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100 Books to Read Before You Die

A reading list for the curious and the brave.

Adam Aushaf
5 min readSep 11, 2023
Photo by John Michael Thomson on Unsplash

You don’t have to read books, you know?

For real, you don’t. It might seem strange that I’m kicking off an article about books by telling you not to read, but I mean it.

It really doesn’t matter where you get your stories and knowledge from. You might prefer listening to podcasts or watching movies, or talking to people, and that’s fine. Books are but one option.

That said, even with all the increasingly sophisticated content forms available to us today — audio, video, XR — I would argue that reading books is still the better way to consume information.

Books might be less engaging, yes, but that’s just the thing: a book forces you to engage. With no sparkly visuals or background music to keep your attention, your brain has to rely on itself to concentrate on the content.

The harder the learning process, the deeper the lesson is carved — which means not only do you retain it longer, but you also keep it closer to heart, and are more likely to actually use it in your life. Similarly, that’s why your most difficult experiences teach you the most powerful lessons.

Well, I don’t know, that’s probably just bro science, eh? But at least it’s true for me.

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Adam Aushaf
Adam Aushaf

Written by Adam Aushaf

No longer writing on Medium. Read my essays for free on Substack: aushaf.substack.com.

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