On reading — and what I had to stop doing to do it better

I read a lot — always have. But for most of my career, I read in the same way I approached most things: with efficiency as the primary goal. Get through the book, extract the relevant ideas, move on.

What I've learned is that this optimises for quantity at the cost of retention and integration. You can have read fifty books in a year and have fewer actual ideas from them than someone who read ten slowly and sat with what they found.

The change started when I noticed I couldn't reliably articulate the ideas from books I'd read eighteen months ago. Not the titles, not the authors — those I remembered. The actual content had passed through and left no lasting impression. That seemed like a problem with the practice rather than with my memory.

The things I changed:

I stopped keeping up with the pace of technical publication. There is an infinite amount of technical content to read. The value of staying current diminishes quickly — most newly published material is incremental. I read fewer technical books now and read them more carefully. Selectivity about what counts as worth the attention is the higher-order skill.

I started taking notes with actual synthesis in them, not just highlights. Highlights capture what the author said. Synthesis notes force you to say what the idea means in your own words, which is when you find out whether you understood it or just recognised it. That distinction matters. Recognition without understanding is common and easy to mistake for learning.

I started reading things I disagree with. The books that have changed my thinking the most haven't been the ones that confirmed what I already thought. They've been the well-argued cases for positions I initially resisted. The discipline of engaging seriously with those — rather than reading for ammunition against the argument — produces something useful. I don't always change my mind. But I understand the territory better.

I started reading more slowly in the evenings. Not as a time-management strategy — as a deliberate change of register. Evenings spent reading fiction or history rather than technical material are not time away from learning. They're a different kind of input: narrative, slower, less instrumentally structured. The brain needs that.

The thing I still struggle with: reading without the phone nearby. The gravitational pull of the notification is irrational relative to the value of what it delivers, and I know this, and I still get pulled in. That's an ongoing practice rather than a solved problem.

What I'd say to past me: read less but better. The idea that you need to have read everything is a trap. The relevant ideas in any field can be absorbed from a fraction of the total publication output. Be more selective, more deliberate, and more willing to stay with one thing until it changes how you think.