What is wise about reading more books than you can actually think through in a year?

Nothing, if the books pass through you like a feed.

When people try to persuade you that they achieved something, they list outputs in a time window. X books. Y projects. Z hours. It sounds like evidence. Often it is only accounting.

Validity is not counted. It is demonstrated. Can you state the argument without the author’s words. Can you explain what would change if a key assumption is false. Can you use the idea to make a decision next week.

People brag about reading 80 to 200 books a year the same way they brag about “10x productivity.” It’s often signaling, not learning. Your post should say this plainly: books read is a vanity metric.

Intuition behind the book is good, rest is bad

So I can only appeal to your intuition. Unfortunately, intuition is a grossly insufficient, and often profoundly misleading, guide for questions like: “Is what I’m doing actually good?”

It’s hard not to generalize from a handful of stories and posts. But that is how you end up taking the temperature of reality with screenshots of other people’s lives, curated by midwits and rewarded by algorithms.

How do you know you are reading the right books

The first problem is selection. The second is intent. If you cannot name what the book is for, reading turns into a vague ritual that feels virtuous and produces nothing.

Are you reading for fun? Good. No need to launder it as productivity.

Are you reading as a writer or critic? Then you should annotate structure, style, and argument tactics. You are studying how the machine is built, not just what it outputs.

Are you reading for research and citations? Then you are hunting claims, sources, and limitations. Your unit of progress is not “chapters finished.” It’s “claims verified or rejected.”

Are you reading to learn a concept or skill? Then you need exercises, retrieval practice, and transfer. If the book never forces you to do anything, it is not training you. It is entertaining you.

This varies, but most people never build anchors. They do not check what they think they learned against anything external. They confuse familiarity with competence.

You can quantify only certain parts. Exercises completed. Summaries you can reproduce without looking. Predictions you made before the author’s answer. But the real question is what happens after you close the book. Do you carry forward a tool, a model, a decision rule. Or do you just carry the feeling of having been near knowledge.

The usual failure mode is simple. People read one book, feel improved, then move to the next book without any mechanism to test whether the improvement is real. No loop. No friction. No audit.

There is a whole genre of books about how to read books efficiently, which is mildly ironic. But the point stands. A system beats vibes.

Most people do not build a system that checks their intuition about what the book gave them. They keep the ritual. They lose the result.

Why do we even read books instead of using some other medium

Books are the default, not because they are always optimal, but because they are cheap to produce, easy to distribute, and good at packing dense ideas into a small space. Defaults are powerful. They are also lazy.

The real question is bandwidth versus retention. How much information can a person absorb in a day that actually sticks. That is not the same as how much you can consume.

If we could quantify retention even roughly, we could compare media on something that matters. Not minutes watched. Not pages turned. Actual understanding that survives contact with time.

Different media optimize different things. Video can be great for demonstrations and intuition. Audio is good for narrative and repetition. Text is still the best compression format for precise arguments, definitions, and careful structure. It forces you to run the idea inside your head. That is the feature. That is also the cost.

LLMs inherit the same basic strengths and weaknesses as text. They are fluent at producing and remixing language. They can help you explore concepts, generate explanations, and test recall. But they do not magically bypass the retention problem. If you do not retrieve, apply, and stress-test the idea, it still evaporates.

Reading books and discussing about it

How do you test yourself, or discuss with others, to polish what you think you learned from a book. And to check whether your reading is actually doing anything.

One way is simple: force the ideas to survive contact with a hostile environment.

Ask for conceptual questions, not trivia. Ask for the steelman, then ask for the weakest link. Turn the claim into a prediction. Design a small test, or at least an application task you could do this week.

Then do something most people avoid. Ask for the wrong answers on purpose. Common misconceptions, tempting but false interpretations, failure modes. If you can spot those quickly, you probably understand the idea. If you cannot, the confusion is already there.

Input and output results

It does not matter how much input you pour into something. What matters is what the input becomes after it sits in your head and gets processed. Ten years of thinking can turn a vague idea into a clean model. Not by magic, but by repeated exposure, encoding, and recombination.

So it is not wise to measure reading by input metrics. Hours read. Pages read. Books read.

Measure outputs instead. Recall you can reproduce on demand. Decisions that got better. Skills you can execute. Writing you can ship. Models you actually updated. Projects that exist because you understood something.

Wisdom is compression and transfer. If you cannot explain it simply, you probably do not have it. If you cannot use it in a new situation, you only memorized it.

The book should be quantifiable

I would believe you more if you showed what changed because of the time you spent reading, not the number of books you can stack into a year.

If you brag about “40 books” as the headline, you are telling me you care about the scoreboard, not the game. That is not impressive. It is just noise dressed up as discipline.

If you cannot produce outputs, your inputs did not land. Notes that survive a month. Reviews that distill ideas into models. Decisions you can point to. Skills you can demonstrate. Work you can ship.

Write meaningful reviews for a purpose. Use the book to educate yourself on a specific question. Extract concepts and test them. Do it for something real, not for the number.

People can list actions. Harder is proving impact.

Prompt after a book

I do not want to hear “I finished it.” I want to see what it did to you.

Give me a decision you made because of the book. An experiment you ran using its ideas. A short essay that argues with it. A project sketch that applies it. Something that has consequences.

A simple template works: A 200 word summary, plus 5 “claims I now believe,” plus 3 “things I disagree with.” That forces clarity, commitment, and friction.

Use prompts like this:

Give me an idea for a short essay, a sketch of a project, a decision memo, a small experiment, and a lesson taught to someone else based on this PDF (book).

Then use LLMs for Socratic drilling. Push past “I liked it” into “what is the claim, what would falsify it, where does it break.”

Can you give me conceptual questions (not factual) from this book? Find the most intense, two-sided ideas, make them clearer, and challenge me in discussion.