A Man Who Reads Books for a Living

By the time you hit 40, you've accumulated ~20 years of adult-life habits. For a lot of people, that lifestyle is very sedentary, missing most dietary recommendations (insufficient fiber intake, oversufficient saturated fat intake), poor sleep, frequent emotional stress etc.

As a young adult, you've spent most of your life being very active, sleeping ~10 hours a night (as a child), having plenty of downtime and playtime etc. It's why you can party hard, study hard and sleep a little; you're starting fresh.

The good news is that some of these habits are massive levers; biological age can drift decades (worst-to-best).

The other thing you gain is time contraction - a year now feels like a month when I was younger, so it's easier to plan long term and follow through on projects.

But I too am very interested in the perspective from closer to 80! I suspect, if I'm lucky enough to make it there, I'll consider present me the same kind of fool as I now consider younger me.

Where he could once hold an entire system and its details in his head (almost an essential skill in the 80s/90s), he could only instead focus on smaller pieces at a time. Any new tooling or approaches that came along, he was fascinated to hear about them, but no longer felt able to pick them up. He could still solve algorithmic problems and debug "in the small", but it was like he had to do math on a Post-it note where once he had a huge sheet of paper.

you power through it, you get invested - but you know that nothing will ever come out of it and in no way can you recommend it

I dropped of a book to this guy that I had just finished called "The Hotel on the Roof of the World," and he later told me that they optioned the author. Unfortunately the film never got made, but if you read it you'll see it has the bones of a really nice film.

It didn't last forever. The last time I saw him was one of those wild random coincidences. I was visiting Cannes during the festival (as a tourist) and ran into him on the Croisette. We went for coffee and he told me that he had become a television producer.

https://howlongtoread.com/books/323872/Train-Dreams

Two days per book full time means one every 16 hours. Enough to read the full Foundation Trilogy with one hour to rest between books.

On a side note, I'm ashamed to share that I tested my reading speed, and while it was 264 WPM, my reading comprehension was 50%. That's why I read slower, and frequently re-read.

https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test

Out of spite I tried to measure my Spanish reading, 520 WPM and 100% comprehension. Very unfair since it's my native language and I can glance and skip instead of reading every word.

https://speedreadr.com/es/

Yes, there were definitely aspects of teasing out how much a poor outcome was related to the initial call and how much was in the execution. The execution breaks down into the early definition and scoping, which can be part of the initial decision, and then all the downstream decisions.

Assessing all this is inevitably clouded by confounding factors like unforeseeable external factors and even human variability. That's pretty easy if a film you green-lit hits screens the week the COVID shutdown happens but in my domain post mortems more often came down to non-binary judgements like the degree to which an unlikely outcome was unforeseeable. In my post mortems I focused a lot on how well I modeled and surfaced the more relevant risks. Unlike an IPO prospectus, just listing all the possibilities isn't enough. The value is in identifying and surfacing the factors below "obvious" but above "very unlikely", then plugging them into scenarios and playing them forward.

To my company's credit, it wasn't uncommon that during a detailed, often painful, post mortem of a horrendous failure, my work would be singled out for being outstanding. Why? Because I'd surfaced and appropriately weighed the risks, including the ones that sank the project. When the calls weren't obvious (and many aren't), my job was to ensure the stakeholders had situational awareness, including relevant risk factors. As I got better at modeling the intractably 'wicked' nature of my role, I included fewer "Go / No Go" calls and more provisional judgements like "If we choose Go, we're betting we can execute a combination of these factors better than their median probability and that the following less-likely externalities won't occur."

Conversely, I found it frustrating that in the celebratory review of one especially huge win, which I'd endorsed with as big a "Go" as I'd ever give, my esteemed stakeholders failed to notice that my "Go" was right but for the wrong reasons. My private self-assessment was quite brutal because the excellent outcome wasn't due to an unforeseeably rare "Golden Goose" (the opposite of a Black Swan). It was a less likely factor that ended up being critical for reasons I'd seen and assessed but weighed incorrectly. The silver-lining was this was one of those rare times that exactly how I'd blown the eval of that factor was discernible. It ended up being one of the single most instructive events of my career because in parsing how I'd failed, I uncovered a process error which significantly leveled up my skills. It's like finding a math mistake wasn't a calculation error but an error in the formula or, in coding, a mythical compiler bug.

It's ironic the legendary 'big win' I was probably most known for was actually one of my biggest preventable errors. Once I'd had time to really study it, I did an internal talk on the whole episode, labeling it as my best-ever 'teachable moment.' I've heard the video of that talk is still regularly shown.

There aren't a lot of professional careers which require skill and years of experience yet are flooded with so many false positives, false negatives, and "we'll never even knows". Domains where playing at a world-class level only takes being right 5% of the time - are just hard to reason about. It can feel like a sadistic casino where 97% of blackjack hands have no clear winner, yet sometimes hitting on 20 is the optimal call. But other times standing on 12 is the best strategy. But it's not entirely random. There are real signals. It's just hard to identify which are real, which are red noise and which are just mapped backward.

With so many false positives and false negatives it's easy to end up chasing black swans (random outlier events). Or to just settle for trying to please your boss, whose own track record is probably closer to astrology than strategy. My best meta-takeaway is to focus on thoroughly mapping the decision space, carefully track and map all the signals, even build a taxonomy of signal types if you can. Then relentlessly optimize the decision making process over the actual outcomes. Why? Because in such 'wicked' domains, sometimes the wrong decision process can still score winning results. And other times, an optimal decision process can yield a string of losses. Your job depends on figuring which is which before it's obvious to other expert players.

As for the book reader in the TFA, I suspect a lot of his value isn't in his a binary "go / no go" call. It's accurately mapping the strengths and weaknesses of a particular title and suggesting where to place it in the studio's current decision matrix. And, on a good day, maybe spotting non-obvious ways the property could be developed.

Like I say, the man in the article must have to read some horrible books. What happens when there is a book which is horribly written, but which might make a good film. I think that is a genuine scenario.

The retirement plan of sitting at a cafe with a book is more for when I’ve already done all the other things. I wouldn’t say it’s my ultimate life dream or anything.

I occasionally watch a woodworking YouTube channel. The creator tells people if they start woodworking as a job they'll have to find a new hobby.

He’d be reading nearly 6/week, which is ~every day.