The novelist and scholar Umberto Eco once bemoaned the fact
that many visitors to his home, seeing his vast personal library, can’t
help but exclaim: “What a lot of books! Have you read them all?” His
jaw stiffens: the question implies that his floor-to-ceiling bookshelves
are for showing off, when actually they’re a research tool. Unread
books are where the action is. The writer Nassim Taleb approvingly calls
such a collection an “antilibrary”;
one’s shelves, he argues, should contain “as much of what you do not
know” as finances allow. And don’t expect the proportion of unread books
to fall, either. The more you read, the more the perimeter of your
knowledge increases, and the more you’ll realise you don’t know.
(Incidentally, Eco’s deadpan response to his visitors’ question is, “No,
these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the
others in my office.”)
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But Eco’s number-one point is about humility, and it’s one that might serve any manager, colleague or parent: “the knowledge that anyone can teach us something”. While researching his own PhD, Eco recalls, he got deeply stuck, and one day happened to buy a book by an obscure 19th-century abbot, mainly because he liked the binding. Idly paging through it, he found, in a throwaway line, a stunning idea that led him to a breakthrough. Who’d have predicted it? Except that, years later, when a friend asked to see the passage in question, he climbed a ladder to a high bookshelf, located the book… and the line wasn’t there. Stimulated by the abbot’s words, it seems, he’d come up with it himself. You never know where good ideas will come from, even when they come from you.
- Oliver Burkeman
[---]
But Eco’s number-one point is about humility, and it’s one that might serve any manager, colleague or parent: “the knowledge that anyone can teach us something”. While researching his own PhD, Eco recalls, he got deeply stuck, and one day happened to buy a book by an obscure 19th-century abbot, mainly because he liked the binding. Idly paging through it, he found, in a throwaway line, a stunning idea that led him to a breakthrough. Who’d have predicted it? Except that, years later, when a friend asked to see the passage in question, he climbed a ladder to a high bookshelf, located the book… and the line wasn’t there. Stimulated by the abbot’s words, it seems, he’d come up with it himself. You never know where good ideas will come from, even when they come from you.
- Oliver Burkeman
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