Read ten books

You can become surprisingly competent in almost any field just by reading ten books on it.

• Jared Kushner was made fun of for saying he can solve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict because he’s “read 25 books on it” but then seemingly did make progress.
• Blake Scholl said he read ~10 textbooks to start Boom.
• Elon Musk taught himself aerospace engineering by reading books like Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down before starting SpaceX.
• Leading VC, Coatue, said they became experts on bubbles by reading “10+” books on them.

Even if your stakes or motivation are lower, this does reveal the power of focused reading. You can become an expert on any subject if you just read ten books on that subject. Expertise not hidden in some university classroom or some secret society. Why?

• Most people don’t read, let alone read multiple books on the same subject. In my mind, this is sort of what a PhD is. Read a lot in one specific area and come out of the other side with a novel insight.
• There is something of value in just getting a lot of input on a subject, spending a lot of time with it, and seeing it from different angles. There are a lot of learning hacks to make you more efficient, but sheer input is always a relevant strategy.
• Focusing your reading encourages active reading. You take notes, think about how things connect, notice differences, and uncover questions. All of your reading on the subject becomes more effective. Blake Scholl said that completing the practice problems that went along with each chapter was critical to getting what he needed from them.
• A lot of books suck. Reading 10 in a specific area encourages you to skim and skip ones that aren’t very good, have repetitive information, or you just don’t connect with. It also forces you into the less well-known books on a subject.
• You get many perspectives on the same subject which forces you to form your own. When you just read one book, you can just take the author’s opinion as truth. When you read at least 2, you need to think for yourself and that forces you to have a better understanding of the subject.

I’m midway through a focused reading block on China’s economic development in the last 75 years. No one book could cover the complexity of the subject or give me enough context to understand (and remember it). Some books have been awesome (Apple in China), others have sucked. Most importantly, I have gone from knowing next to nothing to being able to explain (at least a bit) how China’s economy grew so fast (which was my mission all along). Not an expert, but a lot closer than I was.