I beg you to read.

I know it is hard, and for most of you, you probably think it sucks. But it’s a very important time right now where being someone who reads gives you a huge advantage as compared to someone who doesn’t.

Not because of the types of books you will read, it really doesn’t matter if you want to read Diary of a Wimpy Kid as a senior or read a business book. It doesn’t matter. The reason that reading is now important is because it trains your mind in 2 main ways.

1. Attention. Reading increases your attention span relative to someone who scrolls all day. Having a better attention span makes doing harder, more stressful tasks way easier.
2. Visualization. Many of the most successful people on the planet say that the reason for their success is that they became very good at visualizing. And there are two types of visualization that people talk about. The first is the type where you say something like “when I’m 22 I want to have an M4 that I buy with my money”. This is a very important thing to do because your actions follow your thoughts, and it’s proven by many psychologists that if you give your brain a goal, then automatically your brain will figure out how to get to that goal without needing a huge plan. And the 2nd type of visualization, which is actually more important, is having the ability to simulate situations in your mind. By this I don’t only mean practicing a conversation in your mind, those types of things don’t really work. I mean more for example if you have a business pitch in front of these 2 investors, John and Sarah, what successful people say helped them is to, before the pitch, get as much information as you can on these people and try and simulate your full pitch in your head, hundreds of times, with all the possible outcomes and plan for every outcome. Maxwell Maltz, among many others, who wrote Psycho-Cybernetics, says that your mind cannot differentiate between lived experiences and imagined ones. Other philosophers add that until death, all suffering is psychological. Both of these show the power of the mind in dictating how you feel or act. If you visualize something so much, your body actually gets more comfortable when the time comes to actually perform the act, and you’ve by then seen every possible outcome and are prepared for all of them.

Back to reading. Why is reading so important in training yourself to visualize? When you read, you place yourself into another person’s mind, you temporarily leave your own body and become one with the author or character. This is very powerful and starts to move the gears in your head to say that yes I can get used to doing this.

Fully visualizing every situation is like running a marathon, and reading, no matter what the book is, is like all the steps that train you to be able to do so. And training your attention span also has huge ROI in the age of doom scrolling.

Personally I would rather be someone experiencing life and feeling that I have the autonomy over my attention, rather than feel that my phone controls me, though I will find ways to rationalize that and make it feel it is not like that.

I’m not asking you to start by forcing yourself to sit down for an hour and read every day. Just download Kindle, and get any book, whatever interests you, and when you get the impulse to scroll, just try to get 1 page out. Just one page. By then your impulse to scroll will have gone away and you will either continue reading, or do whatever action other than scrolling that you feel you should do.

The Industrial Revolution made it so that humans no longer (on average) had to do as much physical labor, then came a trend of fitness because people were becoming physically weak. I think the same thing will happen with the Cognitive Revolution, which is this AI age where intelligence can be outsourced, people will see that they need to train their brain in the same way they train their body. To get ahead of that, why not never let yourself get unfit in the first place. Start training your mind and you will see that you will be in the 1 percent of the Cognitive Revolution.

I’m telling you this from experience, I’ve been in the AI startup space for a couple years now and all that people talk about is automating cognitive tasks with AI. People are building companies on the basis of helping AI get better at building AI, forgetting the human in the mix. And they are building these companies, obviously, with AI. There’s nothing wrong with this, people have to use the resource of intelligence to the max, but humans need to hopefully not outsource their own cognition to neural networks.

So all I ask is for you to start reading. Train your mind and you will maximize your chance of success.

Thank you.