 Hello. Today's video is a video where I wanted to talk a little bit about reading and I wanted to do it because you always see this bookshelf behind me with all these books. Wait, let's see if I can sort of, anyway, whatever. And so I kind of wanted to address that. They're not just there for decoration. I do enjoy reading a lot for those of you who are friends with me or are friends with me on Goodreads or something like that. You know that I read quite a bit. I read normal books. I read on Kindle. I read audio books, you know, listen to audio books, I guess, the whole shebang. I'm always reading at least like three books at a time. And anyway, so I wanted to talk a little bit about that. I do think being a translator is very important to read and constantly keep, you know, language structure and all that in your mind and keep it fresh. And but that's not why I read quite frankly, I just enjoy reading. I think I'm lucky that I enjoy reading. And so it does help out with what I do reading both in Italian and English. But that's frankly not why I read. So I wanted to actually address a couple things. First of all, when I say reading does help out for translation, I do believe that's the case. However, I see a lot of people saying you need to read to get better at everything like to do better in business to do better in this and that and the other. I don't think that's necessarily true. And I know it's in fashion now and it wasn't always. So when I first graduated from school actually was the opposite. That was back when, you know, the dot com thing and people all these entrepreneurs were showing off pretty much how they were dyslexic and how they never read and stuff like that. And still, you know, they're like, I didn't get an education. I didn't read and still look here, you know, look how successful I am. Now it's kind of the opposite. Everyone's saying you should read, you should read more, look at my bookshelf, look how much I read and all that. So it goes in phases. And I don't know if it's necessarily as important, say, for business as people might say it is. For example, look, there's no one book or set of books you can read that'll guarantee you'll be successful in business. Let's face it. Even if you do every single thing Warren Buffett did or every single thing Mark Zuckerberg did, you won't be Warren Buffett or Mark Zuckerberg because they were there at the right place in time. You know, I mean, Warren Buffett even says, you know, so much of his success has to do just with luck. Same with everyone else who's successful, at least 50% of it has to do with luck and where they're in. So no matter what you try to recreate, you can't recreate what they did. And so following step by step stuff in books, I think can be overrated. I do think it's very helpful and I still read a lot of business books, but it can be overrated. Remember, a lot of people have been successful without reading and I don't mean just during the dot com when people thought it was cool. I mean, for thousands of years, reading wasn't universal until relatively very recently. For all these thousands of years, a lot of people were successful. And I'm pretty sure many of them didn't read at all. Reading probably was more of an advantage back then in fact, since many people couldn't read. But but yeah, many plenty of people were successful without reading. Also by virtue of the fact that you can't this and this applies, especially for entrepreneurs and businesses on the same way that you can't learn how to drive a car just by reading the instruction manual, you know, you have to actually go out there and do it. And that's the same with business. Like I've met quite a few people who are reading business books and reading many business books, and they have a huge collection of business books. There was this one guy and I asked like what he's doing, how he's applying it and stuff like that. Oh, phone call. Hold that thought. Okay, as I was saying, yeah, so I have this friend who has been reading a whole lot of books. And he said he's just waiting to you get all the right amount of knowledge before setting up his own business and starting off. And I think that's completely wrong. You have to you have to you can only learn by doing and for stuff like getting into business becoming a freelancer becoming an entrepreneur stuff like this. You there's no way you know, it helps to read the books, but you have to learn by doing. And so every time I read a book, I have to apply it right away. And that kind of brings me into how I how I read and my reading always has a goal. Obviously, if it's business books, I want to learn something. And I'll do that, I'll take a lot of notes copious notes when I'm reading a business book. And then I will apply it find ways to apply it. So every time I'm taking notes, I'm doing it with reference to my business and seeing how I can apply it. And as soon as I'm done with the book, then I'll start applying it and give myself enough time to see if I can make it work or how I need to do it when it's really fresh in my mind right away. Otherwise, forget it. And so that's what I do. And so I always have a purpose. If business books is to learn something fiction, obviously it's just for entertainment. And I'm reading a book right now and it's fiction. I usually try to take my time. I'll do a bit more slowly not take as many notes. But this is what I read at nighttime before I go to sleep usually kind of to wind down I can't read business books then because I don't want I need to think about something else. And fiction is perfect for that. Otherwise, I have biographies I read the biographies up. You can't see those are the ones up there. Anyway, I read those more for inspiration. I love reading biographies of people who I see as successful. And anyway, so every single thing I read has a certain goal to it. And so in that sense, I'm always reading quite actively. And when I read for business, I read for that purpose for a specific thing, or just trying to see what I can get out of it and apply right away. A couple other things I I do take my reading seriously, I spend a huge amount of time researching which books to read. Usually online, I mean, almost always online, I'm researching the various books and how they're rated like on Goodreads, I find different places to buy them. I love to use books more than anything. And luckily, they're cheaper than new books usually not always. But I just I just really like them I feel like they've been used. I don't know. In the same sense that when you have a textbook, I don't know if it was the same for you guys in school, but for us in school, when we had textbooks, we went into school thinking you should get new textbooks and that's better and use textbooks were always cheaper until we realized wait, of course, you want to use textbooks, because they have they're already have the important parts highlighted, they have notes in the margins already everything like that, and you can kind of get extra help with the use textbook. And so in that sense, they were kind of more valuable, even though they were cheaper. And I kind of feel the same for use books, because I see sometimes they have dedications in front and I see that they've been used. I don't know. Anyway, I like them. That's just me. Forget it. Then so but I do spend a large amount of time researching which books to read. An exception to this will be when I go to use bookstores. There I'm kind of just exploring and and I have found a couple of gems here and there. But for the most part, I just do research and find something that equals my fancy, you know. And what else? Also, when I read, I always try to find correlations. And this is especially interesting to me when I read things of different fields, like if I'm reading something from my linguistics field, and it ties into something from economics or something along those lines. And if I can relate those, I really like doing that. And that's, that's a big thing that I try to do when reading and I find the more I read, the more often I can do that. Now I hardly read any book where, where and I don't see at least some type of correlation with something else that I've read or something else that I've studied. And so I find that very useful. And I remember someone once I think, in fact, it was Warren Buffett, who always talks about compound interest and how compound interest is one of the greatest things in finance. But the same goes for reading. The more you read, the more you get out of every single extra book you read. And you just get a lot more out of this. By the way, I think this is the same for every single thing in life. Anything, the more you get of it, it's compounds, like experience. The extra experience you get now is worth a lot more than the same amount of experience you would have gotten earlier, just because you get to take from all the experience you have before and build on it more. Anyway, I know I'm not making any sense there. But let's bring it back to reading. I do find the more you read, the more each book is valuable because you can relate it to other things you've read before. Another thing that I tried to take into account is, well, the Lindy Effect is called. I try to read books that have stood the test of time. And if books are still big now after, say, 100 years, 150 years, then that means they're classics. That means they're good. And so I very rarely read the top 10, top 20 books that you see in the bookstore in the airport at the moment. There are exceptions, obviously. There are some authors that I'm interested in. And some books I just get interested in right away. Nasim Taleb is an example and stuff like that. But otherwise, I rarely read books that are big right now because you find that they're big right now and then they kind of taper off and that was it. And no one remembers them in 50, 100 years. But books that are remembered now from 100 years ago or 50 years ago, those are classics. And so I'm more likely to read those than the new ones that are out now. And yeah, anyway, I kind of wanted to show you my books, but I'm not sure how to do it here. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put at the end of the video, I'll just do a tour with my phone and give you a tour a little bit, show you what I have in my books. And just to talk about them just because I like talking about them as you can see. And but I just wanted to give you a general idea. First of all, to show you that I do read, those aren't just for show because you see that on so many videos. Second of all, because I like talking about it. Actually, that's probably the first reason. And third of all, because I do think as freelance translators, reading is important. And if you maybe don't like reading that much now, I'd recommend starting. It doesn't have to be about business. It doesn't have to be about linguistics. It doesn't have to be anything like that. Just read something. Because what it does is it gets you also just used to the language and how it can be expressed in different ways. In fact, fiction is the best in that sense of different ways of expressing language, because that's all fiction writers do. It also brings you into different worlds and shows you different points of view. I read somewhere that reading fiction is actually one of the best things to form empathy and understanding of other types of people. So anyway, I that's more or less than what I tend to read. Again, I don't read the books, the books of the moment. I also stay away from political books because I find those aren't evergreen at all. They're just very much in the moment and then they disappear. And these kind of celebrity biographies I stay away from too, because kind of for the same reasons. Biographies I read by... I read biographies of people who inspire me. And anyway, I'm rambling now. I'll one more thing before I end. Here, just one second if you'll bear with me. There we go. I hope that isn't too much noise. There's a lot of noise going on outside and hopefully you can hear me anyway. I think you should. So everything I read, not everything, but most things I read, except for fiction, I'd say, I read it using this and this is how I take notes. I've tried every single thing in terms of taking notes and books. I've tried writing in the books. I've tried putting a piece of paper where I can write notes so I don't have to write in the book. I've tried just underlining. I've tried underlining and then writing down on the first page where I've underlined or sometimes just keeping notes on the first page. I've tried a bit of everything, including writing on my computer. I had this whole thing where I was going to take every non-fiction book I read and put it all on a computer so I'd have a compendium of all my knowledge on the computer that lasted about a book and a half and because I always need my computer nearby and it's such a pain. Now what I use and what I really like is this. It's called the Fast Book Outliner and I obviously have no affiliation. I just came across it once. I don't even know who does it but if you search for it you'll find it. See it's David Sia, David Sia. Anyway, I really like this because what it has as you can see is it has the page numbers here and you can circle the page numbers and then write down your notes on the side. Here let me show you an example of what I do just one second. So here we have something for Nassim Taleb, his latest books get in the game and if you check I have here. As you can see I have many many different notes and I even did some down here on the bottom but it makes it very easy to circle whatever page they're on and then write about them and in fact more lately I just have things like where I find good quotes or good this or that you know I have different symbols that I use so that way I can quickly see which page they're on and I can quickly see what I want to find if I want to go back to the book and see what interested me and what caught my eye. So I highly recommend if you do read find a way to take notes because you're not going to retain retention is a big part of reading and at least I have very bad retention when I read I tend to forget quite quickly what I've read and so these notes help me a lot because it makes it very easy for me to find them and I just keep them there in the book and I can find them anytime I want to look them up. I also tend to write a lot of them on Goodreads online kind of in the I write book reviews but also in the private section you can write something where other people can't see but that's if I have time it because you know like I said it takes time to do that stuff but anyway that that's it for books I just kind of wanted to give you an update talk about all these books you see in the background and talk about how much I enjoy them because there's something that I enjoy and I hope that you can start enjoying them as well mainly because if you are freelancers even if you work anything having to do with writing then reading books can be very important and yeah you know like I said they're not needed for freelance in business I do believe they help I don't think they're completely indispensable as everyone is saying now but obviously I you know try to get my hands on every good business book I can get as well so that's about it if you want to stick around I'm going to tape the uh a quick tour of my books as well and yeah we'll do that okay thanks bye okay so here there's the camera and here's a quick tour of my uh books um so this as uh as I've mentioned before actually I've moved to Charlotte about exactly your exactly a year and five days ago um so the this is pretty much what I've accumulated in a year and I know it's quite a few books but they are well sorry some were also from Atlanta but basically these are the books I have here I have another set of books back in Taiwan because we were living there for a while and I kept them there and I have an older set of books back in storage in Switzerland which is where I grew up and we fully moved out but we still have a storage space there uh so yeah at some point in time I should put it all in the same place but for now this is you know this is what we have so anyway these are the books I have if you see any that seem interesting or that you've read or that you're interested in by the way feel free to let me know in the comments I love talking about all the books I've been reading and uh and so yeah I'll definitely enjoy anyway I started here these are kind of the business books that I have it kind of morphs into econ books with some science along the way it's uh you know anyway I kind of understand how it goes and uh so that's this shelf this shelf until here are what I classify as essays basically this includes like Thomas Payne uh common sense democracy new federalist papers stuff like that um and uh that goes until here these ones I'll get into them in a later on in a second these are my languages and linguistics and so they have to do with that these are what I consider classics um yeah from the tale of Genji three men in a boat to uh you know Hawthorne with Carol stuff like that then we go a bit further down these are the books I have that are signed by the author um and I keep them there separate for some reason wait these two go here yeah every now and then they fall because I don't have any there you go so anyway the uh these ones here are the um these are books by people that I know like friends of mine or by me myself uh either one then here these are biographies these are biographies mostly we'll kind of divide it like business and not anyway uh I really enjoy as I mentioned biographies of people who inspire me so that's what these tend to be plus I'm doing kind of the presidents in order some of them don't inspire me at all but what are you gonna do these are fiction uh and I kind of have them divided up as Canada, Korea, Japan, Italy you know fiction from different places and uh it kind of spills over also to here hope I'm aiming this right by the way it spills over to here right up until here and then right here here on I have memoirs and um and autobiographies and stuff like that and I have religious biographies too otherwise these are memoirs and journals and autobiographies then down here we have history these are history also divided by location but more or less history oh and then further down there these are books that are older that might be worth something but probably aren't I haven't checked really oh and then way down below is where I have my language books for learning different languages I think there's mostly Korean and Chinese there in fact I took out some Korean books already because I'm gonna start reviewing them since uh you know I uh we'll be heading there soon and oh yeah and then this is the section that I skipped before this is actually kind of my favorite section because these are the books I have not read yet and so these are the ones that I still have to get to and so I'm looking forward to that um yeah that will stay that so that constitutes my bookshelf that's the end of the tour I hope you enjoyed it very much and I'll see you in the next video okay thanks bye