How a book forged my worldview
I picked up my first non-fiction book…
By the way — when I say ‘book’ in this post, I unconditionally mean non-fiction books — think self-help books like The 7 habits of highly effective people. That’s not to say that other kind of books: textbooks, storybooks, novels, palmistry books are bad, but each of those categories serves a different purpose and that makes it difficult to talk about all of them at once. So, let us leave them out of this for now.
With that out of the way, let us continue. I picked up my first ‘book’ at the (late) age of 22. The book was Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. I don’t even remember whose book it was or how it ended up in my hands — this is probably one of the wonders of staying in a boys’ hostel. You don’t always know how or why anything happens there.
Anyways, the thing I do remember about that book is that it was captivating from the get go. From the author’s writing style, it was evident that he was more of a scientist than a wordsmith. He wrote his book bland like an oatmeal — no sugary language, no spicy stories. But an insanely appetizing insight! The book just sucked me in.
This lean book was about a series of experiments conducted to understand human behavior in social settings. As you would expect, the results were bewildering. Each chapter contained so many WTFs that I continued to turn pages through the midnight into the morning. Just to call it out, staying awake all night was nothing out of the ordinary in the boys’ hostel. The extraordinary was that most all-nighters before this had been about binge-watching. This was the first case of binge-reading that happened to me.
I thought self-help books was my niche. So, I arranged the most popular non-fictions for myself — The Secret, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Think and Grow Rich. All good books. I learnt a bit from each of them. But — I had to read them with conscious effort. I was counting the pages, like it was a chore to be completed. And therefore, for me, those books were forgettable. My book-reading frenzy quickly calmed down.
College life had a dozen distractions and my journey of book-exploration had had a faltered start so I forgot about books for a while. ‘A while’ in this context means a couple years.
I now had a job, which was way more forgiving than my college. I got some time to spare — a lot actually. So, I ordered the cool book which everyone (a few people in my office, actually) seemed to be reading at the time — The Subtle Art of not Giving a F*ck. When the book arrived, I did not even care to open it. It lay there packaged for weeks while I was busy playing table tennis and video games. One Friday evening, I had nothing better to do, so I picked it up. Before it was time, Saturday’s morning sun was shining bright into my eyes. I had found yet another book that understood me.
By Monday, I had completed the book and ordered another book by the brilliant Mark Manson — Everything is F*cked. Despite the pretentious titles, Mark’s books were full of wisdom — for me, they were teasers for human psychology and philosophy. I got hooked. From then on, I was always reading something or the other.
I was especially enamored by the books on human psychology. It was fascinating to me that there were solid research and evidence-based theories on the ‘nature of the mind’. But, the average person never cared to read it — let alone employ the understanding for their own well-being.
I read quite a few books to develop my own understanding — most notably Thinking Fast and Slow and The Righteous Mind. Before I realized, my brain had already begun to compile ideas on the limitations of the human mind and stir them together with my own. It began to draw new frameworks around the related concepts I had read across different books. The knowledge came first, its awareness later.
As with everything else, social media changed my learning mode as well. Books were just a pasta station in the larger buffet of knowledge now. I could log into YouTube and hear directly from the famous thinkers and authors — for free. When I discovered Mark Manson’s channel, Yuval Noah Harari’s interviews and Naval Ravikant’s practical philosophy, my life ceased to be the same.
Once, wandering into the boulevards of YouTube wisdom, I ran into this:
This is Dan Ariely — author of Predictably Irrational — the harbinger of my personal mental revolution. I had almost forgotten about him by this point. I obviously watched this video and then binge-watched everything else by him that was available.
When I revisited his work, things felt different. I was not a psychology-noob anymore. Dan’s central work is around irrationality — which basically means that humans don’t always make beneficial decisions based on logic. This did not surprise me a bit — instead, it confirmed to my hard-baked opinions.
And then it occurred to me — I had come one full circle — on my track of learning. It was time to put in more reps now.
Had it not been for that orphaned copy of Predictably Irrational in my hostel room, I would have been reading completely different things now — or worse, I might not be reading anything at all.
Once the idea of irrationality had ‘incepted’ in my brain, I was naturally inclined to other books on the same ideology — books that refined and compounded my convictions further. I realized my niche was not self-help. It was ‘workings of the mind’. Anything that talked about this and was reasonably high quality work had the power to keep me awake at night. Predictably Irrational was the book which was the first evidence of this — one that I completely overlooked at that time.
For better or for worse, that book has contributed to shaping my beliefs on humans, their desires and their actions. It has influenced my response to people and situations. It feels weird to say this but that bunch of inked pages probably has had more to do with my worldview and my thought process than any other single entity — living or otherwise!
