The best way to 10x your intelligence is:
to go on a difficult books reading regimen.
That’s where you read ten or less books a year, and each one should be harder than
the last.
And this is probably the opposite of a lot of what you see and hear on YouTube, where
the game is often to read as many books in a year as you can,
something which I think will be very inefficient if you’re trying to boost your intelligence
and mental strength.
Let me show you how and why the difficult book regimen works better.
So what is intelligence?
Let’s define it as the ability to solve our own problems.
The more intelligent we are, the more of our own problems we can solve.
Ok, but how do we improve our intelligence?
One of the main ways we improve our intelligence, our ability to solve problems, is by creating,
obtaining, and using tools.
And there are at least two types of tools we use: physical tools and mental tools.
An example of a physical tool is a hammer.
If you need to apply force to something, the hammer is handy for that.
Physical tools are easy to understand,
but I think less people talk about and understand the importance of mental tools, which is what
this video is about.
So what is a mental tool?
An example of a mental tool is the word forgiveness.
Think about the word forgiveness
and how much power this word gives you within yourself and within your relationships.
When you forgive yourself, you make peace with your past self and your previous mistakes,
and you give yourself permission to be a better person tomorrow than you were yesterday.
Forgiveness frees you from the burdens of the past.
When you forgive another, you make it possible to repair a relationship for the better and
move forward as a team.
It’s hard to imagine a world without the concept of forgiveness.
Forgiveness, like all words, is really a kind of technology or mental tool.
It’s kind of like a glue that allows us to repair a broken relationship, whether that
relationship is with others or ourselves.
It has changed our lives immensely for the better and improved our ability to cooperate.
Now think about how many books are out there, how many words and mental tools are out there
for you to obtain, tools that will completely change how you interact with yourself and
with others in the world, just like the concept of forgiveness has, tools that can give you
immense power and strength to solve more problems.
Every time you truly learn a new word, you expand your mental tool kit, and by doing
so, you increase your intelligence, and you expand your ability to solve a variety of
new problems.
Mental tools are just as important and powerful as physical tools for solving and overcoming
problems, they just operate differently.
Mental tools help us make meaning of the world.
And meaning can help us overcome problems or even remove them from our lives.
Let me give you an example.
Think about the worst suffering you can?
Got it?
Ok.
Now imagine that you’re given a reason for this suffering.
Imagine the clouds part and a voice gives you a reason, a justification, for why you’re
suffering.
Does this make the suffering more bearable?
I think most people would respond by saying yes.
In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl details his experience as a prisoner
in the WW2 concentration camps.
And in it, he says, “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds
a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
He found out that meaning could lessen one’s suffering.
He also paraphrases Nietzsche when he says, “‘He who has a why to live for can bear
with almost any how.’”
So how does Frankl’s experience relate to what I’m talking about?
Reading difficult books and expanding your mental toolkit will help you discover more
why’s for your life.
It will help you create greater meaning for the life you live.
And according to both Frankl and Nietzsche, meaning, and the ability to produce it, is
one of our greatest protections against the suffering of life.
So I said that you can 10x your intelligence, your ability to solve problems, by expanding
your mental toolkit.
And I said that one way to expand your mental toolkit is by reading difficult books.
But why difficult books?
Reading is a lot like weight lifting for the mind.
The more difficult books you learn to read, make sense of, and overcome, in some sense,
the stronger your mind becomes.
Your mind becomes better at making meaning of things and responding to the world in a
more effective way.
So what makes a book difficult?
I think that, in essence, for most people, what makes a book difficult is two things:
novelty & abstraction.
Novelty is when you come across something new: a new idea, a new word, a new perspective,
or a new problem that you haven’t seen before.
It’s a meeting with the unfamiliar, and unfamiliar things often make us feel uncomfortable
and they require a lot of work to make meaning out of.
The more novelty there is inside a book, the harder it will be for the reader to get through
and make sense of.
But novelty is often what makes a difficult book worth reading!
It’s introducing you to new mental tools which you can use to update your mental software.
But if you shy away from new and difficult ideas, you become like the grandparent who
uses old technology because they’re too scared to learn the new one, and by doing
so, you limit your own potential.
The second thing that makes a book hard to read is abstraction.
The best way I can explain abstract ideas is by comparing them with their opposite:
concrete ideas.
Concrete ideas are things you can identify with any of the five senses: taste, smell,
sound, touch, and sight.
Anything you can experience with these five senses is concrete, but anything you can’t
is abstract.
And because they’re not easily understandable through sense experience, abstract ideas are
hard to understand and many people think they are useless.
This is a huge mistake.
Here’s a good way I can describe the value of abstract ideas.
So imagine someone with a landline at home for phone calls, a tv for entertainment, and
a computer for doing research on the internet.
All of these cost a certain amount of money and energy to maintain.
But this person can actually replace the function of all of these devices with one: the cell
phone.
The cellphone is more efficient use of time and energy and it can perform the function
of the landline, the tv, and the computer, plus much more.
Abstract ideas are similar.
They replace the function of more basic ideas and make you more efficient with how you spend
your time and energy.
If you avoid difficult books because they’re abstract, you’re limiting your own access
to more powerful mental tools.
So if you avoid difficult books, you are avoiding new and more powerful mental tools.
So how do you determine which books to read?
In the beginning, I recommend reading the classics.
The classics are time-tested tools.
They will introduce you to mental tools and concepts that have been effective for people
all through out history, which is why they keep being passed down to the next generation.
But as you develop your tool kit and your literary tastes, you will develop your own
intuition for what you should read next, depending on the problems you’re facing and the tools
you think you might need.
I don’t want to convince you to only read classics, because you would miss out on so
many new ideas that could be useful and relevant, but at the beginning of your reading journey,
you can’t really separate the wheat from the chaff on your own, and so reading the
classics and becoming acquainted with time-tested tools will help you develop an intuition to
discern between good tools and bad ones.
One idea I see a lot on YouTube is the idea of speed reading or reading as many books
as you can in a year.
And here’s what I think about that.
If speed is your highest value, you will almost certainly sacrifice difficulty and end up
choosing easier books.
And I already made a case for why you should read difficult books.
Speed and difficulty are opposing values.
If you read difficult books as I suggest, your reading speed will be very slow, but
your mental strength will grow a lot more.
On the other hand, the best way to read a lot of books is to read things you’re already
familiar with, that are short and easy to understand, but if you only read things you’re
familiar with, you’ll never expand your mental toolkit.
So maybe I’ve convinced you, you’re ready to start your difficult book regimen, and
you want some help on starting.
I’m going to link to a list of great books in the description.
Read the description for these books, and find ten where the themes of the book overlap
with the problems in your own life.
And the reason I cut the number off at 10 is to prevent mindless speed-reading and to
treat the process more like a weight lifting regimen.
We want to keep our reps the same but increase the weight we’re lifting at, so we can improve
our mental strength.
If you read 10 books from the list, I think this will give you a good place to start on
obtaining new mental tools.
And maybe you won’t even get through 10, maybe you’ll only get through one, and that’s
okay, because these are difficult books that take time, and all that matters is that you
try to progressively lift heavier.
As you read more and more books, you’ll start to develop a natural intuition for what
you should read next, and at some point, you might even become the creator of a new mental
tool.
Good luck!