Rule #32 Read

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage

over the man who can’t read them.”

—W. A. Evans, Professor of Hygiene at Northwestern University 1914

Notice the quote above. It doesn’t say you are no better than people

who won’t read; it says you are no better than people who can’t.

That is a whole other group of people: the illiterate. Illiterate people in

many cases are not stupid; they are limited. That is what you need to realize—

that you are limiting yourself tremendously by not reading.

I often ask people I meet and all my friends and acquaintances, “What are

you reading?” or, “Have you read anything good recently?” When I ask

that question, they know I am not asking about Sports Illustrated. They

know I am not asking about a lot of things that require reading skills:

Internet news, television programs, billboards, newspapers, email messages,

text messages, and magazines. Intuitively, everyone seems to understand

that the question refers to books. That is important.

Books are different. In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse

in the Age of Show Business (Penguin Books, 1985), Neil Postman claims the

following:

To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought,

which requires considerable powers of classifying, inferencemaking,

and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and

overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common

sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast

assertions, to connect one generalization with another. To

accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the

words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated

and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer

an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph.

Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached. (pg. 51)

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He goes on state:

Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a

means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate

with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which

has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated

ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a

high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction;

a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; a tolerance

for delayed response. (pg. 63)

Read the above sections again. We want those attributes to be true of us.

We are in the persuasion business. We must increase our ability to mentally

do more and better. Our customers don’t want to be sold; they want

to be taught. Postman would say your customers don’t appreciate having

their emotions and base instincts manipulated. They want to be convinced

logically with well-reasoned arguments that will remain prescient in both

the long and short term. Reading trains our mind to overachieve as communicators

because it improves the way we think! Reading increases our

knowledge, analytical abilities, and insights to help us grow into a professional

who understands the “why.”

A passionate, attractive person who is very charismatic but equally nonsensical

will not succeed. I appreciate that people make irrational decisions

every day. And I am not ignoring the power of emotional attachment that

customers have to products and services. I am also not discounting the

need to touch customer emotions in our attempt to succeed. I am simply

saying that for lack of logic in their arguments and debates, many salespeople

fail.

Mr. Postman goes on to explain the differences in mediums as they are

applied to us as humans. Our minds work a certain way. The ability to

think influences the ability to speak. Exposure to well-written works influence

our thought patterns and help us express ourselves in articulate ways.

Intelligent thoughts express articulate words. Those come in several

forms: new and better words added to our vocabulary; patterns of thought

(logical outlines in our minds that help us argue well); proper grammar;

and the ability to identify and combat false dichotomies and to express ourselves

in complete sentences.

People who don’t read much tend not to speak in complete sentences.

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In his great work Orthodoxy (Ortho Publishing, 2014), G. K. Chesterton

said that reading old literature gives our ancestors a vote. He was arguing

that tradition had value in an era (1890–1930) when traditions of all kinds

were beginning to be ripped to shreds in favor of progress. We can benefit

from those “votes” that embodied wisdom and experience from those

who came before us!

Think of it this way: the Bible says that the first people on the planet (i.e.,

Adam, Seth, Methuselah, etc.) lived for as much as 900+ years. What if Da

Vinci or Einstein or Newton or Steve Jobs had been allowed to live for 900

years? What if their creative genius had been given the chance to continue

working on the problems of science and art and to advance in their fields

for centuries? What would they have achieved? How much more

advanced would our world be?

They didn’t live; they died.

Their ideas, however, live

on, and we can build upon

their genius and continue

their work—if we read what

they said and learn what

they discovered. That is

what books and reading can

do for us. We attempt to

teach our children the

lessons we have learned.

But we have a generation of

people who have substituted

visually stimulating televised

entertainment for reading.

Much of that entertainment

is not historical or factual in

nature. As entertainment

viewers, we are not very selective or discriminating. Television is not usually

enlisted to present deep thoughts and complex arguments. That is why

presidential debates have become so vapid and ineffective as evaluations of

candidates; heavy arguments simply can’t be constructed between commercial

breaks.

I agree with those who say that you become what you watch and read. Ask

any advertising agency if media is influential. I am alarmed by the lack of

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discrimination used to evaluate and select entertainment. Increasingly, we

drink from entertainment fountains that are not uplifting or morally supportable—

or even beneficially instructive if applied and lived it out in real

life. If you are what you watch and read, we are collectively in big trouble.

If we were honest, most of it satisfies our base passions, rather than lifting

our eyes to lofty ideals that are honorable and noble. I was very troubled

when a young lady attending one of my classes from another country professed

her amazement at her American classmates over dinner one

evening. Earlier that afternoon, I had each member of the class introduce

themselves to the rest of the class with picture collages they had crafted.

We projected the slides up on the wall in the front of the room. This class

was very typical in sharing pictures of themselves with their kids and their

spouses on vacations, enjoying holiday festivities, sporting events, etc. The

young lady had only known Americans through the lens of Hollywood TV

and movie characters, and she was surprised at their wholesomeness as

devoted spouses and parents. Acknowledging the fact that sex has not been

depicted on the big screen or small screen between a man and the woman

he is married too in 30+ years, I guess I should not have been surprised.

While I have chosen not to own a television for over a decade, I watched a

ton of it as a kid, and I stay informed. So I know whereof I speak when I

ask, “When is the last time a TV show included a highly respected, honorable

father figure in a loving marriage who wasn’t the butt of every

joke?” Many people respond with the example of Cliff Huxtable from The

Cosby Show, but in truth, Cliff was cannon fodder for many of the jokes.

Fatherhood is becoming the obvious lynchpin in the uncoupling of the

engine of American prosperity: the family. The breakdown of fatherhood

explains much of what ails American culture reflected in the issues of education,

crime, civility, poverty, etc. Ah, but I digress … Back to work.

You are reading this book. Thank you very much! But this is not a classic.

(Not yet, at least!) I can’t even say with pride that this is a noble book. This

is simply a business book for the purpose of helping you be more effective

selling something great.

Go buy a great book whose characters have enlightened generations over

the years and stood the test of time. Or read a book that challenges

important cultural assumptions about family, friends, life after death,

love, and evil. Read biographies all the time. And read those books with a

pen in hand, underlining the parts you love. I like to put stars (using them

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as a rating system from one to four) beside the things that resonate with

me—things I like to revisit when I skim the book later or come back to find

a reference. Plan to go back and revisit your own books by rereading the

parts you underlined.

Be liberal in your reading. Again, I point you to Mr. Postman as he mentions

that our most learned lawyers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

were “models of intellectual elegance and devotion to rationality”

(Amusing Ourselves to Death, p 56) that enabled them to produce the legal

frameworks that in turn enabled America to become great. But “George

Sharswood, perhaps envisioning the degraded state of legal education in

the twentieth century, remarked in 1854 that to read law exclusively will

damage the mind, ‘shackling it to the technicalities with which it has

become so familiar, and disable it from taking enlarged and comprehensive

views …’ ” (Amusing Ourselves to Death, p 57).

Don’t fall into a similar trap and become a one-trick pony with very little

variety to spice up your personality. Don’t let your life become myopic and

annoying. You will develop the habit of talking about the same old things,

which few people care to think about.

Read to write. You may never write a book, but you should read as though

someday you will write a book. You will want to include quotes and

remember those ideas that shaped you. If you know anyone with a big

library of their own at home, you will find that they feel their library is

valuable to them because it made them who they are. The authors are like

trusted friends. If you want to know a person, a great way to understand

them is to peruse their library and note the books that have shaped their

thinking. I enjoy parenting my kids today because of a debt of gratitude I

owe to several excellent authors.

You could be a better person if you read more. But of the thousands of

books ever written, the classics have withstood the test of time, and that’s

why they are worth your time. I work in a field where my customers are my

superiors in age, wealth, education, social standing, letters behind their

name … darn near everything! Reading helps me gain their respect when

we interact professionally—and personally. It will help you too.

My family doesn’t own a TV—on purpose. Truth be told, getting rid of it

was my wife’s idea. But it has been a tremendous benefit to me and our

family. We do watch movies on the computer. As a product of being a

public-school-student-turned-homeschool dad, I can tell you that reading

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is the key to learning. I was well-schooled; I wasn’t well-educated. I can now

appreciate the difference.

As an adult, I am a much better student because my education today has

very specific direction that makes me highly motivated to learn. Unlike

when I was a child and my education lacked clear direction, I know what I

want to be, and I am desperate to achieve my goals. My reading reflects

that.

Men, if you want to be the number one swimsuit model in Sports Illustrated

next year, then that magazine in your hand makes sense. But if you want to

talk to people more effectively and understand human nature more thoroughly,

read a classic work by a great author. If you want to be a professional

who knows “why,” you need to be looking for the answers in good

books.

There is one book I want to ask you to read: the Bible. And I want you to

read it like every other great book: from beginning to end, starting in Genesis

and going to Revelation. Yes, I will say right up front that I believe it

is the word of God, and I am announcing my bias as straightforwardly as I

can. But hear me out on this, and read it just so you know what is going on.

Chances are very good that you live in the West – Europe, North America,

etc., and Christianity has influenced Western civilization tremendously.

There are so many references in everyday life to persons, places,

things, and concepts from the Bible that you are a fool to stay on the outside

of so many inside jokes. Reinforce your resistance to all things Christian

if you must, but at least be able to say you have read it and can

reference it intelligently in public.

You watch sporting events, read business newspapers, etc. just to be in the

know with your customers. How could being ignorant about a book that

has caused millions of people to build churches on so many street corners

in every town across several continents help you get ahead? If you lived in

another part of the world with temples to another god on every corner, if

their founders’ writings insisted that the hand of their god had providentially

guided their forefathers and that ancient writings provided the foundational

basis for their laws and customs, then I would tell you to read that

book, just to be culturally literate and sensitive. Besides that, reading the

Bible could check off the boxes in several categories of liberal reading for

you, because the Bible is history, poetry, prophecy, wisdom literature,

romance, comedy, science, and logic all in one book. You could read it just

to be well-rounded.

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Oddly, I have not heard this recommendation anywhere in reference to the

Bible in America. If you are Biblically illiterate, a lot is going right over

your head daily.

The Bible is not built to be a read like an encyclopedia. If you have never

opened one, treat it like any good book and start at the beginning. In the

middle is a book of wisdom that reads like riddles you may find entertaining

(called Proverbs). If you want a good mental joust with an incredible

thinker from the first century, jump to Ephesians, Romans, and Hebrews.

If you are a true skeptic of the Bible as a truly inspired book, step outside

the walls of your castle for a few chapters with James MacDonald in his

book God Wrote a Book (Crossway, 2004) and prepare to be surprised.

Elite execution demands that you grow by reading deeply and broadly.