Freuqntly after reading books like "Ray Dalio Principles" and "The hard thing about Hard things" and "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck", they are so long that I forget the point of the book and just never put it into my own words so I forget everything unless its been repeated throughout the book 6 times. there's no knowledge check at the end of most books. So like the article says I just subscribe to blinkist now and save the effort.
That's because those books (very popular in airports) are blog posts extended out into books with almost no value add as a result aside from some "choice" anecdotes intended to prove whatever points they're making. Usually it's the same point people have been making for 4+ decades. The act of reading books like those, deciding to read a self-help book for example, is almost more important than whichever book you pick. Most of them are interchangeable. They're meant to make you think you're improving yourself by reading them. (Dalio is more trying to position himself as master of the universe.)
Actual academic monographs and good novels are usually book length because their arguments and stories (and characters) require that book length to reach their full potential.
Yeah, taking those as one's examples is the equivalent of judging the medium of film by watching YouTube "brain rot" videos. "These were a waste of time and I didn't get anything out of them". Well, yeah. That entire genre (I'm back to treating of self-help and pop-business and "surprising" pop-science books) is infamous for being all but entirely garbage, defying Sturgeon's usual "90% of everything is crap" and achieving something more like 99.9%—and even that may be a generous assessment.
I'd be intrigued to hear the argument fully flushed out for once. The Dalio worship after the "principles" exposés is baffling but at the same time he does appear objectively successful.
I think his game is no longer about developing analytical skill to be the best investor, but becoming the person who has access to high level people and gets actionable information on an international scale before others.
I added that genre to popular science books as things on which I will no longer waste my time reading. In both cases they're just collections of cool sounding anecdotes without much redeeming value beyond being brain pleasers.
And in the types of books you cited they are always Just So Stories that worked for that person. For instance, with "The hard thing about hard things", my takeaway was that I'll never be in exactly the same circumstances as the author with exactly the same context and thus their decisions aren't useful for me. Why bother? There was not a single nugget in there where I felt it was something I could add to my persona to make be a better person.
The real red pill is realizing that Jared Diamond's "guns, germs, and steel" was no more accurate or historical than the shit that Foucault was writing 30 years before
> You may remember that Guns, Germs, and Steel is framed as a reply to a man named Yali, a “remarkable local politician” whom Diamond encountered while walking on the beach in New Guinea in July of 1972.
> Yali asked a question that Diamond spends a couple of paragraphs boiling down to something like, “Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?” (Which is of course what Guns, Germs, and Steel tries to answer.) But that’s not actually the way Yali put it, and his real question — indeed, his whole story, which is fascinating in its own right — suggests a whole ‘nother set of answers
> [Yali is] one of the true Player Characters of history. If we lived in a better world, he would be the subject of a prestige cable drama
Many non fiction books are too long, I agree. But there’s also something lost when you treat these books as “extract lesson as fast as possible and move on”. There’s a joy sometimes in engaging with the material and taking your time.
I need to read books like this with extra intentionality or it all just flows through and I might retain a couple of key concepts if I'm lucky.
1) Highlighting or underlining along with folding page corners to make it easy to find high impact passages when flipping through later.
2) Writing a short chapter summary in the blank space at the end of each chapter. Just a couple of minutes to reflect on what I just read and to summarize the core message of the chapter.
