a smart activity - when I tell people I've almost read one thousand books since 2010, they assume it's reflective of a productive habit; nobody asks if I've just been rereading the Goosebumps series over and over. I don't raise this point to suggest I feel any differently, though, about the association of reading books to better intelligence. The other day, an innocent reference to reading books led me into an unplanned rant about bad thinking, a frothing tirade I capped off by declaring I couldn't trust anybody's judgment unless that person read at least one book per month. I've taken a few days to calm down, and now I'm ready to state TOA's official position on the matter - although the exact count of books is irrelevant, anyone interested in becoming a better thinker should be reading at least one page of a book every day.
Why specifically a book, though? Why not just words, organized into sentences and paragraphs, regardless of whether they form part of a book? It's all reading, which I've heard (or is it read?) that we collectively do more of than any other cohort of people that's ever lived on this planet. The internet enabled the creation of an effectively infinite supply of reading material, some of it good (and the rest found on TOA); technologies such as the smart phone have unlocked, accelerated, and simplified access to these sources. People today also communicate far more frequently in print, using texts and emails to create a constant stream of reading material for and about each other; we are all readers, whether we crack open a book or not. But in my mind, these other reading materials are not appropriate substitutes for a book, at least in the sense of their capacity to improve thinking.
The book's biggest advantage for cultivating thinking is the way it empowers a reader to ignore certain impulses encouraged by other mediums. This may sound like a direct shot at the hyperlink, and it's certainly in mind - if I start to disagree (or simply become bored) with a digital article, I can just click to something else. But without intending to invite a relative comparison, this was also true of the newspaper age, when a reader could always switch to one of the other columns, or learn to skip troublesome sections (1) (2). The book solves for this issue by committing the reader to battle through distractions, and the reader becomes more likely to reap the rewards for sticking to the task. This may also make for better listeners, and more patient ones, because books condition readers to slog through the conversational torrent of related but uninteresting remarks, which seems to seek out good listeners like a mosquito picks out sweaty forearms. If people asked me for advice about how to have better conversations with those holding different views from them, I'd start by recommending a book or two that their opponents might agree with as preparation for enduring the task, because in the midst of a conversation there is no option to click over to a more agreeable person.
The way a book disarms weapons of mass distraction is central to the way I think about thinking. Despite the various expressions attesting to the phenomenon, I'm not so sure it's possible to interrupt a thought - it's either completed, or it dies on the spot. Even if I'm wrong about this detail, I know I find nothing more destructive to my thought process than a series of stops and starts; May Sarton thought the surest way ruin a productive morning was to make lunch plans. The problem with thinking, I think, is that it doesn't timebox, which means it can't be slotted neatly into a half-hour on a calendar; thinking rarely stops at a convenient place to pick up later just to accommodate a demand on your time. It seems to me that the only way to have a valuable thought is to make as much time as life allows for thinking, with the dedicated portions of the day being as distraction-free as possible.
The points I've made so far - minimizing distractions, committing to the task, staying patient, and protecting blocks of unbroken time - are starting to look like a list of necessary ingredients for clear thinking. The way a book engages with a reader unintentionally emphasizes these qualities, which is partly why I champion the book as a tool for improving thinking. But it's also true that this isn't a quality exclusive to books - hyperlinked articles can be printed on paper, sterilizing the viral quality of internet reading, while intentional choices can expose anyone to new perspectives or competing points of view. This is why I think the next feature might be the most relevant, as it's almost unique to the form - reading a book teaches the reader to assess information in the context of the issue at its core.
A book, in other words, is a multi-faceted explanation of a central concept. This isn't something readers will understand if most of their information about a topic comes from scattered sources, who will at best produce tangentially related reading materials; the worst-case scenario for these readers is a series of non-sequiturs as the browser moves from link to link, opening one short work after another. The challenge created by this structure is the lack of direction regarding the hierarchy of information - is the current idea a fundamental concept, or merely a supporting player? A report describing the isolated side effects experienced by one among many thousand vaccine volunteers could be a warning alarm for skeptics, or a triumphant data point for those who expected many more problems; the referral, whether via hyperlink or otherwise, often offers little context for the fact and even less clarity regarding its overall relevance to any number of ongoing discussions. The same detail presented in a book, whether it be in support or opposition to a vaccine, would show in plain terms how the fact stitches itself into a broader pattern of observations that support a conclusion, and this gives the reader the tools for reaching an appropriate interpretation. Without these tools, the result is the commonly observed occurrence of people trying to fit each and every new piece of information into an existing worldview, which is often centered around an arbitrarily chosen foundational concept that might never be more than a supporting footnote in a meticulously crafted book.
The way a book can narrow its many pages down to a central focus is reminiscent of a distinction made in leadership thinking - is something urgent or important (3)? The book, by encouraging a hierarchy of ideas to form naturally around the main pillar, reinforces the role of weight, nuance, and relevance in terms of understanding the world; a book is, in other words, capable of making a distinction between what's important and what's not. On the other hand, the reading that happens outside the book is rarely positioned for this task because it must always present itself as urgent - URGENT - in order to attract enough notice to ensure its own survival, which is threatened by the daily avalanche of new content generated in the digital age; the rare news that's (merely) important might fall to the wayside if it does not attract fresh attention. A person who can't make the time for reading books seems to drift toward becoming interruption-driven, forever pulled downstream by the relentless undertow of urgency, and I fear in the long-term this has a corrosive effect on the capacity for making the distinction between urgent and important. The interruption-driven live on the fuel of urgency, but with each shared link or recounted tale they move imperceptibly closer to the fate of the malfunctioning smoke detector, whose constant urgency renders its dependents incapable of divining the life-saving alarm.
If these complaints sound vaguely familiar to you, reader, I can offer a potentially clarifying analogy - what I'm getting at is the equivalent of how a real conversation differs from small talk. The disorienting effect of jumping back and forth from one short article to another is a lot like that mental exhaustion you get at the end of a day consumed by small talk; good luck synthesizing all the chatter into a common theme. Small talk is an easy target - I don't know anyone who claims to enjoy it (though I can think of one or two who, with a dash of honesty, might sing a different tune). And yet, despite a generally low approval rating, small talk seems a permanent feature of the human experience, and one of many explanations for this is safety - in small talk, nobody gets hurt. This is because small talk is unchallenging, which means there is no possibility of harm; a real conversation means a challenge, particularly in the sense of someone's beliefs or assumptions, and this leaves one or both parties exposed to harm in a way that's not possible when commenting on the weather.
This criteria of challenge is why my comparison to small talk might be more appropriate than initially meets the eye. The challenge presented by all forms of reading share a surface similarity because any sentence or paragraph has the capacity to challenge a reader, but unlike with the short form a book challenges thinking in a way that is almost impossible to dismiss out of hand - it's the difference between the deliberation and the verdict. An article, study, or video only has enough time to suggest a different outcome (and can therefore be conveniently forgotten if another piece with a more agreeable conclusion is located) but the questions raised in a book can dig into the full thought process, which invite serious grappling before a reader can consider moving on. This is especially true for me when I object to something in a book that I've entirely agreed with up to that point, or from an author with whom I generally share a perspective - the process of comprehending and sorting out the contradiction can help me reach a new understanding, but if I remain in flat opposition I've likely done so having seen the author's full reasoning, which protects me from a knee-jerk reaction to something presented out of context. It's always good to have a starting point, but for me real thinking starts at the challenge, which I use in a way familiar to those who have some experience writing - the challenge of real writing is rewriting, and the challenge of real thinking is rethinking.
This is why I felt compelled to revisit my rant from a few days ago and attempt to work out exactly what I meant when I made my arbitrary proclamation. I knew I was broadly in agreement with my idea, but it seemed like there were some little contradictions and blind spots I needed to review before I could proceed with something as strong as "I can't trust thinking from a non-reader". As you know, I've scaled down my original stance to reach a more moderate position - always read a little bit from a book every day - but this doesn't mean I've tossed aside the question of trust that was at the heart of the initial outburst. Trust, I think, is the unacknowledged engine that powers the way we share, accept, and expand new thinking - if we trust someone, we give more value to their thinking - but it's unclear how the way someone thinks should influence the amount of trust we place in that person. When I work through the steps I've outlined for clear thinking - minimizing distractions, committing to the task, staying patient, and protecting blocks of unbroken time; evaluating information around a core idea; challenging yourself to rethink - I see a framework for the kind of thinking I trust, and as I've described I feel that reading books is a sure way to build these skills. The shared quality among these steps is that there is no room anywhere for the chattering masses, which makes sense because thinking is an individual's responsibility; groupthink is a marketing label for not thinking, and what I can't trust is someone who thinks not thinking is thinking just because someone else thinks the same thing.
Footnotes
1) By "relative comparison", I mean the kind of objection that would compare the newspaper to the hyperlink as a way of dispelling the idea that a newspaper is an example of distracted reading. I don't think for a second that the newspaper is more (or equally) distracting as a hyperlink, but that doesn't mean it joins the book among the ranks of undistracted reading materials. Imagine if the opening paragraph of a book ended with "continued on PAGE 37", which you'd find after flipping through scores of advertisements, photos, and opening paragraphs for other books? The newspaper, much like a hyperlinked article, creates an illusion of distraction-free reading, but this doesn't become clear until you think about how a book would need to be redesigned in order to resemble the newspaper.
2) This may have also had an effect on the decisions made by writers and editors. Imagine if you knew readers always had the option to flip to the comics the second they became disinterested in finishing your column? I would tone it down, at least a little bit, if I understood that the sanctuary of some orange rodent armed with thought bubbles was always ready to welcome those offended anytime I challenged their assumptions.
But it could go the other way as well - I know my readers on TOA can always jump ship, so maybe I compensate by coming in stronger with my point. Who knows? If I knew, this thought wouldn't be tucked into a footnote.
3) Of course, as it is with many examples of "leadership thinking", the adjective is hardly necessary - finding this difference is an important result of thinking, whether it be in a leadership context or not.
Endnote
Here's an "alternate" ending - it was actually the last paragraph through all the drafts - that I ended up removing in the final revision because I liked the ending of (what was then) the penultimate paragraph:
"When I share ideas with someone who doesn't have the skills gained from reading books (which is the assumption I'll make anytime I share ideas with someone who doesn't read books) it's not a question of whether I can trust that person's thinking, since it's impossible when someone gets their reading material through a daily gatekeeper, or from the top rankings of a popularity algorithm - it's a question of when I can trust, because the moment is surely in the future, which will come not after someone's started thinking, but after they've returned to think again. Trusting someone's thinking when that person doesn't read is like trying to offer revisions for an absent student's writing assignment - if the thinking process hasn't even started, then surely there isn't much opportunity for rethinking, as you would expect from a mind that's never been made up."
