Bookworm: Revisiting Zero to One by Peter Thiel

The greatest injustice you could do to yourself is to read a good book only once. If a book is good, its author had undoubtedly spent a lot of time thinking deeply about the ideas expressed in his book. The insights that emerge from deep thinking are usually not easy to grasp in the first pass.

In fact, most readers who aren’t very familiar with the topic, absorb less than 50 percent of the book the first time. And it’s not because of any shortcoming or lack of intellectual power on the reader’s side. Learning from a good book is very similar to loading a high definition image. Initially, the whole image appears on your screen but it looks blurred. The pixels are large and only give you a vague idea. Give it some time and more pixels load and the image becomes sharper and clearer.

Some books are so dense and rich in knowledge that every time you read them, it feels you’re reading an entirely different book. And that happens because the previous reads prepare your brain to receive the insights from subsequent reads.

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