Why Reading More Books is Hurting Your Growth
The Illusion of More
When Seneca wrote 2,000 years ago that "a multitude of books only gets in one's way," books were rare treasures hand-copied by scribes. Today with Kindle and Audible whereby books have gone the way of content, his wisdom rings truer than ever.
We don't need more content - we need more curation. And far more integration.
You've seen the social media humble-brags about reading 100+ books a year (usually with a big bookshelf as the background) or productivity gurus insisting that "successful people read one book per week." This quantity-focused approach has become modern commonsense, yet it fundamentally misses the purpose of reading.
As I wrote in “My Top Books of the Year”:
“I don't have a big library but rather prefer to read deeply into a small number of books so that the best authors become my Council of Advisors.
The way I see it, if I can fully absorb say even one of someone the caliber of Nassim Taleb, Marcus Aurelius or Donella Meadows, then I will be set in life. I've realized that it's not only the knowledge of the book that's important but the author's perspective and how they came to their conclusions. That's what allows me to think like them.”
The inverse is also true. When you invite too many voices into your mental space without a system for integration, you create more cacophony rather than clarity.
The Integration Challenge
What I've observed in my own learning journey is a growing disconnect between what we consume and what we can meaningfully use. I call this the "Learning Integration Gap."
This gap is especially pronounced for people with broad passions and backgrounds. When you're already navigating across multiple domains, adding more books without a system to connect them only increases cognitive fragmentation.
Think of it like consulting ten friends about an important decision. If each offers different advice and you lack a framework to integrate their perspectives, you don't become wiser - you become paralyzed.
The real value isn't in how many books you read, but in how deeply you integrate them into your thinking. As Epictetus noted, "Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them, you have learned to think better."
I recently explored this approach in depth in my latest video, where I break down my three-step system for turning reading into transformation:
Modern reading culture celebrates acquisition - collecting books, highlighting passages, and counting completions. But true growth happens through integration, the process of connecting new ideas to your existing knowledge structures - and ultimately changing how you move through the world.
In my experience, integration requires three elements missing from conventional reading advice.
My 3-Step Integration System
Here are the three methods that I use to cross the Learning Integration Gap.
1. Purpose-Driven Selection
I learn best through necessity – selecting books that address real challenges I'm facing.
I picked up Marcus Aurelius's Meditations during a difficult period in London when I needed a framework to process disappointment and understand human nature. The book found me at precisely the right moment, becoming a cornerstone of my philosophical approach.
I chose Prisoners of Geography to understand geopolitical forces driving the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This wasn't casual interest – it was an urgent need to make sense of what felt like at the time the advent of WW3.
Sometimes, I read to understand someone better. In the aftermath of a bad breakup, I decided to retrace the intellectual and emotional development path of my ex-girlfriend. Through her, I found Rilke, Patti Smith and Steven Pressfield.
Steven Pressfield’s War of Art is a must read for anyone on the fence to start a creative or entrepreneurial endeavor.
When a coaching client mentioned Mindset Secrets for Winning was pivotal for his success, I got it right away to create a custom program for him. The “side effect” was blowing wide open a new field of subconscious hacking that transformed my own approach.
Key shift #1: Start with a problem you need to solve, then find the book – not the other way around.
2. Dialogue-Based Absorption
While conventional wisdom promotes speed reading and highlighting, I take an entirely different approach:
I spend a minimum of two weeks with important books, treating them as conversations rather than content. I imagine sitting in a cafe with the author, asking questions, taking notes between lines, anticipating their points and countering with my own take.
As one commenter noted:
"Renaissance journals inspired note-taking when books were scarce. Instead of marking pages, scholars would copy passages and diagrams into personal journals with their own observations. Over time, they built on what they learned to form new layers of thinking."
My approach resembles this practice. I actively Epiphany Map concepts, creating visual diagrams that convert the author's ideas into my own interpretation. Rather than highlighting everything, I focus on extracting core principles that can become part of my latticework of mental models.
The ultimate form of Integration is the Council of Advisors, writers whose minds I’ve reconstructed enough to understand the way they think.
3 levels of Absorption. Remember to “extend your stay with writers who’s genius is unquestionable.” Therefore, very few writers ever make it to my Council of Advisors.
For Mindset Secrets for Winning, I drew a graph representing how to cultivate an empowering mindset – celebrating successes like Tiger Woods while approaching failures with stoic detachment. This simple diagram encapsulated a concept I now apply daily.
With Laotzu’s Taoteching, I spent three months studying its 81 verses, drawing connections between Eastern wisdom and Western philosophy. This wasn't passive reading – it was intensive apprenticeship during the most challenging time of my life.
With Nassim Taleb's Antifragile, I mapped connections between his ideas and concepts from Taoism, creating a framework for understanding how uncertainty can be harnessed as a strength.
This approach transforms surface-level information into fundamental understanding - known as First-Principles Thinking. Instead of memorizing an author's words, you learn how they think, allowing you to map your own course through unfamiliar territory.
Key shift #2: Go from passively consuming content to engaging in dialogue, actively reconstructing the author's mind within your own - Matrix style. It’ll take you 10x longer than skimming but you’ll get 100x more real world benefit.*
3. Systematic Implementation
The final step – and most overlooked as we go from one Audible to the next one in the queue – is turning insights into action:
If selection begins with necessity, implementation happens naturally. When I needed to sprint up the learning curve on Private Equity for a consulting client, absorbing The PE Playbook delivered what I needed to know to build a Financial Modeling AI Assistant for them with the mind of Adam Coffey.
Having active projects that give you the opportunity to practice what you just learned does wonders for integration. For me that’s content and community: making videos, writing the Epiphany newsletter, and running Mind Map Nation’s meetups. Funny enough, I find that this overcomes many creative blocks where I’m holding back because of perfectionism. But if I’m doing it for myself - that is forcing myself to synthesize and explain concepts, it suddenly becomes easier.
Most importantly, I use two-week sprints to test specific concepts from books. After learning about visualization in Mindset Secrets, I immediately applied the technique to learning the hand pan, seeing remarkable improvement by focusing on a handful of concepts for 14 days.
Key shift #3: Treat reading not as an end but as the beginning of transformation through deliberate, systematic application.
Building Your Own Integration System
The challenge in today’s information rich world isn't reading more - it's creating deeper connections between what you already know AND directing it towards something personally meaningful for you. That’s how you bridge the Learning Integration Gap.
Here's how to adapt my 3-step framework to your own context:
Audit your reading intention before selection: Are you reading to solve real problems or just accumulating information? Let necessity guide your selection.
Develop your absorption method: Whether through Epiphany Mapping, journaling, or your own system, find a way to transform others' ideas into your own framework.
Design utilization triggers: Create specific moments to put concepts into practice, whether through sprints, teaching others, taking on an active project or creating content.
Build your "Council of Advisors": Instead of a library of acquaintances, develop deep relationships with a few authors whose thinking becomes part of yours.
As another viewer said:
“At last I can enjoy reading a book, using it as a reason to understand the author. The speed reading clips didn't make sense to me either - as you said, there is already too much information, we need to learn to curate it!"
I’m glad my video is able to validate the experience of many deep readers 🙏🏼. Enjoy your extended stay with these incredible thinkers, my friends.
What book has truly transformed your thinking, and how did you integrate it into your life? I'd love to hear your story.
*In the AI age, I’d argue that the skill of Mind Reconstruction is 1,000x more useful because you can create a personal digital advisor. If you’re interested in learning how to do this, check out this video:
This obviously doesn’t replace your integration system - it’s simply an extension of it. There are no short cuts to true knowledge mastery.
If you’re interested in enhancing your learning, Join Mind Map Nation to get access to the Extended Learning Editions for my videos, which contains 30% more content than the YouTube versions. You’ll also be invited to the Deep Dive Discussion I’m hosting this Friday to explore these integration principles with the MMN community. See details below👇
🧠 Deep Dive Discussion: Turning Books Into Results
Date: April 25, 2025
Time: 8AM Pacific Time
Prerequisites: Watch "How I Turn Books Into Results (Extended Learning Edition)"
Details: In this session, we'll use the "How I Turn Books Into Results" video as a starting point for engaging conversation. We’ll get into questions like:
Selection: How do you decide which books to invest your time in? What signals tell you a book is worth “prolonging your stay with”?
Absorption: What note taking techniques have you found most effective for “owning” concepts? How do you balance breadth vs. depth in your reading practice?
Utilization: How do you apply book knowledge to real-world situations? What systems have you developed to revisit and implement insights from your reading? What challenges do you face?
As always, I'll facilitate and live-map our conversation to help us identify patterns and connections across our different perspectives.
If you can’t make it live, this event will be recorded and summarized in our Community Library afterwards. Here’s what our members had to say about our previous meetups :)
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