“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate. You will be incompetent because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.” — General Jim Mattis

That hits hard. Not because I think people should read more books (though they should), but because it made me realize how little of the world we actually get to touch.

People grow up, go to school, and get jobs. Maybe travel a bit and most likely meet people outside their bubble. But even if we stretch as much as we can, our own lives are tiny slivers of everything that’s out there. We don't live enough to know enough.

When you read, you're not just collecting facts — you’re inhabiting another mind. That sounds kind of weird, but it’s not. It’s just code. A writer encodes thought into language, and if you’re paying attention, you decode it and run it on your own brain.

You don’t need a philosophy degree to study Kant. You don’t need to be a soldier to understand war. You just need to read.

I mean, if I only have a few minutes with someone smarter than me, I don’t ask them to explain something. I ask them what to read.

“If you only have some minutes with a subject-expert, don’t ask him a question — ask for a book recommendation instead.”

(Often attributed to Naval Ravikant, though I’ve heard variations from others.)

"A question gives you an answer. A book gives you a thousand."

The majority of people believe that reading is an academic thing. A luxury you don't have time for, or an introverted pastime. But it isn't. It's the infrastructure.

Scaffolding is necessary for important work, such as building, creating, understanding, fighting, and fixing. It's not just your scaffolding, either. It's the tales of a hundred people who came before you. Their experiments, errors, and strange, clever mental models.

Books are how you build a cognitive exoskeleton.¹

So read books. Real ones. The kind people spent years writing, not the kind generated to hit SEO targets. Read things that slow you down, make you sit with an idea instead of reacting to it. Read people you disagree with. Read people who scare you.

And when you find something good — pass it on.

Books expand the mind, build shared memory. They make us less alone.

¹The phrase “cognitive exoskeleton” comes from Venkatesh Rao. He talks about the tools we build to think better — books, notes, software, rituals. Reading is one of them.