What I have learned from reading more than 170 books since 2017

2017 was a brutal year. Brutal because it was one of the moments of my life when I had to be disciplined, focused, and determined when I was seriously running low on these three things. Why the need to be disciplined, focused, and determined? That was the year I wrote my JAMB, WAEC, and NECO (Nigerian exams) - or in other words, when I finished secondary school. My school never took it easy on my particular set. In JSS3, we were drilled like we were going to write exams to enter heaven. In SS3, we stayed in school for nearly 7 months straight (it was a boarding school). Memories give me both trauma and insight into what a human being can endure.?

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The other reason why 2017 was a brutal year was because I knew I wanted to rest (gap year, not death please), and that resulted in a 2018 that was very paradoxical. After I graduated in July 2017 and realized I would be at home for a while, I decided to actually reason what my next decade would look like. For context, I grew up under the institution of perhaps one of the most hardworking men in Nigeria - Bishop Oyedepo. The “readers are leaders” philosophy had already sunk into all kinds of my consciousness that I could not possibly see how I would not read, even just for the sake of it. For extra context, I have always been a very academically stubborn individual since my first year of Senior Secondary School (before SS1, school was uninteresting to me). I call it “academic stubbornness” because I used grades as a measure of personal effort and as a result, I had to read to actually become better each time. This unconsciously allowed me to discover that knowledge, and reading generally, was actually enjoyable. I mean, it was like magic to an extent. You did not know something before but after a few minutes, you know an entire subject/concept/argument. And as the logic will imply, the more you can read the more you can know. So guess what I did, I set a decade-long goal of just reading.

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By December 2017 I had decided that by the time I was 30, I wanted to have read 500 books (by 2030). Why 500? It felt like a robust enough number, and in my head, that number would have allowed me to go as broad as possible. I mean, if you read 500 books and they are all in one field/subject then you are just possessed. I had envisioned reading about 30-50 books yearly just for the sake of it. I honestly had no focus on what kind of books I would read. I had no plan. I had no reading list. In my head, reading books had to be a good investment of my time. And so, I started Reading. And because I started reading, I started thinking and seeing a lot of things quite differently. Naturally, I have always been someone who loved asking questions (and I can be stubborn at it) because if I didn’t understand something that might be useful to me, why should I pretend that I knew it? For the sake of questioning, I rather look like a fool in front of anyone as long as I get my answer at the end. Since December 2017 till now, I have been able to read 178 books. A read book means reading cover-to-cover (or listened to completely for audiobooks). I don’t consider 80% read, and 60% read as complete (in this context, but in academic settings any amount that gets the job done is enough). You go through all the material or you don’t mark it as complete because the point was to learn, not tick a box. As you will imagine, there are tons of books that I left out of the list because they were not read cover-to-cover even though I learned so much from them. I learned this habit from people I grew up around in secondary school, there were very bookworm personas in my school. Why do I have a list of the books I read? I honestly have a list of books I’ve read because I used to write reviews about them. Though I don’t write book reviews again, I just continued the habit so that one day, like in this post, I can reflect back or show my children sometime in their own lives. Reading some of the titles again to make this post actually brought different episodes of my life to mind.

As you can see from the above, I am not really a fan of audiobooks. I feel like reading a book either in soft or hard copy is much more engaging because I convert a lot of my books to textbooks by the time I am done – highlighters, scribbling, ideas jotting, etc. You can also see that I love to read fiction, a lot. More than fiction, however, I love reading books on technology, finance, business, philosophy, politics, etc. (what I classify as “Specialized Topic” because the titles were so broad). The aim of this post is not to talk about all the books but what I have learnt from them so that is exactly what I am going to do. I am also choosing not to talk about the list of books because then the obvious “What’s your favourite” comes up. I have favourites, and different books were significant at different moments. Besides, as you will learn below, there is a way to look at knowledge without making everything hierarchical. I read quite broadly, so I believe the points below are really for anyone, even if you don’t want to become a “reader”. In fact, I have seen that there is a certain group of readers whose knowledge converts to Hubris. Conversations and interactions with them often end up like lemon in the mouth.?Below are the seven things I learned:

1) The goal is wisdom and wisdom is commonsensical

Trust me, your common sense is the most important asset in your possession. There is a paradox in the way people view “smart” (or whatever you call the equivalent in your reality) people and that is the fact that most of the time, having faith that smart people are smart is what keeps them above in that false hierarchy. Smart people pretend they know (especially when it comes to solving people's real problems), and society believes them and that gives them the necessary power to keep creating jargon that makes others confused. A simple hypothesis that I always work with is that if someone cannot explain something so simply, they probably don’t even understand what they are talking about. If you cannot use your understanding to create an analogy in another field or solve a real-life problem, then you are probably not as knowledgeable as you claim to be. Just think about it, as complex as the world is, it still makes things so easy to function with that you don’t need to prove a formula. You might not understand how it works, but it works anyway. The problem with smart people is that they want to understand the functionalities of everything.

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What I noticed in myself when reading so much was that I was eventually losing my common sense because I wanted everything to make sense in a particularly sophisticated way. Things that were so straightforward became complicated because I started feeling the need to use different concepts and theories to explain them – this is tragedy 101 or what I call the fallacies of useless jargon. I have realized that many books say similar things, but each author just uses different jargon to confuse us. And to their benefit, people do get confused and call these authors to actually come and explain what we already know (and you might even find yourself in a seminar room clapping for what you already know). It sometimes feels like a scam. My direct suspects are business and finance books, but I honestly don’t have time for these categories today.

How should you interact with knowledge? By actually questioning its usefulness in your life. If something is useful to you, you should know about it. If it is not useful at the moment but it will be in the near future, then start preparing your mind to understand the topic. Other than that, run away because when unpreparedness meets jargon, you will be very confused and your world might turn upside-down unnecessarily. And yes, this is a subtle argument against blind curiosities even though that was exactly how I started this journey.??

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Curiosity should always be leveraged on the desire to see a real solution in the world, except if you have excess time of course then you can be as curious as you want to be (as I was wanting to read so much). This sounds like I am advocating that people should not read as much. In one way, I am because the more you read the more you might actually be much more stupid because your so-called knowledge blinds you from seeing white as white, and black as black. You’d always want some sophisticated way of seeing things, and to your own peril, your brain can allow you to build castles in falsehoods only to be destroyed by a gentle shock.?So, use this as a simple rule to have a bias for wisdom that is commonsensical: is the knowledge I am consuming making common sense? How is it common sense? How functional is it in the world (you are not living on Mars or Jupiter)? What solution or revelation does it proffer? Wisdom is never too complicated. To be wise, you must, of course, accumulate so much knowledge, and then subsequently find the common sense in all the knowledge. If your pursuit does not end in making things common-sensical to you, you are probably on a path of being lost and disillusioned with reality.?Do not lose your joy and motivation in the pursuit of improving your own life because someone somewhere is talking so eloquently about certain topics. Most people like that are one question away from sounding lost themselves.

2) Be careful of being puffed up by knowledge, or tasting like lemon in people’s mouth

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Pride is perhaps the biggest devil when you are reading. That feeling that you know everything because those around you don’t know as much as you. For me, if pride just stopped at this, then we can argue for its usefulness. But the real issue is that because of knowledge that might puff you up, you cannot even be corrected by others. Everybody seems beneath you and unable to also give you counsel. Eventually, you will actually sour all your relationships because you, with all your knowledge, have become unreasonable to others. The irony.?

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In my own self, I have had to force myself, especially as I was getting older, to actually just hold what I think I know to one side. I mentally listen to what people are saying, compare it with the things that I know, and ask myself the question in point 1 above: is the knowledge I am consuming making common sense? How is it making common sense? Common sense has caused our species to survive this long, a so-called scientific generation with the internet is not that smart that what we think we know somehow supersedes the intelligence of systems and peoples from the past combined. Common sense might not sound as sexy, but I will take functions biased towards helping me make my life better over sexy anytime. Knowledge is supposed to help you, not be the cause of your destruction. If it destroys you then it would have been better not to have consumed the knowledge in the first place.

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3) “What is not intelligible to you is not necessarily unintelligent”, or the universe’s way of saying fuck what you think you know

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If there is one thing reading has taught me, it is the ability to not care about so many things. There are some things that are really not understandable. You won’t be able to explain it or understand it. Just move on. A baby cannot explain to you how they learned how to feed from their mother, but who cares? Only people who increase in knowledge actually care about such irrelevancies. Some things are just not necessary to understand as long as it works well. I mean, we should try and understand things. But if you have tried many times but cannot explain it, I think it is better to just move on to the next thing. Don’t be consumed by the universe’s automated processes. If it wanted you to understand, trust me, you will. There is an opportune time (Kairos) when certain kinds of knowledge are uncovered by people. It is like the situation with the Tower of Babel. If you want to see God but God does not want you to see him, just know that you are not going to see Him/Her/It. You only get to understand the universe when the time is right, and that might take generations after you. Be at peace with the knowledge you uncover because with more knowledge is actually more suffering and pain (point 7). Our generation has been sold the fallacies of curiosity, but you can actually be ill-prepared for your curious path and that might mess you up. Don't jump into an ocean if you know you cannot swim (wisdom that is commonsensical).

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4) Seek convergence, not a destination

Perhaps my favorite point, I believe the journey to increasing knowledge is really about a convergence and not a destination. Let me explain. When I set out the goal to read 500 books, I was more interested in finding out the kind of person I would become not really where I would be. I am still a mystery to myself, as are we all to ourselves. The best definition of who you are is probably potential (energy). You have lots of potential, but potential energy is useless if it does not become kinetic. You can have the potential for a CEO but without uncovering how you get there then it remains a potential.

Convergence is really about realizing how things are useful for your potential. So, all the books + movies + friends you regret meeting + terrible jokes + bad grades + family drama + a billion other things - all build up together in you, and your responsibility is to channel everything to take you to the place you want. The point when you start to realize how everything can be useful is your place of convergence. It's a convergence because they all align and start to make sense. I do not believe in coincidence, as a personal philosophy and that is largely because I think all experiences and knowledge consumed can be channeled to something related to the person you would become. The universe is too functional to waste anything.

So don't be obsessed about destinations because they are just temporal vanities, rather be obsessed about making out how everything is supposed to come together. Sometimes, it looks very abstract and random but I promise you that things tend to come together somehow. I don't understand and can't explain it, but they do. Just trust the natural algorithm of the world, it won't fail you. But you have to be open (or have faith) in your philosophy that there would actually be a convergence.

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5) Parallel stubbornness, or being able to tell the world fuck you when necessary

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Annoying people exist on different spectrums of intellectual sophistication - from the fool to the wise. But a special brand of annoying is dedicated to people whose life ambition is to limit others from progressing. Like the teacher who tells the students they will not amount to anything or the Manager who totally disregards the advice and ideas of employees. What I have clearly seen that reading has done to me is the ability to parallel stubbornness. When I say parallel stubbornness, I mean that you actually go ahead with what people say does not make sense. But there is a balance to this. You must first understand and listen to why the teacher and the Manager disregard you. If it does not make common sense, then parallel stubbornness. If what they are saying is solid counsel, then you become the fool for going against them. You must be humble. But you must also fiercely believe in your capacity to produce results because you see things differently. The more you read the more things you are able to see. The real works has to do with investing in the necessary creativity that connects different things together.

6) Authors are flesh and blood, it’s better not to meet your heroes sometimes?

My favorite author by far is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and sometimes I dread the day I will meet her, if I ever meet her. Sometimes, authors are better left as people whose ideas you read from. Always remember that they do human things like you, and probably got to write what you are reading through a process and not some mystical procedure. I don't know that I want to ever meet Frantz Fanon in real life. But his ideas are living inside me. Same for Nassim Taleb, Naomi Klein, Chinua Achebe, Gary Klein, James Clear etc. Be careful of elevating human beings higher than they actually are. The concept of having idols has always baffled me. Allow their ideas to consume you, but be careful in allowing them to become more than human. The human and the idea meet at a convergence, but they are not the same thing.

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7) Do not expect to know a lot and have little responsibilities, the universe will spew you out of its mouth

The truth is that I actually feel like the more I read, the sadder I get for some reason. Maybe it's because I am still learning how to properly channel knowledge, grasping my convergence, or because being an autodidact has more days battling pain/suffering. The truth is I would have never read as much knowing what I know. These days I prefer listening to podcasts, except you can do better than Nassim Taleb or Clayton Christensen or help me solve a problem I am directly facing. For this reason, I am not even as interested in reading 500 books again. I believe life can be abundant with or without abundant knowledge. Besides, leadership was never sexy in my eyes. Except you want to have a lot of responsibilities, limit your pursuit of vast knowledge (specialize in the things that interest you and be at peace). If you know more, people will realize when you talk and that automatically comes with more responsibilities. My mistake was being unaware of this in 2017. But now you know so ignorance has lost its power on you.

At the same time, the convergence gives you enough robustness to deliver on your responsibilities. Another paradox. That is, if you do get to accumulate knowledge, provision will be made for the demands. It is like the universe's way of compensating you. In essence, if you are not sure but really want to try then go ahead. You might emotionally hate it, but you won't die from it because your life would be redundant enough to accommodate how you would be able to survive. Besides, the greatest of things in life come to us by stumbling upon them.