In these cases, I pull out a frame from my childhood best friend. He once told me something like this:
Here’s the thing, Akash. There are some incredible books in the world that both of us should read. But most books worth reading are not that good. One of us should read it, and then we should share the main insights and try to communicate >50% of the value. There are few books so valuable that it’s worth both of us spending our time reading them.
I’ll push back against just this one thing, I’ve never gotten anywhere close to 50% of the value of reading a book from just reading the summaries or talking about the book. This is obviously true for anything actually important like Information Theory textbooks, and it’s certainly true for fiction books, where the value is that *you* get to read them for pleasure. The only genre of books where this has a chance of being true are non-fiction books and maybe classic fiction books that aren’t that pleasant to read but impart good lessons. Yet even for those books, spending the time to read them is what instills their lessons into your mind. I can summarize everything in Atomic Habits in like 2 paragraphs, yet that would be useless to you because spending 8 hours reading the book is what will infuse those lessons at a sufficient psychological depth as to be useful, any summary will be quickly forgotten and have no chance of actually being implemented.
The only genre of books where this has a chance of being true are non-fiction books and maybe classic fiction books that aren’t that pleasant to read but impart good lessons.
Also: bad books, where the lesson to be imparted is “This book sucks, don’t waste your time on it”. Or: “Book Y covers the same stuff but much better.” Which are valuable lessons if you were considering reading book X.
The particular friend I refer to is unusually good at distilling things in ways that I find actionable/motivating, which might bias me a bit.
But of course it depends on the book and the topic and the person, and it would be unwise to think that most books could be easily summarized like this.
Notably, I think that many of the things that people commonly worry about RE status are easier to summarize than books. Examples:
Takeaways from a conference
Takeaways from a meeting with High-Status Person TM
Takeaways from a Google Doc written by High-Status Person TM
The main exception is when information is explicitly flagged as private. Even in these cases, I think people are often still able to reveal things like “the updates they made” without actually sharing the sensitive information. Or people are allowed the ideas but not their sources (e.g., Chatham House rules).
I’ll push back against just this one thing, I’ve never gotten anywhere close to 50% of the value of reading a book from just reading the summaries or talking about the book. This is obviously true for anything actually important like Information Theory textbooks, and it’s certainly true for fiction books, where the value is that *you* get to read them for pleasure. The only genre of books where this has a chance of being true are non-fiction books and maybe classic fiction books that aren’t that pleasant to read but impart good lessons. Yet even for those books, spending the time to read them is what instills their lessons into your mind. I can summarize everything in Atomic Habits in like 2 paragraphs, yet that would be useless to you because spending 8 hours reading the book is what will infuse those lessons at a sufficient psychological depth as to be useful, any summary will be quickly forgotten and have no chance of actually being implemented.
Also: bad books, where the lesson to be imparted is “This book sucks, don’t waste your time on it”. Or: “Book Y covers the same stuff but much better.” Which are valuable lessons if you were considering reading book X.
I think this is a reasonable critique.
The particular friend I refer to is unusually good at distilling things in ways that I find actionable/motivating, which might bias me a bit.
But of course it depends on the book and the topic and the person, and it would be unwise to think that most books could be easily summarized like this.
Notably, I think that many of the things that people commonly worry about RE status are easier to summarize than books. Examples:
Takeaways from a conference
Takeaways from a meeting with High-Status Person TM
Takeaways from a Google Doc written by High-Status Person TM
The main exception is when information is explicitly flagged as private. Even in these cases, I think people are often still able to reveal things like “the updates they made” without actually sharing the sensitive information. Or people are allowed the ideas but not their sources (e.g., Chatham House rules).