Reading can hijack your interests

“What topics do I want to get more excited about?” This is a factor that goes into choosing books to read (1) that I used to not give much thought to.

When I was in college I read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It’s a rip-roaring 1000 page sci-fi book flashing back and forth between near-future entrepreneurs creating an online financial system and WWII codebreakers. 

It’s an awesome book and it got me excited about the technical topics it explored. I decided to write a program that would unbreakably  encrypt audio (2). It didn’t quite work (3), but was a lot of fun. It amplified my interest in how computers work, which was probably a significant subconscious influence on my decision to take a computation class my next year in college. And I bet its depiction of startup founders has contributed to my excitement about joining a startup for my next job.

Reading this book changed me into a person who was more interested in cryptography, electrical engineering, and startups. I was already generally nerdy and interested in those topics - otherwise I wouldn’t have read the book. But it amplified interests I already had, and channeled general interest in “secret codes” to a more specific interest in “One Time Pads”.

This interest-amplification-and-channeling effect of good writing is something I’ve started considering more when deciding what books to read. Should my next book be Half of a Yellow Sun or Mansfield Park? Well, I’d rather be excited about the Biafra war than Victorian England, so that’s a point in favor of Half of a Yellow Sun. I’m interested in this biography of Ramanujan, but I know if I read it I’m going to want to learn a bunch about theoretical math and Indian history, so maybe I should prioritize something that will get me excited about block chains or African history which will likely be more useful to me in my life (4).

Maybe this is part of the reason so many people read business books that don’t seem to teach very much. If spending 4 hours reading keeps you excited about your job, that might be a valuable use of time even if you learn very little else (5) (6).

Motivation and excitement are powerful forces. And reading is a great tool for hijacking your own interests to harness these forces.

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1. Or movies/shows to watch, podcasts to listen to, etc,

2. It was essentially a One Time Pad for audio, which I’m sure is not an original idea

3. I also only spent like 4 hours on it

4. Of course, it can be valuable to learn things outside your direct interests. With all of this you shouldn’t try to optimally engineer your reading habits, but I do think general rules can be helpful

5. Ditto for self-help books

6. I think also of Neil Gaiman’s story about how the Chinese Communist Party started to promote science fiction after realizing how impactful it could be on inventors