Stacks on Stacks (Of Books)

Before I start, I want to mention my new obsession with the website Goodreads. This past week I’ve been adding books from the shelves I have at home, ebooks on file, as I hear them referred in content I’m consuming, or just pop into my head as something I want to read. For those of you unfamiliar with the website, Goodreads is a database of nearly every published book ever. You can create reading lists, organize books into shelves, and rate them for other users to see. Creating and organizing my shelves has probably taken up at least an hour of my time this past week. I am obsessed with tagging each book properly. Come check out my list! As mentioned, my currently reading consist of the three books I mentioned last week. So far, I’ve started both Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and The Haunting of Hill House.

Ben Franklin’s story is a pretty amazing one. As a middle-class tradesman, he is now highly regarded as a philosopher, scientist, businessman, and politician. How did a printer from Boston become the face of the $100 bill? I believe a huge part of Franklin’s success comes from the use of a few rules or models for living. By letting minor actions be decided thru certain rules, he could focus on what mattered, being successful. In his young adulthood, he created four rules of living:

To be put simply: Be Frugal, Be Honest, Be Committed, Be Polite.

He also lived by a code which he called the Thirteen Virtues. Someone had made a website listing out each paired with Franklin’s definition for it, as found in this very biography. http://www.thirteenvirtues.com/

Another aspect that I think truly made Franklin excel, was his association with other like-minded people. This is not to say he was surrounded by “Yes men” or each of his friends held the same beliefs, but his colleagues, the Junto, were all philosophical minds that continually questioned conventions and assumptions. These men not only helped Franklin thrive in philosophy and science but also in business ventures as well. I’ve heard this type of thinking time and time again from the author, entrepreneur, and Ben Franklin fan Tim Ferriss. He has many times said in both his writing and speaking, “you are the average of the five people you spend most of your time with.” His advice is to build your group with the people you want to see yourself become, which can be tough advice to practice, but important if you have high goals.

The chapters ahead of me focus on Franklin’s life as a politician, where his fame truly lies, but first I plan on wrapping up Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t often get into fiction stories that much in book form, but I’m challenging myself in this trial to actually get thru an entire book. I’ve found myself starting yet never finishing a number of books in the past.

One piece of advice that I think has helped me to not only enjoy the story more but to actually read faster as well is to not focus on the words on the page, but visualize the story as it’s happening. My brother told me this one day a while back when I was living with him. We got on the subject of reading and I shared with him my distaste for fiction. “I get caught up on the same line over and over again, so I never get into the story,” I said. He explained to me how he didn’t worry about the words as much and just created the scene as he read over the lines. This has really helped me cruise thru the book so far.

In the past week, I’ve read more than I have in probably the past three months combined, and if you’ve looked at my Goodreads want to read shelf, I would never put a dent into that thing otherwise. Reading has long been something I put off, and even have in the past week. The other day I was up until three in the morning making sure I got my pages in. Another day, I got about twenty pages in and could barely read anymore so I made up the pages the next day. Even with this challenge to myself, I still find myself putting it off for less important tasks and distractions. To tie the last few sentences up nicely, in order to do the things we really want to do, we need to make time for them by not doing the things we only kind of want to do.