Book 191 - A Year of Magical Learning (2 of 5)

Reflection Title: Umberto Eco’s Anti-Library!

Book – The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Part 2/5)

Book Description: What have the invention of the wheel, Pompeii, the Wall Street Crash, Harry Potter and the internet got in common? Why are all forecasters con-artists? What can Catherine the Great's lovers tell us about probability? And, why should you never run for a train or read a newspaper? This book is all about Black Swans: the random events that underlie our lives, from bestsellers to world disasters. Their impact is huge; they're impossible to predict; yet after they happen we always try to rationalize them. A rallying cry to ignore the 'experts', "The Black Swan" shows us how to stop trying to predict everything - and take advantage of uncertainty.

Reflection:

For reasons unknown, this passage from the Black Swan has been lodged in my brain from the moment I first consumed it and I’m pretty sure at this point it has no plans of ever leaving.

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”

The Antilibrary – all the knowledge that exists in this world that lives outside of your mind today that you wish you knew. What a beautiful concept, and probably the reason why I can’t get it out of my mind.

My personal antilibrary far outnumbers the number of books I’ve read on this journey. The more I read and learn, the more that the antilibrary grows by a factor of 2 at least it seems. In these modern days, we’re lucky, we don’t have to physically purchase all these books anymore to grow our personal antilibraries like Umberto Eco, that is what a little something called amazon.com was invented to tackle.

I find myself at least a handful of hours a few times a month scrolling through the virtual shelfs of amazon.com to research books, read descriptions, read reviews, and add them to my wish list if they pique my interest at all. My wish list on amazon.com is what I like to think of as my personal antilibrary. My wish list consists of at least 300+ books these days and it only grows larger and larger with each passing month on this journey.

I can’t keep up with my wish list, but I love it so much more than my read list. There are just so many damn books out there I want to consume. I sometimes feel bad for some of the books on my wish list because I know that they will never get pulled off the bench and put into the game most likely. That’s okay, I’m sure someone else will give them their time to shine, and that makes me feel a little better about leaving them collecting dust on the virtual shelf.

This might sound stupid to say, but I honestly had no idea of the sheer overwhelming quantity of books that existed in this world before this journey began. This is just not a world I explored much pre-Emilia. Sure, I might have occasionally visited a Barnes and Noble and picked out a best seller every now and then, but that is about the extent of what I thought existed of books to read in this world outside of textbooks for school. I truly had no idea of just the sheer volume of books that have been published throughout time…now I know, and it might as well be infinite because I’ll never come close to consuming even .001% in my lifetime.

Learning is so much fun, however, talking about what you already know always gets old. Not only does it get old, if you aren’t careful you quickly become “that guy” that thinks he always knows more than everyone else in the room as you casually find ways to work in the titles of books you’ve read to impress others in a conversation. Spoiler alert…nobody cares!

My biggest problem these days has somehow magically shifted from struggling to pick up any book and just getting started, to worrying about if the book I pull off the wish list going to be a dud! I know what I can consume is limited in my time here on Earth, and I pains me to waste it on a book that I learn nothing new. However, for every Black Swan that I find in the stacks of my antilibrary, I know I will probably have to go through at least 3 How To Raise an Emotionally Intelligent Child (no offense).

And that is okay, because I know my next Running with Sherman, Born to Run, Thinking Fast and Slow, Black Swan, Happiness Hypothesis, Sapiens, Humankind, etc is out there and ready to blow my mind…it is just up to me to find it. This hunt will never get old!

Question: What do you cherish more, the knowledge you’ve consumed or what you haven’t?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb