Unread Books
The Japanese have a word for it: tsundoku. It means acquiring books and letting them pile up unread.
I do this constantly myself, at times unhappy for being wasteful, but there was part of me that loved it. Having the books on my shelf signals something positive and meaningful to me. So I asked myself, why am I ok with buying books I won’t read when the internet has everything?
Well, the internet is infinite, which is why of course everyone that has a cell phone is imminently informed on all topics all the time. Oh, is that not true?
I think the realization became clear when one day I watched a senior employee in action versus a junior. The junior didn’t even know what to search for.
There is a huge difference between known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
Google can answer any question you can formulate. But how do you search for something you don’t have a concept of?
So these unread books represent connections your brain has already acknowledged, problems you recognized, points of view you’ve witnessed and may want to dive into one day. They’re breadcrumbs to ideas you haven’t fully explored yet.
I am impressed by the person with a pile of unread books. They don’t need to memorize everything, they just need to remember that somewhere in that stack is a book about network effects, or urban planning, or metallurgy, because having the knowledge that these concepts exist informs them on what they need to search, should the need arise.
Google “indexes” all knowledge out there, but none of it is yours, not even the indices. Book collectors build an index of their future thoughts that’s implicitly and indelibly theirs.
In an AI world where the right question is increasingly harder to find than the right answer, that’s worth a lot.
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