"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."
-Henry David Thoreau
"A man without a favorite author is a lost soul. He remains an unimpregnated ovum, an unfertilized pistil. One’s favorite author…is pollen for his soul."
–Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, 1937
"Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital."
–Thomas Jefferson: Letter to James Madison, September, 1821
"Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institutions––such call I good books."
–H. D. Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849
Ron Baker is the founder of VeraSage Institute (www.verasage.com), a think tank dedicated to burying the billable hour and trashing timesheets from professional knowledge firms.
He is the author of five books:
•Professional's Guide to Value Pricing, Sixth Edition (CCH, 2004).
•The Firm of the Future: A Guide for Accountants, Lawyers, and Other Professional Services (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003).
•Pricing on Purpose: Creating and Capturing Value (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006).
•Measure What Matters to Customers: Using Key Predictive Indicators (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006).
•Mind Over Matter: Why Intellectual Capital is the Chief Source of Wealth (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2008).
As an inveterate reader, I hope you enjoy my shelf.
A note on the "Books I plan to read," what we now call the "Anti-library" thanks to Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his thought-provoking and challenging book, "The Black Swan" where he wrote:
"'The Impact of the Highly Improbable', tells the story of the writer Umberto Eco, who possesses a library of over 30,000 books (mine, by comparison, is around 2,000). He separates his visitors into two categories: 1) Those who, upon seeing his library, exclaim, 'Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?'"
Taleb explains the next category this way:
"And the others—a very small minority—who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
"...focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced...but it would be nice if they did. ...Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously." [End quote]
What a great explanation! My anti-library gets bigger every year, and over two hundred books are staring at me right now, unread, taunting me with the knowledge they contain that may change the course of my life. My colleagues are also constantly reading and strongly suggesting books I should read, which I’ve learned to take seriously.
So many books, so little time.
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