“I read 52 books last year. Why then am I still a fool?”

Why You Probably Won’t Learn From the Advice of Others

Stańczyk by Jan Matejko

Maybe it’s just my algorithm, but I feel like reading is being shoved down our throats. We are constantly told to read, especially by “successful” people. They tend to take reading seriously. Bill Gates famously goes on “Think Weeks,” where he spends time by himself mostly reading and thinking. Naval Ravikant describes reading as his first love. Warren Buffet recommended students interested in investing to read 500 pages a day. All this hype can sometimes give the false impression that the key to success is opening a book.

Don’t get me wrong; I love reading. I think it’s great, but I feel people often talk about reading as if it were the only thing that mattered. For a while I bought into this belief. I thought the answer to anything was: open a book. But especially when it comes to the big questions that we’ve been asking ourselves for centuries like, “What is the meaning of life?” or “How to live a good life?” there are no clear answers. Books offer perspectives, but not definitive answers.

Obviously, successful people also do a lot of stuff besides reading and yet reading is often touted as a superpower. I’ve been reading consistently for 5 years and I guess I am just wondering when my superpowers are going to kick in? Maybe it’s because I’m not reading 52 books each year?!

One apparent advantage of reading that I hear over and over again is that you can learn from the mistakes of others. That you can simply pick up some life lessons by letting your eyes glaze over a piece of paper. That you can obtain wisdom by making the “effort” of reading an ancient text.

My initial reaction to this type of argument was something like: fuck yeah, that’s why I read. I learn from the experience of others. This means I’ll dodge all the mistakes of the silly billies and all I’ll have to do is read.

However, there's a significant difference between memorising a lesson and truly understanding it, and the argument overlooks this distinction.

It can’t be that easy

If that were true, the shortest root to wisdom would be reading aphorism collections or Reddit posts entitled something like: What life lesson you wished you had known sooner or wished that someone had told you earlier in your life?

We’d read The Top Five Regrets of the Dying and experience less regret. We’d read The Intelligent Investor and invest intelligently. We’d read The Power of Now and be more present.¹

But there is a huge difference between reading a lesson and learning a lesson. Why would anyone risk failure if you could learn the same thing by opening a book? Reading can be done from the comfort of your home. It doesn’t involve real effort. You don’t have to get your hands dirty. You don’t have to leave your comfort zone. There is no comparison to actually falling on your face and learning a life lesson. 

We all reflexively repeat lessons like “communication is important in relationships” or “stop caring about what other people think.” But the people who learned these lessons the hard way understand them on a profound level that goes way beyond words. The words can be transferred but the wisdom can’t. You can easily acquire the words but not the lesson.

It’s kind of like picking up a maths book and skipping straight to the answer section and exclaiming, “I know the answer.” You technically do, but you have no clue how to get there. If someone were to take away your maths book you’d be left with nothing.

We don’t want to hear certain advice

The lessons of others also have to fall on fertile ground. You might be open to hearing lessons, but only those which resemble whatever you’re familiar with already. You’re unlikely to deeply listen and consider advice that goes against your beliefs. If you are strongly convinced that money is going to make you happy, you’re not really going to be receptive to people criticising your approach to fulfilment. We only consider the advice we want to consider.

A biased view of the past

One’s personal experience is not always relevant to others. It can be interesting to hear advice from others, but at the same time you’ll never know all the factors relevant to the situation. You don’t actually get enough information to figure out whether the decision quality was high. You mostly hear about others' outcomes, but not how they make their decisions. And those two are not the same. You can make a high quality decision and end up with a horrible outcome, but you can also make a low quality decision and end up with an amazing outcome. We have the tendency to confuse our decisions and outcomes.² All we hear is the rationalised stories seeped in hindsight bias.

Since we often do not have all the relevant information about what led to a decision, we just have to trust the advice-giver. So essentially we’re only going to listen to the advice of people we “like.”

For example in Letter II to Lucilius, Seneca wrote “to be everywhere is to be nowhere.” He told him to not read widely, “a multitude of books only gets in one's way.”  When I first read this I felt really conflicted, on the one hand it sounded really reasonable and on the other hand it went entirely against what I was doing. But I thought to myself that this is advice from Seneca, this must be true because he’s way wiser than me. After chewing on it for a while I came to the conclusion that it was good advice, but not for my stage in life. Lucilius and Seneca had a lot more life experience than I had. They knew what was out there. They knew their preferences. They had already explored and landed on a small selection of books that they deemed worthwhile. At that stage I was only in the beginning of my exploration stage.³ I didn't know what was out there. I still don’t. Which leads me to my next point.

Lessons aren’t one-size-fits-all

Decisions are typically context dependent. But advice is usually given without caveats and that makes sense because how impractical would it be to give advice followed by 5 minutes of caveats.⁴ So, we have to think of them ourselves. For example, I was initially confused by the critical nature of American discussions on whether to attend college. It wasn't until I connected the dots that I realised they were also considering the impact of crippling student loans, a concept that's not really a thing where I’m from.

Does reading the advice of others have any benefits?

Of course it does. Just not to the extent that some people claim. 

Advice of others might make you aware of some danger zones that you might not have known about. You may learn that something is a pit, but that doesn’t mean you don’t still fall into it. But once you've fallen into the pit you’ll (hopefully) recognise the problem more easily. You’ll think to yourself,  “Oh this is what this is.” 

Additionally, the life advice of others gives us something to push against. For one person who advises one thing there is another person who advises the exact opposite thing. “Just be yourself” vs “Fake it till you make it.” Life advice is not universally applicable. Sometimes the early bird catches the worm and sometimes the second mouse gets the cheese.

If you’re seeking life advice go read How to Live by Derek Sivers. It’s one of the most uncomfortable books I’ve ever read. Each chapter disagrees with the next. In one chapter the author makes a convincing case for being totally independent while in the next he makes a great case for commitment.

I think the more charitable interpretation of the idea that you can absorb wisdom from books is sitting down and really thinking the advice of others through. Back to the Reddit post, you might select the piece of life advice that strikes you as the most fascinating and then you start questioning it, you try to figure out in what situations it applies and what situations it doesn’t, you really think it through. That being said a better approach is always going to be to experience stuff. Reading 50 books on startups is no replacement for the experience you’ll gain from actually starting your own business. The same way watching porn will teach you little about sex.

A couple years back, I came across one of the first financial self-help books, Franklin's Way to Wealth; or, "Poor Richard Improved." The book is written in the style of a story and starts off with a crowd gathered waiting for an auction to begin. They are complaining about how times are tough so someone asks a dude called Father Abraham about what he thought. So, Father Abraham starts dispensing financial advice. He drops zingers like: 

"Never leave that till to-morrow, which you can do to-day.”

"Many have been ruined by buying good pennyworths."

After essentially telling the waiting crowd to work hard and be frugal the story ends on this:

“Thus the old gentleman ended his harangue. The people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and immediately practised the contrary, just as if it had been a common sermon; for the auction opened, and they began to buy extravagantly.”

This story illustrates one important thing: We may receive advice, but we cannot receive conduct.⁵

1. I was actually crazy present for the first two days after reading The Power of Now, but that didn’t last long.

2. Annie Duke calls this “resulting.”

3.

Henrik Karlsson

has a great post about this.

4. People who know you personally can obviously give you more tailored advice.

5. This sentence is based on this line by Benjamin Franklin: "We may give advice, but we cannot give conduct."