Do you read books with embarrassing titles?
Like How to Win Friends and Influence People or The Four-Hour Workweek or The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People?
If you’re anything like me, you stayed clear for as long as possible. The cynic in you despises these titles, having already made a thousand judgments without reading a page.
But don’t judge a book by its cover—and don’t judge it by its title. Judge it after you read it. And if you don’t think you’ll read it, then judge it by whether it was recommended to you by a friend.
I take book recommendations very seriously, but I always ask the person, “Have you read it?” If they have, I like to reverse-engineer what it took for them to recommend it to me. Because that’s a lot of work. First, it was probably recommended to them. Then they had to invest time and energy into reading it (or listening—I think that counts). And it had to stick with them enough to become part of them somehow—enough that, in conversation, they’re reminded of its usefulness.
That’s not an easy road to a recommendation. It’s not the same as, “I heard this book was really good,” or “I heard about it on a podcast.” Nothing against podcasts or shorter-form content, but a book is a threshold I like to use as an internal rule. If it crosses that threshold, I add it to my notebook or Notes app.
I guess I’m really asking you to invest in your development the way the government and your parents did for the first twenty-some-odd years of your life. Now it’s all up to you. A book is one of the highest-leverage pulls you can make for the time it requires. It teaches you patience and concentration—things that translate directly into the quality of your songwriting.
So many of the books that have helped me have embarrassing titles. I try not to think about that. Instead, I think about the publisher who just needed to get someone’s attention in an airport. I forgive them and move on. I’ve written a book myself, and I understand how hard it is to sell one without a title that clearly points to a problem—and an implied solution—people are facing.
So, all this to say: read books with embarrassing titles. You’ll find them helpful.
And you can still impress your friends by continuing to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
Love,
Aaron
P.S. I’m counting on you to be a critical thinker. A lot of these books have outdated opinions and advice. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. Take what’s nourishing and leave the rest. (Or, to use another idiom: chew the meat, spit out the bones.)