When I saw the title I thought the article would be about the dreadful stress of keeping up with new tech or research.. But it's about spare time reading?
Granted the problem seems similar, but only because the author is in the field of reading (working in books related profession).
I'm not sure how much it can be applied to just hobby reading. Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of professional obligations (you'll fall behind to your professional peers) but there's not much of stress if you're in it as a leisure /hobby; it's not inherently competitive activity.
So the conclusion is not that helpful. It's targeted to a very small audience (people that work in a field where reading books and keeping up with the latest books, are important) and is essentially "don't worry about it!"
> Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of professional obligations (you'll fall behind to your professional peers)
Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.
I have built my life around me with people that perform at those levels, so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels. Not to mention, look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer. It is sad, but its reality.
So I work always, every success opens up 2 new problems to deal with.
Back when Bell Labs was a top research institute, some researcher gave an interview. He noted that he was top of his class in high school. Way up there in college. Pretty good in grad school. Then he was hired at Bell Labs, where he was at best average. Man, he just got dumber and dumber as time went on.
He said it with a smile, but still, there's a hard kernel of truth there for many of us: if we work hard to advance, and put ourselves in the company of top people, we no longer stand out. But you know what? Life needn't be a continual competition. Be good at what you do, do it well, and take satisfaction in that. You don't need to continuously compare yourself to everyone else, and ask if you are in the top 10%. Eventually you won't be, if only because your entire group is up there.
...look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer.
Yes, but we aren't surrounded by hyenas in the wilds of Africa. Civilization does bring some benefits. Take some time to smell the roses. Heck, a bit of time for relaxation may even improve your performance.
>Not to mention, look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer. It is sad, but its reality.
There's a lot of helping weak members of the pack done by social animals, don't get fooled by the reductionist understanding of "survival of the fittest" that the American education system seems to teach. I believe part of the success of social animals like humans is the support they can give each other, which doesn't mean there is no survival of the fittest anymore, but that the fitness now refers the whole group rather than individuals.
And there are examples of very early humans with disabilities that would have made their care very resource-intensive for their tribe, and still they often lived long lives. This implies that these early humans helped even the weakest members, when they could just as easily have let these individuals perish to make their own lives easier.
I'm trying to say this in the kindest way, but please seek professional help, your view of reality and your relationships seems neither healthy nor sustainable to me.
It is important that you can sometimes let your guard down and not perform at the highest level imho. After all, you are not a machine, but a real human being with feelings. If you want to perform at that level, this is of course perfectly fine, but it should be because you enjoy it, or the fruits of your labor, not because you feel like you have to.
> Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.
You're not in the top 1% of posters on this site. How do you deal with that utter failure? Sure, you can make excuses, but face it, you're not in the top 1%, 10%, or even top 90% of this site in points.
These points are, of course, worthless, but holding yourself to an unachievable standard is ridiculous. One might even say it's the top 1% of ridiculousness. And how about things that are contradictory? If you're in the top 1% of people who get 8 hours of sleep every night, you're automatically disqualified from being in the top 1% of people who get 4 hours of less a night. If you're in a top 10% country for Gini inequality, are you also in a top 10% country for happiness?
You're not in the top 10% of wealth already, so you've already failed at that. Just do the best you can and have some self-compassion. By all means, push yourself to do your best, but don't kill yourself over the fact that there's always going to be someone better than you at something.
Unless you have extremely expensive lifestyle, usually being in top 10-20% is enough. And getting to top 10-20% is extremely easy on the timescale of decade or so, basically it boils down to any directed effort. Giant majority of employed people literally don't grow.
On the contrary being in 0.1-1% is not worth it, things like monetary success are usually more down to networking and being in the right place at the right time, top 10% software engineer can earn way more money joining right early stage startup or even tech company at the right time - like NVIDIA lately. While the 0.1% developer might spend his time at failed startup - for example, because his extreme passion might mislead them to believe field like _developer tools_ is the future.
Of course, this is written from a perspective of a person that likes what they do, but not to the point where it's what I want to do for the rest of my life. Pretty much every hour spend lead climbing outside was more fun and fulfilling than any hour spend at work.
> Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.
I don't believe you. No one is in the "top 1%" of everything you do.
I don't say this to shame you, but to make you realize that you're already okay as you are, while not being the best.
There's no way you're in the top 1% of management ability, technical knowledge, coworker relationships, parenting, exercise, finances, et cetera.
On the few axes of life where I know for sure I am better than the next 99 people I meet, I have had to practice that thing so much that I have made more than one logical jump and ability jump that counts as a filter for the next 99. It won't be overnight that I fall out of the 1%.
I suspect the same is true for anyone in any 1% of anything.
>If i'm not in the top 10% my wife and friends are going to leave me.
I hope this is sarcastic because it's comically neurotic. Like you're headed for a huge breakdown.
>look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer. It is sad, but its reality.
Wanna know how I know you spend 0 time in nature?
I think you should start a garden. Get in touch with actual nature. You're going to have a breakdown when you realize you're not in the top 1% of all gardens, but once you start to see perennials refuse to accept they were put in the wrong spot year after year, maybe you'll chill out.
> so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels
Excuse me, what the flask. You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family.
> look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer
What kind of nature are you even watching? It's the sickly bottom 1% that's suffering which is an unfortunate reality, not the 90%. You completely inverted that.
Not only that, members of the same intelligent species usually help weaker members of their "packs". And people are supposed to be even better than that.
It's fairly easy to get into the top 30% of something. Just showing up, paying attention, and putting in a little effort will often put you in the top third.
Getting into the top 10% requires a lot more effort and will likely require you to sacrifice other things so that you can focus on that one thing.
Unless the subject is something obscure where few people have interest; getting into the top 1% often requires complete dedication. Your life revolves around that one thing and you need superior talent.
Competition drives us to be better, but often those who find themselves in that 1% are questioning if it was really worth it. You can be completely happy further down the ladder.
> I have built my life around me with people that perform at those levels, so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels.
Are you positive that this is what is going to happen?
If you are constantly afraid of being abandoned if you show the slightest sign of weakness, you may not be as strong as you imagine tbh. Such fears are easily exploited, too. You should really discuss this with your wife and/or friends, chances are that they have similar fears. You might support each other to achieve true strength and the confidence that comes with it.
But if you feel the stress of keeping up with new tech or keeping up with book reading, don't you think it's the same? Just don't worry, everyone has their own pace
I don’t think it’s the same. The author frames it as a social pressure. It actually reads as a personal anxiety that they project on the world in my opinion. They started feeling competitive about books as an 8 year old? I’m not shocked they assume anyone asking them what they’re reading is some test. I can’t imagine walking through the world like this.
Of course there is some of this in software related fields, but for a lot of us the bigger risk is a demonstrable professional one. If you haven’t learned anything new in tech in the last 10 years you could be out of a job. There is a whole ocean of jobs for which you would not qualify.
I'd say it is transferable only partially? But still not that helpful.
It is helpful to people that are not aware of the source of the stress (often in the form of feeling overwhelmed) to be able to identify it. The article spend most of the words actually just describing this phenomenon. I think newly-graduated-in-tech-startup me in the past would've felt validated reading it.
But the article falls short on any good remedies for the situation. Like yeah I'd love to be able to just "not worry about it", but the problem is that I (as a researcher needing to keep up) can't just stop worrying about it, but I'd love to find a balance where I can keep the enthusiasm and up to date while not feeling overwhelmed and dreadful while doing it.
It works for the author because ultimately, the author is in a position when they can walk away or explain WHY they don't keep up and get accepted for it. Worst case the author will lose respect or some snobbish friends.
That's not the case for most tech or research people. Not worrying about it might be close to just quitting (or silent quitting) and require a bit more mental change than "to not just worry about it". Even if that's the ultimate goal, the advice is as helpful as telling a homeless man how dreadful it is to not have a home, and then tell him to just buy a house.
> I'm not sure how much it can be applied to just hobby reading
When I widen my aperture, what I see is this is a form of "keeping up with the joneses", or teenagers comparing themselves to others on Instagram, or chasing the latest buzzword in technology, etc.
FOMO (fear of missing out) vs JOMO (joy of missing out) is another riff on this age-old idea.
Before I started my first tech job many years ago I was quite stressed. I felt behind constantly and I was worried everyone would be so much better than me so I over compensated by reading every tech book I could get my hands on. I threw myself into them and flat out memorized and experimented with the content until I knew it through and through.
Turns out I had nothing to worry about. In my entire career I've met one guy that was ever "on my level".
I'd say yes-- book reading can help, but the dread of not being enough shouldn't be a part of it. Most tech people don't read. Most tech people don't code before 9AM or after 5PM. Most have never heard of hacker news. You're going to be o.k.
At one of my jobs the entire team read at least a book a week, often more and seemingly non-stop. Every standup started with every person talking about what we'd read that week.
I'd never been a huge longform reader (more like a book a month, at best) and rarely had anything to contribute. Sometimes I'd say "our documentation" because that's what I'd been working on, and when I wasn't working _I wasn't reading_ because it was too much like work to enjoy.
It eventually got profoundly uncomfortable. My manager raised my non-participation as an example of how my attitude was turning too negative for the team. I'd find out from recorded team meetings when I was out sick or on vacation that they'd crack jokes about it when I wasn't around.
It particularly odd because I arguably read as much as anyone else on that team, but I preferred either technical content related to what I was working on, or shorter works like short-story collections and articles for fun. If I wasn't reading biographies and novels, it seemingly didn't count to them.
I'll be honest, they sound rude for laughing behind your back, but I really disagree with the notion that you're reading "as much" by reading some reddit articles or docs pages.
People who keep up a book per week or month ALSO read those things. I've found many people that don't read have this notion that just going on reddit for an hour a day "is the same thing", but it's nothing like sitting down and properly diving into long form.
That being said nobody should feel bad for not doing it. It's like running a marathon, don't say it's the same because you go for a walk with the dog, but nobody should be expected to run one.
People who “read a book a week” aren’t absorbing anything useful for technical work anyway.
When I think about the best (as identified by both myself and widely within the org) engineers I spent the last couple of decades working with, exactly 0 of them went through a book a week.
Reading that much means you’re just skipping across some other author’s ideas. The person that reads a single article about some new algorithm or research and spends multiple hours internalizing it, trying it, analyzing it, debating it, etc is gaining far more than the book guzzlers.
Really weird to say "you read X, I read Y. We are not the same" and then follow-up with "oh but it's fine, you don't have to. But I'm X and you're Y".
I could replace a few words in your comment and make it about thinking reading books is the same as reading extremely dense technical content. It's a silly argument.
> My manager raised my non-participation as an example of how my attitude was turning too negative for the team. I'd find out from recorded team meetings when I was out sick or on vacation that they'd crack jokes about it when I wasn't around.
I can really understand how it feels from their perspective. Work feels much better when we do stuff that makes us connect as humans, and quarterly corporate events don't cut it. They created a culture where they did something fun together and had a conversation topic other than work, and there's this one guy who just refuses to participate and doesn't even try to find a way to include himself in the group.
Sure, reading a book a week takes time from your other activities and is way too much to expect, but if you had spent 15 minutes on Monday morning browsing Wikipedia on the topic of literature and brought some trivia, that would have been much appreciated.
People often complain about the soullessness of corporate jobs, but when someone tries to do something about it, there's usually huge pushback because everyone wants that something to fit their personal preferences, and since we can't find a thing that everyone likes, we go back to treating job as a pure business relationship.
The complains come from how fake it is. Companies force "corporate fun" where there is none. They try to influence your personal life. They want you to dedicate your entire life to the company and they want you to treat coworkers as family while laying off underperformers of ever increasing KPIs.
Sometimes not even underperformers.
THAT'S soullessness and that "mandatory" team-building exercise of book reading is actually an example of that because when layoffs come the company won't care about any of that.
It's much better to work for a company that allows you to do the job (preferably remote) and f off asap, enabling you to forge real relationships out of work in an area you actually plan to live.
> I can really understand how it feels from their perspective. Work feels much better when we do stuff that makes us connect as humans, and quarterly corporate events don't cut it. They created a culture where they did something fun together and had a conversation topic other than work, and there's this one guy who just refuses to participate and doesn't even try to find a way to include himself in the group.
Could also say the group failed to integrate a person who had different preferences for their free time and then bullied them when they weren't present at work?
I think both perspectives are quite extreme and miss the mark.
If reading a book a week in my free time was a work requirement, I would be out and quick. That sounds ridiculous!
I do agree that work is much better if you are friends with your colleagues. That being said, one always need to be wary of bad actors that take advantage of people's openness.
There is a reason why the advice to not date or get too close to colleagues resonate with many people. There are just some workplaces that are toxic.
Sometimes, it is just better to delineate work from your personal life and interests.
Like... an involuntary book club? As in one person opened up that they read something like The Scarlet Letter? I'm sorry that you experienced that.
At an old job I read a fiction series based on a suggestion from my manager but that's because we liked the same type of books, absolutely was not expected to be read to join the "in" crowd. If anything, we were the "out" crowd!
^^^ I get night terrors thinking about gig in Boston fire city good sea food but wth is up with work environments that lure you in with free books and perks and it's like hell
I read around 150 books a year. Most of it is what I like to call "shitlit", or alternatively inconsequential literature.
This does not mean I am better or worse than anyone, just that my default state is reading. Friends eventually read books when recommended them and we talk about then.
Reading shouldnt be a target, it should be for enjoyment. I enjoy shitlit, but others may not.
And also, there are people I respect who said they read 100+ books a year, and that you should, too. But while others in my circles were eager to jump on the train, for me, I thought it would be performative, and be about having read said 100+ books than digesting any of it. And what more, I recall that I best retain info via reading if I have skin in the game, rather than feeling like reading makes me appear more approvable to others.
All that is to say, it's good to hear from someone who reads a ton that a lot of your reading is kinda junk stuff (even if 150+ books a year is still a crazy metric – and as a tangent, people who ride bikes a ton say that a lot of their miles they rack up are junk miles, so I'm sure there's an equivalent of shitlit in any pursuit/ hobby/ interest/ endeavor).
Do you blog or keep a list? I would be nice to see what you read. I tend to only read fiction written by women. (I read enough non-fiction via the Financial Times newspaper.) As a man, it is really eye-opening to "see the other (emotional) side". Usually, the stories are much more about character development, than trying to save the world ("do something big") that I often see in fiction written by men.
I have most of it on my kindle so there is a purchase history there.
Recently its been a lot of LitRPG stuff. Dungeon Crawler Carl, The Primal Hunter and so on. I also read most of the Hugo and Nebula lists too. Lots of SciFi in the past couple of years.
How does this work? Is it a book every two days? Or three books on the weekend? How long is your commute and how do you keep off YouTube/Netflix in the evening?
I commute for 20 hours a week on public transport, so a lot gets done there. I also read every night as a way to wind down before bed. Sometimes I will read continuously on a weekend if the book/series is engaging enough and can finish a couple of thousand pages that way.
Honestly, its not a target it is just what happens when you read a lot - you get through books.
As for YouTube or Netflix, I dont really watch that much and can't really understand how people spend that much time on them. Given that though, I read instead and lots of people dont understand that. Each to their own, happiness is different for everyone etc
> how do you keep off YouTube/Netflix in the evening?
not Having Netflix is a start. Realizing that most Netflix shows gets dumped mid-story after 1 or 2 seasons and will leave me without closure is another
if you read 150 books a year you are well ahead of the crowd. However it would be tough to apply all 150 books contents to real life. If you enjoy reading keep doing it. I would love to be able to read 150 books or let alone make the time for it.
They're only well ahead of the crowd if someone's measuring for some reason, otherwise they just have a number and other people might have their own numbers, but regardless it's just as arbitrary as having a number for how many video games you played or tv shows watched.
I read probably 6 books last year, all of them left me with some little useful takeaway. I didn't watch any shows, and none of the movies seemed remotely compelling. These numbers and whether I come away feeling good or not are basically a series of dice rolls from year to year, and I'm never desiring to do arbitrarily more of any of them; the time comes when the time comes.
I only ever want to do more when something else is diverting my attention in a way I dislike. For example, I love hiking and I love video games, but one has an endless viable season and the other doesn't.
I used to feel differently though. I used to want to persistently clear my Pocket list, but now I just let the things that really seem compelling draw me in, and the rest can sit there waiting.
"it would be tough to apply all 150 books contents to real life."
Why the hell would anybody want to do that?
Do you feel some need to "apply every meal you eat to real life"? or to "apply every movie you watch"? Or every concert you hear, or every ballet you see?
(I usually read books as a way to avoid "real life" for a while...)
I think this comment encapsulates quite exactly the point of the article: reading as a gamified chore that puts you "well ahead of the crowd" and somehow measures (or influences, even?) how successful, smart, rich, interesting, etc. you are.
Ahead in what way? Reading more shitlit than anyone? I guess. It's clearly a time tradeoff, and you are probably "ahead" on something else besides book reading that you don't even think about.
I think even if you did find the time to read 150 books a year, you'd quickly be disappointed.
You know, this whole idea of applying what you read to your own life, even if it's good literature is really funny. I've been rereading a lot of southern gothic lit, and thinking about applying Wise Blood or Confederacy of Dunces to guide my life actually seems kind of hilarious (even though O'Connor especially has some interesting commentary packed in her works).
Reading is part of my daily job, my education path, and in my free time. Even here on HN (ignoring the fact that the internet is no book).
I have so many open tabs in my browser with articles I want to read because I see value in reading them eventually, but I can't keep up with all the new content that gets produced.
Then I read the article with different eyes, the eyes of a youtube consumer.
I have a huuuuge list of yt videos I still want to watch because of education, interest, or curiosity. Same here, I just have not the time to keep up with all the information that gets produced.
So what's the solution to that?
Step back from the Internet, unsubscribe from non essential creators, close tabs without verifying if still needed, organize more and more? So trade fomo with organization? Start over with an empty browser, empty new email account?
I liked Oliver Burkeman on this with his “too many needles” idea [0].
Personally, I hoard a bunch of stuff using Omnivore and then on a semi regular basis I go through that and just throw away 90% of it. I find this two stage process useful: stage 1 is gathering All The Things, stage 2 is after a while sifting and keeping only the stuff I’m really interested in. Ultimately though, I try nowadays to apply a Buddhist angle on it: I hold all this stuff very lightly, knowing that it’s as close to infinite as makes no difference, and letting it go!
Stop looking for content that might be interesting. There's simply way too much content that might interest you.
Start pulling content instead of pushing. Why are you looking for something to read? Boredom, research? Then go for the kill: what is the best option here? What is the most fun to you or the most important data you need? Prioritize mercilessly.
And filter aggressively. There is very little original and high quality content out there. Most of what is available is derivative and there's a long tail of very low quality content. Even if the topic or title seems interesting, for each 100 articles or books that sound interesting, there's likely 1 or 2 that are miles ahead of the crowd in terms of quality. Time is a great filter. Books on a given topic that are decades or centuries older than average are likely to be the source of much rehashing in a given field.
> Step back from the Internet, unsubscribe from non essential creators, close tabs without verifying if still needed
Pretty much, yes, that's the answer, at least for me. I've stopped keeping tabs on much of what's considered as being "new" and I've surrounded myself (literally, I think I might have a hoarding problem) with books that I consider to be close to my (hobby-ish) interests.
Even when it comes to those books I 100% realize that I won't have enough time to read them all, but whenever I see a mention/reference being made from a book that I'm currently reading to a second book it's good to know that I have that second book in my piles of books located around the house. Hard to logically explain, but it is what it is.
This sort of gamification is so widespread. It makes perfect sense to me in some areas, but in others (reading being one), it doesn’t at all. Reading is so personal and so important to savour, that the idea of “getting through the book” just seems to run counter to the whole spirit.
I’ve got a massive stack of books that I want to read and I feel some frustration sometimes that I can’t get through them quicker, because I want to read more! But this is an internal metric and not one I’ve ever compared to anything or anyone else.
I’m a fiction reader mainly; maybe this sense isn’t the case if I had a stack of business books? I don’t know.
Goodreads statistics don't add pressure. They take it off. This article assumes that reading is a chore.
If I notice that I'm falling behind it's because I'm not taking enough me time. It's so easy to get wrapped up in work, research, deadlines, grants, students, etc. Then you burn out.
Reading stats are a way to keep that at bay. And even better it's cumulative and I can't cheat. If I've been really busy this month, I have to make even more room next month to catch up. That space gets filled with afternoons where I relax, sip tea, enjoy the view, read, learn something new, get a new perspective, or just live in another world for a while.
Beautifully put. Many metrics suffer from the glass half full vs half empty, perspective! They're just numbers at the end of the day. The important part is how you let them inform you. It is so easy to have the number goes up === good mentality, but many metrics hide the subjective and or collective truth. People need to take metrics in aggregate. Not everything is a race, not every number is important and many metrics are poor indicators for what you really want to measure.
not just books but almost everything. there is a lot of anxiety seeing others put out stuff when you are barely stringing along. dont beat yourself up, focus on beating yourself.
I'd always thought of it as being a perk of being a nerd that I didn't feel the need to "keep up" with fashions.
TV series, books, movies, bands, whatever. I'll partake if I fancy it, if I don't, who cares? I won't be cool? I never was cool, and hell, they changed what it was anyway.
Readit News
Granted the problem seems similar, but only because the author is in the field of reading (working in books related profession).
I'm not sure how much it can be applied to just hobby reading. Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of professional obligations (you'll fall behind to your professional peers) but there's not much of stress if you're in it as a leisure /hobby; it's not inherently competitive activity.
So the conclusion is not that helpful. It's targeted to a very small audience (people that work in a field where reading books and keeping up with the latest books, are important) and is essentially "don't worry about it!"
> Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of professional obligations (you'll fall behind to your professional peers)
Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.
I have built my life around me with people that perform at those levels, so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels. Not to mention, look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer. It is sad, but its reality.
So I work always, every success opens up 2 new problems to deal with.
I was happier drinking Stoic koolaid.
He said it with a smile, but still, there's a hard kernel of truth there for many of us: if we work hard to advance, and put ourselves in the company of top people, we no longer stand out. But you know what? Life needn't be a continual competition. Be good at what you do, do it well, and take satisfaction in that. You don't need to continuously compare yourself to everyone else, and ask if you are in the top 10%. Eventually you won't be, if only because your entire group is up there.
...look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer.
Yes, but we aren't surrounded by hyenas in the wilds of Africa. Civilization does bring some benefits. Take some time to smell the roses. Heck, a bit of time for relaxation may even improve your performance.
There's a lot of helping weak members of the pack done by social animals, don't get fooled by the reductionist understanding of "survival of the fittest" that the American education system seems to teach. I believe part of the success of social animals like humans is the support they can give each other, which doesn't mean there is no survival of the fittest anymore, but that the fitness now refers the whole group rather than individuals.
And there are examples of very early humans with disabilities that would have made their care very resource-intensive for their tribe, and still they often lived long lives. This implies that these early humans helped even the weakest members, when they could just as easily have let these individuals perish to make their own lives easier.
I'm trying to say this in the kindest way, but please seek professional help, your view of reality and your relationships seems neither healthy nor sustainable to me.
It is important that you can sometimes let your guard down and not perform at the highest level imho. After all, you are not a machine, but a real human being with feelings. If you want to perform at that level, this is of course perfectly fine, but it should be because you enjoy it, or the fruits of your labor, not because you feel like you have to.
You're not in the top 1% of posters on this site. How do you deal with that utter failure? Sure, you can make excuses, but face it, you're not in the top 1%, 10%, or even top 90% of this site in points.
These points are, of course, worthless, but holding yourself to an unachievable standard is ridiculous. One might even say it's the top 1% of ridiculousness. And how about things that are contradictory? If you're in the top 1% of people who get 8 hours of sleep every night, you're automatically disqualified from being in the top 1% of people who get 4 hours of less a night. If you're in a top 10% country for Gini inequality, are you also in a top 10% country for happiness?
You're not in the top 10% of wealth already, so you've already failed at that. Just do the best you can and have some self-compassion. By all means, push yourself to do your best, but don't kill yourself over the fact that there's always going to be someone better than you at something.
On the contrary being in 0.1-1% is not worth it, things like monetary success are usually more down to networking and being in the right place at the right time, top 10% software engineer can earn way more money joining right early stage startup or even tech company at the right time - like NVIDIA lately. While the 0.1% developer might spend his time at failed startup - for example, because his extreme passion might mislead them to believe field like _developer tools_ is the future.
Of course, this is written from a perspective of a person that likes what they do, but not to the point where it's what I want to do for the rest of my life. Pretty much every hour spend lead climbing outside was more fun and fulfilling than any hour spend at work.
I don't believe you. No one is in the "top 1%" of everything you do.
I don't say this to shame you, but to make you realize that you're already okay as you are, while not being the best.
There's no way you're in the top 1% of management ability, technical knowledge, coworker relationships, parenting, exercise, finances, et cetera.
On the few axes of life where I know for sure I am better than the next 99 people I meet, I have had to practice that thing so much that I have made more than one logical jump and ability jump that counts as a filter for the next 99. It won't be overnight that I fall out of the 1%.
I suspect the same is true for anyone in any 1% of anything.
Let go of your fears.
I hope this is sarcastic because it's comically neurotic. Like you're headed for a huge breakdown.
>look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer. It is sad, but its reality.
Wanna know how I know you spend 0 time in nature?
I think you should start a garden. Get in touch with actual nature. You're going to have a breakdown when you realize you're not in the top 1% of all gardens, but once you start to see perennials refuse to accept they were put in the wrong spot year after year, maybe you'll chill out.
Excuse me, what the flask. You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family.
> look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer
What kind of nature are you even watching? It's the sickly bottom 1% that's suffering which is an unfortunate reality, not the 90%. You completely inverted that.
Not only that, members of the same intelligent species usually help weaker members of their "packs". And people are supposed to be even better than that.
Getting into the top 10% requires a lot more effort and will likely require you to sacrifice other things so that you can focus on that one thing.
Unless the subject is something obscure where few people have interest; getting into the top 1% often requires complete dedication. Your life revolves around that one thing and you need superior talent.
Competition drives us to be better, but often those who find themselves in that 1% are questioning if it was really worth it. You can be completely happy further down the ladder.
Are you positive that this is what is going to happen?
Deleted Comment
Of course there is some of this in software related fields, but for a lot of us the bigger risk is a demonstrable professional one. If you haven’t learned anything new in tech in the last 10 years you could be out of a job. There is a whole ocean of jobs for which you would not qualify.
vs
"I will be completely unable to collaborate on a project because I literally don't understand the concepts on which it's based"
The only non-fluid timeliness considerations of literature are typically social in nature and casual in import. Not so, tech.
Isn't the conclusion from the article inherently transferable to what you described? (I was assuming a different topic as well.)
It is helpful to people that are not aware of the source of the stress (often in the form of feeling overwhelmed) to be able to identify it. The article spend most of the words actually just describing this phenomenon. I think newly-graduated-in-tech-startup me in the past would've felt validated reading it.
But the article falls short on any good remedies for the situation. Like yeah I'd love to be able to just "not worry about it", but the problem is that I (as a researcher needing to keep up) can't just stop worrying about it, but I'd love to find a balance where I can keep the enthusiasm and up to date while not feeling overwhelmed and dreadful while doing it.
It works for the author because ultimately, the author is in a position when they can walk away or explain WHY they don't keep up and get accepted for it. Worst case the author will lose respect or some snobbish friends.
That's not the case for most tech or research people. Not worrying about it might be close to just quitting (or silent quitting) and require a bit more mental change than "to not just worry about it". Even if that's the ultimate goal, the advice is as helpful as telling a homeless man how dreadful it is to not have a home, and then tell him to just buy a house.
When I widen my aperture, what I see is this is a form of "keeping up with the joneses", or teenagers comparing themselves to others on Instagram, or chasing the latest buzzword in technology, etc.
FOMO (fear of missing out) vs JOMO (joy of missing out) is another riff on this age-old idea.
It feels very real to me, in the circles I run in.
Turns out I had nothing to worry about. In my entire career I've met one guy that was ever "on my level".
I'd say yes-- book reading can help, but the dread of not being enough shouldn't be a part of it. Most tech people don't read. Most tech people don't code before 9AM or after 5PM. Most have never heard of hacker news. You're going to be o.k.
I'd never been a huge longform reader (more like a book a month, at best) and rarely had anything to contribute. Sometimes I'd say "our documentation" because that's what I'd been working on, and when I wasn't working _I wasn't reading_ because it was too much like work to enjoy.
It eventually got profoundly uncomfortable. My manager raised my non-participation as an example of how my attitude was turning too negative for the team. I'd find out from recorded team meetings when I was out sick or on vacation that they'd crack jokes about it when I wasn't around.
It particularly odd because I arguably read as much as anyone else on that team, but I preferred either technical content related to what I was working on, or shorter works like short-story collections and articles for fun. If I wasn't reading biographies and novels, it seemingly didn't count to them.
People who keep up a book per week or month ALSO read those things. I've found many people that don't read have this notion that just going on reddit for an hour a day "is the same thing", but it's nothing like sitting down and properly diving into long form.
That being said nobody should feel bad for not doing it. It's like running a marathon, don't say it's the same because you go for a walk with the dog, but nobody should be expected to run one.
When I think about the best (as identified by both myself and widely within the org) engineers I spent the last couple of decades working with, exactly 0 of them went through a book a week.
Reading that much means you’re just skipping across some other author’s ideas. The person that reads a single article about some new algorithm or research and spends multiple hours internalizing it, trying it, analyzing it, debating it, etc is gaining far more than the book guzzlers.
Reading a book is arguably easier than reading technical content or other articles, because they don't tend to be as information dense.
I prefer reading things like this: https://commoncog.com/becoming-data-driven-in-business/
But someone might like reading documentation for e.g. databases, which is also extremely information dense. I have briefly done this (https://turbopuffer.com/docs) and read other database content (https://artem.krylysov.com/blog/2023/04/19/how-rocksdb-works...), but it's not my favourite content.
Really weird to say "you read X, I read Y. We are not the same" and then follow-up with "oh but it's fine, you don't have to. But I'm X and you're Y".
I could replace a few words in your comment and make it about thinking reading books is the same as reading extremely dense technical content. It's a silly argument.
That's workplace bullying.
Sure, reading a book a week takes time from your other activities and is way too much to expect, but if you had spent 15 minutes on Monday morning browsing Wikipedia on the topic of literature and brought some trivia, that would have been much appreciated.
People often complain about the soullessness of corporate jobs, but when someone tries to do something about it, there's usually huge pushback because everyone wants that something to fit their personal preferences, and since we can't find a thing that everyone likes, we go back to treating job as a pure business relationship.
THAT'S soullessness and that "mandatory" team-building exercise of book reading is actually an example of that because when layoffs come the company won't care about any of that.
It's much better to work for a company that allows you to do the job (preferably remote) and f off asap, enabling you to forge real relationships out of work in an area you actually plan to live.
God I love remote contracts...
Could also say the group failed to integrate a person who had different preferences for their free time and then bullied them when they weren't present at work?
I think both perspectives are quite extreme and miss the mark.
If reading a book a week in my free time was a work requirement, I would be out and quick. That sounds ridiculous!
There is a reason why the advice to not date or get too close to colleagues resonate with many people. There are just some workplaces that are toxic.
Sometimes, it is just better to delineate work from your personal life and interests.
Dead Comment
At an old job I read a fiction series based on a suggestion from my manager but that's because we liked the same type of books, absolutely was not expected to be read to join the "in" crowd. If anything, we were the "out" crowd!
This does not mean I am better or worse than anyone, just that my default state is reading. Friends eventually read books when recommended them and we talk about then.
Reading shouldnt be a target, it should be for enjoyment. I enjoy shitlit, but others may not.
I'm gonna start using "shitlit" from hereon out.
And also, there are people I respect who said they read 100+ books a year, and that you should, too. But while others in my circles were eager to jump on the train, for me, I thought it would be performative, and be about having read said 100+ books than digesting any of it. And what more, I recall that I best retain info via reading if I have skin in the game, rather than feeling like reading makes me appear more approvable to others.
All that is to say, it's good to hear from someone who reads a ton that a lot of your reading is kinda junk stuff (even if 150+ books a year is still a crazy metric – and as a tangent, people who ride bikes a ton say that a lot of their miles they rack up are junk miles, so I'm sure there's an equivalent of shitlit in any pursuit/ hobby/ interest/ endeavor).
Recently its been a lot of LitRPG stuff. Dungeon Crawler Carl, The Primal Hunter and so on. I also read most of the Hugo and Nebula lists too. Lots of SciFi in the past couple of years.
Honestly, its not a target it is just what happens when you read a lot - you get through books.
As for YouTube or Netflix, I dont really watch that much and can't really understand how people spend that much time on them. Given that though, I read instead and lots of people dont understand that. Each to their own, happiness is different for everyone etc
not Having Netflix is a start. Realizing that most Netflix shows gets dumped mid-story after 1 or 2 seasons and will leave me without closure is another
I read probably 6 books last year, all of them left me with some little useful takeaway. I didn't watch any shows, and none of the movies seemed remotely compelling. These numbers and whether I come away feeling good or not are basically a series of dice rolls from year to year, and I'm never desiring to do arbitrarily more of any of them; the time comes when the time comes.
I only ever want to do more when something else is diverting my attention in a way I dislike. For example, I love hiking and I love video games, but one has an endless viable season and the other doesn't.
I used to feel differently though. I used to want to persistently clear my Pocket list, but now I just let the things that really seem compelling draw me in, and the rest can sit there waiting.
Why the hell would anybody want to do that?
Do you feel some need to "apply every meal you eat to real life"? or to "apply every movie you watch"? Or every concert you hear, or every ballet you see?
(I usually read books as a way to avoid "real life" for a while...)
Ahead in what way? Reading more shitlit than anyone? I guess. It's clearly a time tradeoff, and you are probably "ahead" on something else besides book reading that you don't even think about.
I think even if you did find the time to read 150 books a year, you'd quickly be disappointed.
So what's the solution to that? Step back from the Internet, unsubscribe from non essential creators, close tabs without verifying if still needed, organize more and more? So trade fomo with organization? Start over with an empty browser, empty new email account?
What's your take on that?
Personally, I hoard a bunch of stuff using Omnivore and then on a semi regular basis I go through that and just throw away 90% of it. I find this two stage process useful: stage 1 is gathering All The Things, stage 2 is after a while sifting and keeping only the stuff I’m really interested in. Ultimately though, I try nowadays to apply a Buddhist angle on it: I hold all this stuff very lightly, knowing that it’s as close to infinite as makes no difference, and letting it go!
[0] https://www.oliverburkeman.com/river
Start pulling content instead of pushing. Why are you looking for something to read? Boredom, research? Then go for the kill: what is the best option here? What is the most fun to you or the most important data you need? Prioritize mercilessly.
And filter aggressively. There is very little original and high quality content out there. Most of what is available is derivative and there's a long tail of very low quality content. Even if the topic or title seems interesting, for each 100 articles or books that sound interesting, there's likely 1 or 2 that are miles ahead of the crowd in terms of quality. Time is a great filter. Books on a given topic that are decades or centuries older than average are likely to be the source of much rehashing in a given field.
Pretty much, yes, that's the answer, at least for me. I've stopped keeping tabs on much of what's considered as being "new" and I've surrounded myself (literally, I think I might have a hoarding problem) with books that I consider to be close to my (hobby-ish) interests.
Even when it comes to those books I 100% realize that I won't have enough time to read them all, but whenever I see a mention/reference being made from a book that I'm currently reading to a second book it's good to know that I have that second book in my piles of books located around the house. Hard to logically explain, but it is what it is.
I’ve got a massive stack of books that I want to read and I feel some frustration sometimes that I can’t get through them quicker, because I want to read more! But this is an internal metric and not one I’ve ever compared to anything or anyone else.
I’m a fiction reader mainly; maybe this sense isn’t the case if I had a stack of business books? I don’t know.
If I notice that I'm falling behind it's because I'm not taking enough me time. It's so easy to get wrapped up in work, research, deadlines, grants, students, etc. Then you burn out.
Reading stats are a way to keep that at bay. And even better it's cumulative and I can't cheat. If I've been really busy this month, I have to make even more room next month to catch up. That space gets filled with afternoons where I relax, sip tea, enjoy the view, read, learn something new, get a new perspective, or just live in another world for a while.
What an awful take on life and reading.
Maybe "use your time well" is a better thought?
Focusing on beating X just makes it a metric, and can be destructive when you'd be better off switching to some completely different activity instead.
When it's a metric, you can be tied to keep meeting it (or even just attempted to) well past it's usefulness.
TV series, books, movies, bands, whatever. I'll partake if I fancy it, if I don't, who cares? I won't be cool? I never was cool, and hell, they changed what it was anyway.