Joys Of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning

by Gautam Baid

The point of assigning yourself a certain amount of reading every day is to create a deeply held habit. The 25-pages-a-day thing is a habit-former! … … Read what seems awesome and interesting to you now and let your curiosities grow organically. A lifelong interest in truth, reality, and knowledge will lead you down so many paths, you should never need to force yourself to read anything unless there is a very, very specific reason. (Perhaps to learn a specific skill for a job.) Not only is this approach way more fun, but it works really, really well. It keeps you reading. It keeps you interested. And in the words of Nassim Taleb, “Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction; magnified by attempts to satisfy it.” Thus, paradoxically, as you read more books, your pile of unread books will get larger, not smaller. That’s because your curiosity will grow with every great read. This is the path of the lifelong learner.5 This is compounding wisdom in action. This is how you become smarter. You must value your time very highly. You’ve got to keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life. —Warren Buffett