Don't Trust People Who Don't Read
I have a deep seated suspicion of people who don’t read. It’s not because I think everyone should read “the classics,” or some other equally arbitrary collection of books. That sort of mentality is one of the reasons why people have a distaste for reading. No, I don’t trust people who don’t read because it means they have no interest in learning.
Let me explain.
Learning is a difficult and complex process. Crucial elements of an idea are easily lost when it is transmitted between two people. The method used to share ideas greatly determines their fidelity. And no other medium transmits ideas better than the written word.
With face to face conversation, people may think they grasp the ideas being discussed, but it’s dangerously easy to misunderstand someone when there is no way to retrace your train of thought back through time. Truly learning anything requires being able to go back and review the elements you don’t immediately comprehend. This requires a medium where nothing is lost and where the ideas are transmitted at a pace you can manage. The spoken word is fragile and quickly forgotten. And time has a way of warping people’s memories of events.
What’s worse, you can only communicate face to face with an extremely small group of individuals. You are limited to people who happen to be in the same geographic location as you. Even worse, you are stuck communicating exclusively with living people. You are cut off from all the great minds that have come before you — unless those minds took the effort to document their ideas — and only if you take the time to read their thoughts.
Once you embrace the written word to learn, an entire world of knowledge opens up to you. The greatest minds that ever existed have left guides to help navigate through life’s greatest challenges. Almost everything you feel has been felt before, and chances are that at least one genius has spent time and effort trying to understand it and describe it. The past has left you the ultimate collection of mind hacks, guides to living, and secrets you could possibly ask for, and they are waiting for you, unchanged and untarnished, to use them for your benefit.
The real beauty of the written word, however, is that the knowledge it transmits is asynchronous. You can learn at your own pace. Anything you
fail to grasp you can review, and anything you already understand you can quickly bypass. And the best part is, as you continue learning through reading, you begin to learn faster. Reading feeds a never ending cycle of accelerating revelation.
Anyone who has such an opportunity for knowledge and growth available to them and refuses to take advantage of it clearly has no interest in learning. And if a person has no interest in learning, you shouldn’t waste a moment’s time with them. It’s time better spent reading.