Discover the Key to Great Writing
In the Age of Information, we are constantly overloaded by content. Flashy videos, empowering aphorisms, and a myriad of other things are…
In the Age of Information, we are constantly overloaded by content. Flashy videos, empowering aphorisms, and a myriad of other things are sure to grab our attention. We might even follow pages that give us excerpts from great pieces of literature or high-brow podcasts. All of this time we spend following, liking, and sharing is time that we consider well spent; however, I am not so convinced that this is the case.
Over the last few years, we have been cooped up and had been attacked by the infamous “Nothing-Better-To-Do” monster; a monster that has gained more and more power over the last decade. This monster has grown to be a titan in millions of lives. Home, work, and nearly every other part of our lives have become overtaken by this attention-devouring titan and for many, there is no way to stop it.
Finding significance in anything but our screens has become very difficult, even when we know that it is to our detriment — we are trapped in the digital world. Little do we know: we also hold the key to our prison cell. The key to breaking out of our entrapment is to fill our time with something else; something truly grand.
A few months ago, I received a relatively normal text from my wife. She was at work and noticed a “Used Book Drop-off” was going on; scores of books were brought by fellow employees hoping to give their shelf candy to a new owner. Knowing how much I love authors with obscure, typically Greek names, she sent me a picture of a book asking if I wanted one. Its unique beige cover immediately intrigued me — then I saw a number of Ancient Greek playwrights as the authors, which interested me all the more. She then informed me that there were two boxes full of the same beige-covered books and sent me a picture of the inside cover of one confirming that it was indeed a collection. By now, the bibliophiles likely know what I am talking about, but if you are still not sure what my wife stumbled upon, she managed to find a totally free (moderately complete) set of the Great Books of the Western World. This collection includes many of the most well-known writers from antiquity to the early 20th Century.
At first, I was astonished that these books were just sitting there and were not snatched up by some handsome young lad also looking to read Euripides or Goethe. After the excitement of such an incredible find settled, I realized just what I had in my hands. Some of the most significant words ever written on paper in human history, and certainly primary to the Western canon, were now in my hands. This sparked even more excitement and a naive eagerness to read each of them cover-to-cover immediately; luckily I had some self-restraint.
Having these books sitting on my shelf in my office has sparked many ideas when thinking about the authors; who they were, where they derived their ideas from, and how these books came to earn the honor of being labeled one of the Great Books of the Western World. Many of these authors are heralded as some of the most intelligent and intuitive thinkers to walk the earth, so how did they do it?
When reading these paragons of the West, it is not readily evident how they managed such feats of the mind. Forgive me as I pass through all the examples I could naively pose in order to say “no”. They did not have some secret ritual for brainstorming or an ancient note-taking strategy. It was not as though they were just shooting in the dark either; the great thinkers of the past, and those alive today have a very common and simple strategy to improve their ability to think critically and synthesize the vastness of existence into incredibly specific and systematic theories. Some even go beyond that and express these theories in brilliant artistic forms like plays or novels. Their common habit and central to the development of each of their great works — reading.
All of the great thinkers and artists had vastly more input than their output suggests to some people. Not only was their input greater, but the quality of their input was also heightened. While reading is commonly thought of as looking at and interpreting words on a page, it is truly much more than that.
Reading, beyond ink and paper, is spending time in nature observing the great order that exists in the world. It is also reading the patterns of behavior others display and interpreting motivations, subconscious mental states, and the ripple small actions have in a wider context. One way or another, these great thinkers were all reading like it was going out of style.
We all interpret the world in a nearly automatic process; we observe something and ascribe motivations or potential outcomes to it in proportion to our previous experiences and current knowledge. Great thinkers worked to understand something about this process and how it interacts with other processes all within another much larger process that seems to continue forever. To understand these processes at their respective levels, they read (some more humbly than others) the works of the past and found where they could advance the common thought past the previous point to the benefit of all throughout time.
This is the importance of reading great books comes into play — you have to understand where we have been in order to see where we might be going so that we can contribute to the best outcome that we could manage given our circumstances. In essence, reading comes before all else.
How can you write better? Read better books more often.
How can you improve your relationships? Read the motivations of your own behavior within those relationships.
How might you become better at your job and advance your position? Read where others have both failed and succeeded and analyze according to your current actions and tendencies.
Watching podcasts or tv shows and scrolling through social media are certainly ways to input some good things into our minds. We should be careful, however, to not rely on them as the sole mode of input and to ensure that high-quality reading is on our ‘to-do’ list for a short amount of time each day. Reading is the simplest and most significant action that we can take to improve our lives.
No matter what goal we are trying to reach, we should read as often as we can in order to gain a better understanding of the world we live in. If it is the case that you live a life separated from regular and intentional input of significant quality, you will never achieve what you set out to do in a satisfactory manner.
Change it all by reading more.