The Self Help Telephone Game

Part of my tweaked version of 75 Hard that I’ve been doing to start the year — that I’ll write about in a couple weeks — includes a 20 minutes of non-fiction reading every day.

I cleared out my backlog of articles from Tim Urban and Kevin Simler — who I highly recommend btw — and moved on to book summaries. I’ve talked about Shortform before and its advantages. I’m learning, the more I use it, that it has significant disadvantages too. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

I’ve read about half a dozen summaries in the last week, some of which are considered recent heavy hitters in the self improvement world.

Wanting by Luke Burgis.

The Gap And The Gain by Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan.

Finish What You Start by Peter Hollins.

Chop Wood Carry Water by Joshua Medcalf.

Meditations For Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

Their messages are the same, at least according to Shortform. Each is a different flavour of the phrase, “Think positive thoughts.” There’s different mix-ins but at the end of the day it’s all just vanilla ice cream.

As it turns out, books summaries are a stereotypical game of Telephone from your 1st grade classroom with Ms. Smith.

While it’s true that 90% of books should have been a blog post, they needed to originate that way. Turning them into one after the fact doesn’t work very well. We talked about ‘The Map Is Not The Territory’ a few weeks back, this topic falls into the same bucket. Too much detail loss.

Another great example is this compression experiment that MKBHD did with Youtube videos.

3 quick action items as a result of this:

1. Probably don’t write a self help book.

2. Read 1 book and apply its lessons, don’t read 3… or 23 like most people addicted to self help.

3. There is a niche for high quality summaries.

A la point 2:

Pick a Lindy Book. A timeless classic. If you want a spot to start and end, The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey or How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

If you read both those books over and over again for the rest of your life and apply their lessons, you’ll be a lot better off than filling a library. You’ll save a load of time too.

On book summaries:

I think — and I’m willing to be wrong about this — that high quality summaries need an individual filtering mechanism. What do I mean by that?

You need to hunt down book summaries that have been done by one other person with their lens applied to it. And, the closer you can match their lens to your own, the more insight you can gain.

Great news, I think these summaries already exist. They’re called podcasts.

If you’ve spent any time in Podcastistan like me you’ve noticed that whenever an author releases a new book they do a podcast tour, in place of, or to supplement a book tour. Sometimes they turn out great, like Chris Williamson interviewing Nick Bostrom about his new book Deep Utopia. Or, sometimes they turn out like this trainwreck of a canned interview from Scott Galloway and Sahil Bloom about The 5 Types of Wealth.

You can’t cover a full book in one podcast, but you do get significant advantages over a classic summary.

• You maintain the author’s voice and intent. The Shortform summaries all suffer from the same homogenized and hedged writing style.

• A good podcast host will ask the same questions you have about the book. It’s like you’re listening to someone make notes in the margins in real time.

• You maintain detail. A book usually only has 1 point to make. Summaries try to pull in all the secondary points and examples, the mostly useless stuff. Summaries are required to cover the ‘width’ of the book to say they’ve summarized the whole thing. Podcasts allow the host and writer to get into the depth of the main point, without constraints. Nobody is going to complain the author didn’t cover that obscure example from chapter 11 in a podcast.

Pick a podcast host you like listening to and whose values and life goals align with yours. This ensures they’re filtering the information in a way that will be most applicable to your own life.

Words I Wish I Wrote

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