by Dr. Ryan Neinstein
Why do I read at 4:30am every day of the year as a doctor?
A few people I really admire have summed this up perfectly. Charlie Munger once said, ““There is no better teacher than history in determining the future…there are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.”
General Mattis, in his fantastic memoir opined, “Reading sheds light on the dark path ahead,” he explains. “By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present.”
I could not agree more with these simple yet magnanimous statements from people I deeply admire. I am frequently sitting at my kitchen table reading about Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Musashi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, amazed at the life lessons learned and real actual truths that still apply to today. I would need to have lived 1000’s of lives and made millions of mistakes to accumulate the knowledge that I can get from a few dollars worth of books. It’s not just interesting, it’s liberating to learn. I find comfort that no matter what the time and place in history, everyone goes through the same squabbles, drama and toxicity as before, but there are clearly better ways to handle these things which will allow you to live a better life
Ok here it is, the one thing I would never have known if I didn’t read a book a week:
I would never have known what is possible in the universe. There is simply no other way to grasp what human beings are capable of (good, bad, and indifferent) without diving into the stories from history. This has profoundly changed everything in my life. Once you start to get curious and explore what is possible it leads to the next step which is “how do you actually do something”. This step starts to get easier as you learn how to level up the accumulation of knowledge and skills. Once you have figured out what you want to do and you have learned how to actually do it you can start building a team of people to help you do what you do, help you get better at what you do, help you continue to explore what is possible.
You may be thinking that all of this can’t affect your life, but you don’t have to be a hustling entrepreneur, or be looking to change the world to learn lessons from history. Simply trying to be a better person everyday is really the ultimate goal of learning because otherwise, as Nietzsche said, reading is merely a “critique of words by means of other words.”