Reading Principles
Definition
A stance on reading drawn from Naval Ravikant (AngelList founder; early investor in Uber, Twitter, Stack Overflow), as collected and annotated by the Jiayuan Thoughts newsletter. Its premise: books are an investment, not consumption, and books — not feeds — are the primary information channel.
The nine principles below are the source’s structure; the annotations are the reader’s own practice notes.
Core Ideas
1. Don’t chase volume
“I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.”
The work is identifying which books are great for you — different books speak to different people — and then genuinely absorbing them. Naval buys every edition of a book he’s studying so it is readable in any situation.
2. Prefer books that survived time
A book that lasted two thousand years has been filtered through many people, so its general principles are more likely to be correct. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is the canonical example — Stoicism still applies.
3. But don’t over-apply #2
“If you’re trying to learn how to drive a car or fly a plane, you should read something written in the modern age because this problem was created in the modern age.”
The test is when the problem was created, not when the book was written.
4. Reading isn’t a race
“Reading a book isn’t a race — the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.”
Naval reads one to two hours a day and credits that alone for his material success and whatever intelligence he has. Ryan Holiday’s version: speed reading is bullshit — at normal speed you still finish a 1000-page book in a week.
The reader’s own gloss, and the most useful idea on the page: slow reading deliberately adds friction. The harder the input, the easier the retrieval.
5. Pick up many books, finish few
“I pick up a lot of books and only get through a few which form the foundation of my knowledge.”
6. Read many books at once
Naval keeps 10–20 open, flipping to whatever matches his mood — the point being that it keeps him reading regularly at all. He skips ahead when bored, starts mid-book when a paragraph catches his eye, and feels no obligation to finish.
The reader’s calibration: 10–20 is too many; 3–5 works — one professional book, one non-fiction, one biography or literary work.
7. You don’t need to finish a book
Most non-fiction has one point, makes it, then supplies example after example applying it to everything. Once you have the gist, putting it down is legitimate.
“The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power.”
And on grinding through:
“Sometimes the book isn’t bad — you just never feel like reading it. The prevailing wisdom is to power through, but that is terrible advice. You’re not in school anymore — reading should be a joy.”
The failure mode this avoids: getting stuck on page 332 of a book you feel obligated to finish, and consequently stopping reading entirely for a while.
8. Treat a book as a collection of blog posts
Blog posts carry no completion pressure. Reframing a book as bite-sized posts lets you read the chapter you need most right now and count it as read once you have what you came for.
9. Reread
The déjà-vu experience halfway through a book — realizing you’ve read it before — is fine: it means you were ready to reread it. Rereading surfaces points you missed and new readings of your own old notes.
Tooling makes rereading cheap: excerpt what matters into a note system on first read, then reread the notes — referring back to the original to avoid losing context. Block references make annotation easy.
Relationships
- Knowledge Management — principle 9 only works if excerpts are captured somewhere durable
- Feynman Technique — the complementary move: rereading tests recognition, explaining tests understanding
- PARA Method — where the excerpts land
- Knowledge Management and Learning Systems
- Learning Methods — “friction on input, ease on retrieval” is the same mechanism as spaced retrieval practice
References
- Naval Ravikant 的 9 个阅读原则 · Jiayuan Thoughts
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (《纳瓦尔宝典》)