Reading Archives

Choosing To Get the Education I Deserve

August 23, 2024September 16, 2024 Nik

It was one of those weeks where one and one just add up to three.

First, I woke up at 5 AM one morning. Groggy, unable to sleep, I dragged myself to the couch and opened a new fantasy novel. I struggled with a phrase on the first page. Then another on the second. I read and read, and by page 24, I was scratching my head so hard it started hurting: “Is it just me, or is this written so badly, it’s barely comprehensible?”

Between the multi-paragraph sentences, needlessly verbose descriptions, endless adverbs, and backwards unwinding of the action, I gave up on The Atlas Six right then and there. I confirmed with several friends that the writing was indeed atrocious, and after some googling, I found out why: It’s a self-published book that became a bestseller because the 15-year-olds on TikTok are all over it. Now, I’m not too old for a Booktok recommendation, but I am too old to read bad, unedited writing. Aren’t we all?

A few days later, my friend Franz sent me a list of the top 100 literary classics, aggregated across a decade of rankings. “How many have you read?” he asked me. I did a quick count. The answer was five. Ouch! Here I was, a writer with ten years of experience, apparently wasting my time on TikTok drivel, yet having read almost none of the all-time greats of English literature. “What the hell am I doing?” I thought.

In that moment, something clicked — and then so did I. I proceeded to Amazon, loaded my shopping cart like a kid on Christmas with an unlimited budget, and hit “Order.” Over the next week, box after box arrived, and while I watched them pile up, I finished two early birds — Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Turning those pages felt like taking a big breath through my nose after stepping outside for the first time in days. “Ahhhh! That’s better.”

I’m currently enjoying J. R. R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion, and while I do feel like my literary train is finally heading in the right direction again, the whole incident made me reflect: How can someone who writes for a living cruise right past the most important works in their industry for a decade?

How Modern Non-Fiction Books Waste Your Time (and Why You Should Read Them Anyway)

July 6, 2021September 27, 2024 Nik

When I first discovered non-fiction books, I thought they were the best thing since sliced bread. Whatever problem you could possibly have, there’s a book out there to help you solve it. I had a lot of challenges at the time, and so I started devouring lots of books.

I read books about money, productivity, and choosing a career. Then, I read books about marketing, creativity, and entrepreneurship. I read and read and read, and, eventually, I realized I had forgotten to implement any of the advice! The only habit I had built was reading, and as wonderful as it was, it left me only with information overwhelm.

After that phase, I flipped to the other, equally extreme end of the spectrum: I read almost no books, got all my insights from summaries, and only tried to learn what I needed to improve a given situation at any time.

So, do self-help books work? As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

9 Timeless Articles You’ll Read Many Times Over the Years

May 24, 2021August 8, 2024 Nik

“Matter” is my theme for this year. As in: What matters?

So far, it has been fun to ask this question in my personal life. What are the things I really need? Who are the people I really want to be around? I’m decluttering and prioritizing the people I care about.

When it comes to my work, however, asking this question hasn’t been fun at all. It’s throwing me for a massive loop. All writers eventually hit this wall. In my case, I look back at seven years and some 2,000 pieces, and when I ask, “Which ones did I really care to write?” the answer is “Shockingly few.”

When you’ve written every day for so long, there’s always another idea, always another fluff piece you could write. Fortunately or not, I’m so bored of fluff pieces. I’d rather not repeat myself for 50 years. So, how can my problem be to your benefit?

Well, in my investigation of “Which writing matters?” I couldn’t help but dig up the articles that mattered most to me over the years. The following nine are beacons of light I keep coming back to again and again. I hope you too will find their timeless wisdom worth revisiting.

You Don’t Care Enough About Your Book

April 6, 2021August 8, 2024 Nik

I’m writing a book. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Writing articles is easy. It didn’t use to be, but when you’ve done it 2,000 times, anything becomes frictionless. Articles are low-stakes. If one flops, I’ll just write another. It only takes a day. With a book, well…

If your book tanks, you’ll have wasted a year. You won’t get paid for work you’ve already done. If people hate your book, they won’t hate 1,000 words — they’ll hate 200 pages. That’s a lot of bad karma, and, quite frankly, it scares the hell out of me.

Other people, it seems, aren’t as afraid. Everyone’s writing a book these days. Books are the new business cards. Haven’t you heard? I hate this trend. It leads to shitty books, and we already have too many of those.

If you’re writing a book solely for money or clout, I suggest you reconsider. You’ll make careless mistakes driven by greed and fame-seeking. Chances are, it’ll be exactly one too many, and you’ll get neither gold nor groupies.

If you’re one of those rare specimens who — gasp — write a book for the reader, I’d like to issue a warning, a reminder to myself, really: Right now, you don’t care enough about your book. If you don’t start immediately, your supposed masterpiece will flop like a Michael Bay movie at Cannes, and, worst of all, you’ll deserve it. It’ll be your fault and your fault alone.

Let me show you two examples. The point here is not to ridicule the authors, so I’ll blur their names. My goal is to show you how “small” mistakes add up to a book that looks sloppy overall — and will inevitably fail. Look at the cover and backside of this book. What’s your first impression?

Are You a Reader or a Listener?

November 24, 2020August 5, 2024 Nik

When Dwight Eisenhower served as supreme commander of the Allied forces during World War II, journalists raved about his press conferences. His responses to questions were always brief, but beautifully polished. He showed total command of his subject matter.

A few years later, however, when Eisenhower became the president of the United States, his interviews with the press became a source of frustration. Reporters said he rambled without direction, never answering their questions. He was criticized as ill-informed and awkward.

It turned out that back when Eisenhower was supreme commander, his aides made sure that questions from the press were submitted to him well before he answered them publicly. That way, he could think through his responses and refine them. When he later moved to an open press conference style, where questions were fired at him off the cuff, he floundered. Eisenhower didn’t know that he was a reader, not a listener.

I Have Never Been More Proud To Write Self-Help Online

October 22, 2020July 31, 2024 Nik

I want you to understand how it feels to be a self-help writer in 2020.

Not because I want you to be one or because I want your admiration or sympathy but because, whether you realize it or not, you’re reading self-help every day, and if you don’t know where it’s coming from — who, why, what emotional and mental place — you can’t judge it accurately, let alone interpret it well or implement it in your life in a way that’s actually helpful.

My name is Niklas Göke, and I write self-help on the internet. It’s a job I’ve been doing for six years, and I have never felt more proud to do this work than today. I’ve also never felt more insecure about it.

It’s Not How You Read, It’s Who You Listen To

October 5, 2020July 31, 2024 Nik

Humans only read for one reason: We read in order to grow.

Sometimes, the growth is so minuscule it seems irrelevant — but it never is.

When you’re sad, you may decide to read a funny comic. The comic is meant to transform your state of sadness into one of joy. You want to laugh. You want to be distracted. You want to feel entertained. Only then will you be able to move on with your day, and the reading supports that change.

Of course, you might also read a novel. A murder thriller perhaps, or an epic in which the hero tragically loses his wife. That’s a deeper form of processing your sadness than the comic, and while there’s no saying when you’ll need which, there is no doubt that both serve reading’s universal outcome: growth.

If you look at it this way, everything you read is self-help. A press release expands your knowledge. A novel alters your identity. A diet book molds your body. Again, even reading for leisure is part of your trajectory of growth. After all, we can’t enjoy the fruits of our labor if we never eat them. Sometimes, growth is just patience. We can’t rush certain timelines, and reading may be our training until we’re ready.

If reading stems from a desire to grow, you’re reading more self-help than you know. You may rarely pick up pop science books, but even without realizing it, all of what you read, you read because you want change. Whether it comes in the form of outright advice, inspiration by osmosis, creativity, entertainment, or knowledge will differ in each case, but the underlying goal is the same.

The funny thing about “self-help” is that it’s not self-driven at all. Self-help is just help.

The 4 Smartest Ways To Become Smarter

September 2, 2020July 30, 2024 Nik

The fastest way to become smarter is to make learning a habit.

This may sound obvious, but it’s not about maximizing the time you spend sitting at a desk, working or studying. It’s about finding ways to integrate learning seamlessly into your day.

A quick Google search right when you bump into a word you don’t know beats your plan to read The Intelligent Investor in one sitting — because 50 searches a day add up while, most of the time, the reading never happens.

We’re all busy. We have work and to-do’s and societal obligations. If we ignore everyday life, we’ll never make a big enough commitment to learning. Instead, we must acknowledge it. Work with it. Big, deliberate study sessions are a great second step, but if we try to make them the first, we’ll likely spend our lives feeling like perpetual failures.

Your goal should be to live your everyday life while learning naturally permeates your entire day — like an undercurrent of water that keeps carrying your mind to higher heights without you feeling each bump along the way.

Here are four tiny habits to make learning feel as natural as breathing. They might not seem like much, but that’s exactly why they are so powerful and, therefore, the four smartest ways to become smarter.

Listening to an Audiobook Is Not the Same As Reading a Real One

August 24, 2020July 30, 2024 Nik

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Two days ago, Ray Bradbury would have been 100 years old. If he could comment on his observation from 1993, he’d probably conclude we’re succeeding.

In 1953, Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian vision of the world in which books are illegal and so-called “firemen” burn any that remain.

40 years later, he understood we didn’t need law and fire to destroy the written word: We just had to make sure we’re too busy to look at it.

In 1993, it was tabloids and TV. Today, it’s the internet and video games. None of these things are inherently bad. They’re just too seductive — and we’re too weak to prioritize what’s important.

However, even Bradbury couldn’t have anticipated the world’s most ingenious installment in tearing us away from turning the page. Instead of distracting us from books altogether, it now seduces us with an innocent prompt:

“If you don’t have time to read, why don’t you just listen?”

How To Write a Bad First Page for Your Novel

August 3, 2020July 24, 2024 Nik

If the first page of your novel is bad, you won’t need the 300 that follow.

It’s a sad truth of writing in the 21st century: Catch our attention early, or we’ll move on right away. There are too many things to pay attention to. We’re overwhelmed already, and so we’ll only stick with the best.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” That’s a great opening line, but you’ll still need great paragraphs to follow. The first page will make or break your novel. It is hard to overestimate how crucial it is.

It is, however, easy to screw it up. Let’s look at a random example. Laura is a photographer. She also writes poetry and short stories. Below is the first page of a story inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Read it and think about how it makes you feel:

Category: Reading