Read To Lead: How To Digest Books Above Your

Level
By Ryan Holiday, April 29th 2013

The best advice Ive ever got about reading came from a secretive movie producer and talent manager whod
sold more than 100 million albums and done more than $1B in box office returns. He said to me one day,
Ryan, its not enough that you read a lot. To do great things, you have to read to lead.

What he meant was that in an age where almost nobody reads, you can be forgiven for thinking that the simple
act of picking up a book is revolutionary. It may be, but its not enough. Reading to lead means pushing
yourselfreading books above your level. In short, you know the books where the words blur together and
you cant understand whats happening? Those are the books a leader needs to read. Reading to lead or learn
requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it islifting the subjects with the most tension and weight.

For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects youre not familiar with and wresting with them until you can
shying away from the easy read. It means reading Feynman over Friedman, biographies over business books,
and the classics over the contemporary. It worked wonders for me: at 19, I was a Hollywood executive, I was at
21 I was the director of marketing for a publicly traded company, and at 24 Id worked on 5 bestselling
books and sold my own to the biggest publisher in the world. I may have been a college drop out but I have had
the best teachers in the world: tough books.

My apartment is filled with such books that on paper, I never should have been able to understand. It wasnt
easy to crack them, but with the secrets below I was able to. And the process starts before you even crack the
spine of a new book.

Before the first page

Break out of the School Mindset

The way you learn to read in the classroom is corrupted by the necessity of testing. Tests often have very little
to do with proving that you know or care about the material but more about proving that you spent the time
reading it. The easiest way to do this is picking obscure things from the text and quizzing you on them: Name
this passage What were the main characters in Chapter 4? We carry these habits with us. Remember: now
youre reading for you.

Lets say youre reading the History of the Peloponnesian War. That there was once a conflict between Corinth
and Corcyra is not really worth remembering, even though the proxy fight kicked off the war
between Athens and Sparta. (To write this, I had to look the names up myself, I only recalled that they started
with a C) What you should latch onto is that as the two fought for allied support from Athens, one took the
haughty you owe us a favor route and the other alluded to all the benefits that would come from aiding them.
Guess who won? Place. Names. Dates. These are unimportant. The lessons matter.

From Seneca:

We havent time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that he ran into a storm or somewhere
outside the world we knowwhen every day were running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by
vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew.

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Forget everything but that message and how to apply it to your life.

Ruin the Ending

When I start a book, I almost always go straight to Wikipedia (or Amazon or a friend) and ruin the ending. Who
cares? Your aim as a reader is to understand WHY something happened, the what is secondary.

You ought to ruin the endingor find out the basic assertions of the bookbecause it frees you up to focus on
your two most important tasks: 1) What does it mean? 2) Do you agree with it? The first 50 pages of the book
shouldnt be a discovery process for you; you shouldnt be wasting your time figuring out what the author is
trying to say with the book. Instead, your energy needs to be spent on figuring out if hes right and how you can
benefit from it. Plus if you already know what happens, you can identify all the foreshadowing and the clues the
first read through.

Read the Reviews

Find out from the people who have already read it, what they felt was important. From Amazon to the New
York Times, read the reviews so you can deduce the cultural significance of the workand from what it meant
to others. Also by being warned of the major themes you can anticipate them coming and then actually
appreciate them as they unfold. Tip: if you agree with their assessment of the work, go ahead and steal it once
youve finished. You cant copyright an opinionthis isnt school, this is life.

The book itself

Read the Intro/Prologe/Notes/Forward

I know, I know. It infuriates me too when what looks like a 200 page book turns out to have 80 pages of
translators introduction, but that stuff is important. Every time I have skipped through it, Ive had to go back
and start over. Read the intro, read all the stuff that comes before the bookeven read the editors notes at the
bottom of the pages. This sets the stage and helps boost your knowledge going into the book. Remember: you
need every advantage you can get to read a book above your level. Dont skip stuff intended to add context and
color.

Look It Up
If youre reading to lead, youre going to come across concepts or words youre not familiar with. Dont pretend
like you understand, look it up. I like to use Definr or I use my phone to look stuff up on Wikipedia. With
Military History, a sense of the battlefield is often necessary. Wikipedia is a great place to grab maps and to
help understand the terrain. I was once trying to read some books on the Civil War and got stuck. 10 hours of
Ken Burns documentaries later, the books were easy to breeze through (see, looking stuff up can be as easy as
watching TV) That being said, dont get bogged down with the names of the cities or the spelling of names,
youre looking to grasp the meta-lesson: the conclusions.

Mark Passages
I love Post-It Flags. I mark every passage that interests me, the makes me think, that is important to the book.
When I dont have them, I just fold the bottom corner of the page. (I actually folded the corner of every page of
Heraclitus Fragments). If there is something I need to look up, I fold the top corner of the page and return to it
later. I carry a pen with me and write down whatever thoughts/feelings/connections I may have with a passage.
Its much better to do it in the moment than to risk losing the contemporaneous inspiration. Dont be afraid to
tear the book up with tags and notationsbooks are a cheap. Plus youll get more for your money this way.

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After you finish

Go Back Through
I have the same schedule with every book I read. After a mandatory 1-2 week waiting period after finishing, I
go back through the book with a stack of 46 index cards. One these cards, I write outby handall the passages
I have noted as being important. It might seem strange but its an old tactic used by everyone from Tobias
Wolff to Montaigne to Raymond Chandler. (Who once said: When you have to use your energy to put those
words down, you are more apt to make them count. ) Each one of these cards is then assigned a theme and
filed in my index card box. The result of 4-5 years of doing this? Thousands of cards in dozens of themesfrom
Love to Education to Jokes to Musings on Death. I return to these pieces of wisdom when I am writing, when I
need help or when I am trying to solve a business problem. It has been an immense resource.

Read One Book from Every Bibliography

This is a little rule I try to stick with. In every book I read, I try to find my next one in its footnotes or
bibliography. This is how you build a knowledge base in a subjectits how you trace a subject back to its core.
Just keep a running list through Amazons Wish List service (here is mine). Last month I read a book on
Evolutionary Psychology and discovered that Id read almost 80% of its sources because Id been pulled down
the rabbit hole of a predecessor.

Apply and Use

You highlight the passages for a reason. Why type the quotes if you arent going to memorize and use them?
Drop them in conversation. Allude to them in papers, in emails, in letters and in your daily life. How else do
you expect to absorb them? The more fulfilling an outlet you find for the fruit of your database, the more
motivated you will be to fill it. Try adding a line to a report youre doing, find solace in them during difficult
times or add them to Wikipedia pages. Do something.

I give you Seneca again:

My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be
applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and
noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical applicationnot far far-fetched or archaic
expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speechand learn them so well that words become works.

Remember: we read to lead for moral and practical lessons. The point is to take what weve read and turn the
words, as Seneca says, into works.

Conclusion: Its on You

Of course, none of this is easy. People always ask me if the books I carry around are for school because theyre
full of notes, flags and folded pageswhy would anyone work so hard on something they were doing on their
own? Because I enjoy it, because its the only thing that separates me from ignorance. These are the techniques
have allowed me to leap years ahead of my peers. Its how you strike out on your own and build strength
instead of letting some personal trainer dictate what you can and cant be lifting. Its also expensive, Ive
purchased thousands of books and invested hours upon hours of time learning them. But how expensive is going
back for an MBA? Or attending TED? I think there is more wisdom in the timeless books of the last 5,000 years
than a conference or twoif you do it right and push yourself.

So try it: Do your research, read diligently without getting bogged down in details, and then work to connect,
apply and use. Its your job as a leader. And I think youll find that youre able to read above your supposed

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level and that people will follow your example. If you put in the work, books, as the great writer and
voracious reader Petrarch once said, will pay you back:

Books give delight to the very marrow of ones bones. They speak to us, consult with us and join with us in a
living and intense intimacy.

Enjoy the journey.

Note: This is just my system and its by no means all inclusive. However, since posting a version of it on my blog
in 2007 it has been seen hundreds of thousands of times and discussed everywhere from Lifehacker to college
classrooms.

Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Ego is the Enemy and The Obstacle Is The Way: The Timeless Art of
Turning ...

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