With millions of books published every year, how do you decide what to read next?

In software development there’s a concept called the rockstar programmer. This is the kind of person who operates on a completely different level to most others, and can produce 10x the output of the average programmer. Hiring one of these people can be worth more than hiring ten average people.

I think the same is sometimes true in books. You can read endless good books, or you can seek out the exceptional ones and dedicate your time to those.

This doesn’t apply to all books, but I think it applies to most non-fiction books. While fiction is highly subjective and doesn’t necessarily have one purpose, the main point of non-fiction is usually learning.

I found this out through trial and error. For example, I like reading about psychology and behavioural economics. I really enjoyed the Freakonomics books, and some of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing. They’re easy reads and I came away from those books feeling like I’d learnt something. Though if you were to ask me now, I couldn’t formulate anything I learnt in a way that would be useful to me. (beyond maybe “incentives are important” and “little things can make a big difference”).

And then I read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It’s much more dense, and takes more time to get into. It requires more focus to read, and the chapters are longer. But it’s completely worth it. Reading this felt like other pop economics/psychology books (like the ones I mentioned above) took one idea from Kahneman’s book and turned it into a chapter, or took a chapter from his book and stretched it into four hundred pages.

Kahneman has spent decades leading research in his field, and so can talk about it in a level of depth that many others can’t. He takes the reader on a journey from hypothesis to experiment design, results, and interpretation. He’s constantly analysing his own way of thinking and shares a wealth of psychological biases that the reader can try to be more conscious of.

The same is true in other fields. Interested in evolution? Try reading Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Or go right to the source, and read Darwin’s Origin of Species. You might be surprised by how relevant most of the content still is, and the clarity with which the ideas are presented. Physics? Try the Feynman lectures.

Some people are primarily writers, and their job is to sell as many books as they can. They find interesting ideas, and write them up in a way that makes people want to buy their books. There’s nothing wrong with this, but I think they rarely compare to the people whose writing is secondary to their real work.

This is where the 10x books come from — people who have invested huge amounts of time mastering a field, and who also happen to have a talent for explaining things.

These people don’t write about things because they’re new or fashionable. They probably don’t have enough material to bring out a new book every few years. But their material is far more valuable, and more timeless.

Timelessness is key. An easy way for an author to increase book sales is to cater excessively to the readers of the time, compensating for quality of content through ephemeral relevance. An extreme example of this is the news — while reading today’s news feels somehow educational, reading a newspaper from more than a few days ago is extremely dull.

You can use this as a heuristic to evaluate non-fiction books. If you’re looking for a book on a specific subject, see if there are any which are more than a few decades old and are still considered relevant. When judging a recent book, consider how useful you would expect it to be in a few decades. Hopefully this can help you find those exceptional 10x books, and avoid the ten others.

Thanks for reading! For some more book recommendations (fiction and non-fiction), check out this post 🙂