Books are a great way to learn because they're more information-dense than shorter formats like talks and podcasts.

As Steven Kotler explains in The Art of Impossible, you get much more of the author's time for the time you spend reading a book. While an author might spend several days writing and researching a blog post that takes you 3 minutes to read, they might spend 15 years gathering and synthesizing the experience that goes into a book that takes you 5 hours to read.

You'd have to read 1,825 blog posts to get an equivalent amount of that author's time. At 3 minutes per blog post, that would take you 91 hours!

And it's not just time. Nick Maggiulli estimates that based on the time it took Robert Caro to write The Power Broker (7 years for 1344 pages) and the time it took Michael Lewis to write Liar’s Poker (18 months for 320 pages), if you buy those books on Amazon today, you'd be paying them both less than $0.004 per hour to write their books.

Books Don't Just Save Time and Money

• Books provide a sense of accomplishment; there's nothing like seeing a growing collection of books on your shelf or reading app. Each one represents a leveling up of your mental models, mindsets, and perspectives. This sense of accomplishment can motivate you to continue reading and learning.
• Reading is more effective at reducing stress than other popular methods, like walking or listening to music. Could this be one reason book readers live longer than non-book readers?

From Naval [1]:

• Unlike with videos and podcasts, which you consume synchronously, you can consume books asynchronously. You can spend thirty minutes pondering one phrase and five seconds flipping through an entire chapter.
• {comment on authors being invisible to you.}
• {comment on people's work not being accepted or appreciated in their time}

"I do not write for this generation. I am writing for other ages. If this could read me, they would burn my books, the work of my whole life. On the other hand, the generation which interprets these writings will be an educated generation; they will understand me and say: 'Not all were asleep in the nighttime of our grandparents.'"—Jose Rizal

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If saving time and money, boosting your knowledge, and living longer aren't enough to make you charge the nearest bookstore, how about some billionaire software founders: Michelle Zatlyn (Cloudflare), Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub), and Patrick Collison (Stripe) honed their craft by reading books, then taking action to apply what they learned.

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[1] Ravikant, Naval. "Let Us Not Talk Falsely Now". Apr 26, 2022. (25:41) https://youtu.be/euzoOkBUzsQ?t=1541.

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