Critical thinking skills are vital. Very easy to get swept away by a tide of bullshit.
It can all be very overwhelming. Let’s look at some action strategies and advice from people who are already very good at doing it.
“When asked how to get smarter, Buffett once held up stacks of paper and said ‘read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest.’”
“‘No,’ says Warren. ‘We don’t read other people’s opinions. We want to get the facts, and then think.’”
“Charlie, as a very young lawyer, was probably getting $20 an hour. He thought to himself, ‘Who’s my most valuable client?’ And he decided it was himself. So he decided to sell himself an hour each day. He did it early in the morning, working on these construction projects and real estate deals. Everybody should do this, be the client, and then work for other people, too, and sell yourself an hour each day.”
“We read a lot. I know know anyone who’s wise who doesn’t read a lot. But that’s not enough: you have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.”
“Mortimer Adler writes: ‘The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.’”
“Another way to get smarter, outside of reading, is to surround yourself with people who are not afraid to challenge your ideas.”
“If you presume that the average person spends 3-4 hours a day watching TV, an hour or more commuting, an another 2-3 hours a week shopping, that’s 25 hours a week on the low end.
25 hours. That’s 1,500 minutes. That’s huge. If you read a page a minute, that’s 1,500 pages a week.”
“Few things are as rewarding as making friends with the eminent dead. Reading isn’t something to be done once a week to check a box, it’s something to do every day.”
“I made a choice after I graduated from university that I’ve rarely deviated from: I don’t worry about money spent on books.”
“Remember the tagline of this website: Mastering the best that other people have already figured out. That’d be nearly impossible without reading. In fact, it is largely through reading that we walk this path.”
“Odds are that no matter what you’re working on, someone somewhere, who is smarter than you, has probably thought about your problem and put it into a book.”
Seneca - “Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides.”
“The rich invest in time, the poor invest in money.” - Warren Buffet
Francis Bacon - “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
Read Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book