RethinkDB founder's reading method: five-book 'lenses' and 20 books a year
jiayuan_jy · x · 2026-10-10
A rescued note from a deleted blog post by RethinkDB founder Slava Akhmechet on systematic reading in the AI era.
- Metaphor: one book is an aperture; reading five on the same topic forms a "lens" for inspecting the world — most people never read even two books on one subject
- Pace: 40 pages/day, assume 30% failure rate → 10k pages / 20 books a year = 4 lenses; 40 lenses over a decade (compounding)
- Example: a tech-history lens built from The Victorian Internet, Empires of Light, The Wright Brothers, The Network, Hackers — finishing it beats 95% of readers
- Selection: no reading list; after each cluster ask "what instrument doubles my lab's utility?" or "what important subject do I know least?"
- Lenses upgrade one book at a time; the bookshelf mirrors the mental lab — "win the decade, not the day"
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