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What to read and when is that’s kind of difficult, actually. I don’t know. Like, a lot of articles just kind of come past me during my day. I build up a reputation for being into a certain set of things, and people will pay stuff to me in Slack rooms, or iMessage, or email, or whatever have you. And so I’ll just get information during the day and it will sort of ambiently pass through. There’s that, and then there’s the book stack. The book stack is Last out, first in. I think that’s it. What is whatever that is?

You have to wait your turn in the book stack. So when I get a new book, it goes to the bottom of the stack. That’s what that is, right? So I did that, and it was actually pretty easy to establish that routine. And I usually read in the mornings and the evenings. And sometimes it’s professional stuff. Sometimes it’s like tech adjacent stuff. Like right now I’m reading a book by Sarah Wachter Boetchera, whom I’m probably butchering the last name of. And it’s about the tech industry, but I’m not going to be applying it to conversion rate optimization any time soon, right? It’s good. But yeah. Then there’s kind of the time that I plan during the rest of the day where in the morning, morning is writing time, writing time is sacred time. I have upended my mornings all of thrice in 2017 to do anything that wasn’t writing. And then the afternoon usually kind of breaks into early afternoon is client work and late afternoon is like reading and walking the dog. And I’ve just kind of always done that, right? Because reading is the most critical thing in my business. If I’m not constantly understanding what to do next in the tech industry, I’m going to fall behind and I’m not going to have a job. If you are part of the tech industry, you fundamentally have to be understanding what is the new cool shit. You have to understand what works now. And so if you’re not reading a lot and working that into your routine frequently, You have probably around how long do you imagine before you become irrelevant and have to quit the industry? I would say about four years.

Um, I definitely think I’m in the tech industry.

I think increasingly the tech industry is just kind of growing to encompass all businesses. And there’s ceasing to be a distinction, right? Like I’m, you know, one of my clients, they make like artisanal handmade bracelets from Bali, right? But if they weren’t an e-commerce business, they wouldn’t be turning over the amount that they do. Right. You could theoretically go to Bali and ship it and get to like a hippie market someplace, and you would be doing maybe, I guess, 20K a year, something like that. Yeah. So I mean, I don’t think that if you want to grow as a business in the year of our Lord twenty seventeen, you have to pretend like you’re a tech company, even when you’re not. Right. And I’m when I say tech industry, I mean more in like an actual building role, right? Because you can be in the tech industry and be in marketing. You can be in the tech industry and be in content creation or and it’s still peripheral, right? Like you’re a writer first and foremost, but you happen to be a writer for Casper, which is a tech company, right? They’re a tech company that happens to issue mattresses to people. But they’re fundamentally a tech company. No, I agree with you there. Yeah, that’s a bit of a digression from the reading and writing bit. But if you’re like a designer or developer, especially if you’re a developer, you should be reading every single day. You should be devoting at least an hour and a half to your reading and an education every single day. And if you don’t, I mean, that’s the way you become professional. But if you don’t, also, you’re going to be on the wrong side of history when your language gets deprecated or your job gets outsourced, right? Your jobs don’t get outsourced in the language that came out 10 minutes ago.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you’re taking the time to listen to our stupid podcast, you can take the time to read.

I mean, you’re going to get about as much value if you read while listening to our podcast as if you pay very careful attention. Yeah. Yeah. We’re good at our work.

Yeah. I um I’m sort of the opposite. I come from like a very academic-y background, and so I just Reading happens. It’s not a thing I have to force for myself. It’s a thing that, just like, it’s always there. And maybe I’m just taking it for granted, but like I spend maybe three hours a day reading. Like between morning, evening, just like all of my waking hours, I spend so much fucking time reading. And and that’s, you know, probably a result of my upbringing and my background and like what I did in college and whatever have you. But like the result of it is I don’t think about what to read next. I have a stack. A book goes in the bottom of the stack. Once I have completed the stack, I ask a couple of people what should I put in my stack, and then Amazon Prime orders just appear at my house. Because people are like, I’ve been waiting for this moment my entire life. Here’s the one book I care about. And then they send me, I don’t know, the Bible. No, they don’t send me the Bible. They send me the the book they actually care about. And then it goes in my stack. And that happens like a couple of times. And it works real well. But I don’t know. Like, books just, I have a confidence that good books are going to find me. Like, I surround myself with good people, and the good people happen to recommend good books. And so I don’t really have to think about am I getting low quality books in that aren’t going to help me? I also am very skeptical about shitty books. You have basically twenty pages to keep me reading your book. And I will come in and skim the table of contents, understand how the book is structured, especially for nonfiction books, and understand where to get like interesting bits out of that book, right? There’s a lot of times where I’ll read half of a book and I’ll be like, that was a damn good book. It was incredibly valuable for me. Understanding that a nonfiction book is not really necessarily meant to be read the entire way through, at least most of them that aren’t meant as like entertainment in your bookshop, but like Books where you’re supposed to actually learn something and get something done. You can skip around them. You can skim them. You can throw them to the side if they’re not working out for you. And so the consequence of that is that I go through probably around 100, 120 books a year, something like that. It’s a lot of books, right? And I don’t read 120 books a year. I said go through 120 books, right? Like, I’m close to reading maybe 20. And then I’m half-acidly skimming/slash partially reading probably about 50 more. And then the rest are just bullshit, and I don’t have to read them. I look at them. I see they’re not worth my time and I throw them to the side. Congratulations, I just completed another book in the stack. I doubt that.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s a really good analogy to be making. Like, if you are the kind of person that needs that sort of guidance to stay accountable on your reading routine, by all means, plan out your books. Have a book club, like read with other people. Go out of the house and say, This is going to be my reading time, and only take your Apple Watch or no device at all, better yet. All of those things are tremendously valuable. If you’re a crazy weirdo who did chaos theory research for NASA for in college, Then you should probably just be reading all the time, right? Like, I love reading. I’m one of the I am the success story of the kids’ department of a library. It’s like, reading is fun. I’m like, it is. All right.

My partner is actually frustrated at how little I read, which is hilarious. She’s like, um Some sort of crazy power user on Goodreads. Like her biggest social network is Goodreads. And you know, she’s like, she has a fairly large presence on the internet. Her biggest social network is Goodreads. Yeah. Follow Aaron Watson on Goodreads, everybody. But anyway, yeah. So point being, like, I I don’t know. I’m one of those people who just like reading happens at me and I I just churn through books and it’s great. But if you’re not that kind of person, like carve out a space for it and carve out a routine from that. And the way that I know how to do that is through time management. And it’s not even just I’m carving out space to read, but there’s also the matter of figuring out what to read, right? I’ve solved that largely by surrounding myself with other crazy bookheads. And other people who know what I like and being very outgoing about that. But in the absence of that, what you do, you have a library. And if you live in a big city, you have a big library. And I’m envious because it means you don’t have to go 35 minutes to go to the library. I just sit on shypublib. org and make holds on my partner’s account because she goes. To the library way more often than I do. So she just checks them out on her card and gives them to me. Wonderful. And they happen on the interlibrary alone because Chicago is layout is probably similar to other cities where they have. Big library downtown that has all the interesting books. And if you want like 50 shades of the horror thing, whatever, you can go to your local library. Or you just get loans over there and they’re for free, right? So you could just say, Hey, I want this, send it to Logan Square. And now my book is a one-mile bike ride away and not a half-hour L ride away to another L to et cetera, et cetera. So it’s easier that way. Buying used books, checking books out of the library, doing all these things. The goal is to spend as little on this entire endeavor as humanly possible, because otherwise you’re going to be spending too much money and you’re going to be Wasting a lot of money on books you’re not going to like, and you don’t know until you open it. You know, that’s the problem with books. You’re only enthusiastic about the book when you decide to get the book, and then it goes at the bottom of the stack, and you’re like, what is this? What was I thinking about macrame in 2016? Slow cooker revolution. I mean, slow cookers are great.

Hell no. Just slow cooker, Jesus.

Yeah, my my library library books override other books in the stack because I have three weeks to read them, you know. But yeah, that’s that’s about it. Um I don’t know. I don’t know. Oh, tape flagging you mentioned. If I own the book, oh my God, I cover it in tape flags. And what I do I was mentioning this to Kai while we were preparing the notes for this one, but I buy the one that’s like the five color tape flags from Post-It because they’re cheap. And because nobody makes a single color tape flag that’s the same size, like the tiny pocket size, so I can outline, I can point at a specific line. And then I rip it apart and I sort it in order from cool to warm color, and there’s a hierarchy. If something is like, huh, that’s a cool life hack tip thing. Then it gets a blue tape flag. If it’s more interesting, it’s green. If it’s like getting to the point where it’s like actionable advice, it’s yellow. If you earn a red tape flag. You have justified your existence as an author to me. The most number of red tape flags I have ever put in a book once is eight. Oh, wow. It takes a lot to get eight red tape flags. You have to be, in this case, Alan Weiss’s million-dollar consulting to get eight red tape flags. And a lot of orange, a lot of yellow. I think I went through two packs of tape flags on that book.

It’s a good book. It’s a good book. You have to earn your tape flags. There’s some books that get one tape flag or. I put in a tape flag two-thirds of the way through the book, and Aaron is like, It took that long for them to get a single blue tape flag. I’m like, I know.

Let’s say two orange, five yellow, and then maybe two dozen between green and blue. Whatever the split is. That’s kind of the bar that I have for anything that and above. I’m like, I spent a good amount of time reading this book. It was very valuable for me, very useful, very worth my time. And then other books, I’m anything below that is kind of like bug. If you get a red, automatically, you’re worth my time. If you get like a ton of orange Yeah, yeah, we’re we’re in business. That’s good. But like, yeah, I’m basically just like you gotta dance, man. Fucking dance. I think of one book that you’ve mentioned on this pot, I’m not gonna mention the name of the book. It’s a business book that you mentioned on this podcast like a bunch of times. It earned one red tape flag and nothing else.

That’s it. And it was in the middle of the book, and it’s the like key point of the book. And that was That was a very insightful red tape flag moment. That was amazing. Could it have been a blog post on Medium? Sure. Right.

Somebody actually sent me a copy of Cadence and a photo of a copy of Cadence and Slang that was covered in tape flags. I just lost it. Just lost it. If you have that, you want me to break down crying for five minutes, by all means, email it to me. But yeah, that’s real. That’s there’s so much wasted paper in nonfiction. There’s so much wasted paper in professional texts. They want to feel special and fancy by being a published author, and so they give you chaff. That’s what it is. You can accuse cadence and slang of many things, but one thing you cannot accuse it of is chaff. It’s 120 pages long. There ain’t much chaff.

Yeah, I look at all the red tape flags. Fair. That’s this is not hard. And it is if I did that for every book, I would read six books a year. Like, the goal is to always think about how you’re understanding the knowledge and whether it’s helping you, and then have a decent process for recall. And that’s what it is for me. Because otherwise, I would just be hung up on the same book. And that happens sometimes, right? I currently, every time I’m writing a book. First thing I do is I turn to the Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst, the book I ripped off for cadence and slang in format, if not in substance. And I’ve done that every time, right? And I have a lot of tape flags in all three of my copies of the elements of typographic style. And I go through and think about what is valuable for me in those books. And the same in business, right? Like if I’m thinking about what do I need for business negotiation, I look back on the like five or six books that I just remember in the back of my head, and I’ve organized them by subject in my library. So I have that. And then I take out the ones that I remember to be most insightful because I have a good memory for what gets the most tape flags. And I look at all the red tape flags. That’s it. This is not hard. I go through a lot of tape flags.

That’s it. Just read. Read a lot. Don’t stop.