Oh How It Goes By In A Blinkist
PREFACE
I wrote a version of this blog I was SO proud of yesterday and Squarespace glitched and deleted it. My first response was disbelief, maniacal laughter, and moving in my normal direction ready to jump off the bridge into Self-Pity Town. And I stopped and thought deeper about it. Avoided deleting the early draft because I think this exercise was an almost meta-exercise in itself. What I gained wasn’t entirely in the writing of the lost draft, but what happened after I lost it.
Blinkist Of An Eye
So…
Here it goes. The return to regular programming to examine what the initial idea was all about.
And it starts with a question I was asked and will ask you now:
Have you ever used Blinkist?
Yes. The modern-SparkNotes with venture funding.
I feel in some way conflicted about this app and feel guilty in a small way as to why this approximation tool exists.
What is it that led us here? What led me here to feel this shame that I’m trying to sort out?
Well, it all started about a week ago.
(Wooshing noise through the fabric of time and space and wasted data)
Amy and I are in our first couple of days at a new setup we’re trying called co-living. We’re at Outsite’s Pacific Heights location, and I’m talking to a newly found friend/entrepreneur about the books that led us to where we’re at. I start listing Good to Great, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Essentialism, The Mountain is You, and The Richest Man in Babylon.
And he cut in to say, “The Richest Man in Babylon, I just finished it recently! That’s a good one.”
Excited to have found an overlap I began describing the symposiums of Arkad, his advice, the shepherd’s deal, and the story of the man who defaulted on his debt and the only way to repay with all he had left, his abled body to work a farm.
To all of that ramble of mine, he said, “Yeah it’s really special. Text me the names of the rest of your favorite books and I’ll check them out.”
I was like, “Dope. (*sent message sounds*) Let me know what you think!” And he told me some to check out.
The next day we were in the kitchen hanging out and he said, “Thank you so much for the recommendations.”
I said with an excitement Dale Carnegie would be smiling in his grave from, “Of course, what do you think you’re going to start with?”
And he said, “Oh, I’ve already gone through most of them.”
I was flabbergasted, folks.
Flabber has never been gasted quite like this.
You couldn’t tell me apart from the hardwood I was so floored.
My immediate inclination of thought was to assume, “dang another speed reader here to leave me in the dust.”
Quick confession, I’m not a fast reader. I can get through a couple of books in a month.
BUT MULTIPLE IN A DAY!
I don’t have that kind of magic, but bow to those that do. Like my partner Amy, she has a bounty of this skill.
I quickly started reacting with elation and reverence as I ate my humble pie.
And he just laughed and said, “Have you ever used Blinkist?”
And immediately my mind was sent back in time, flashing through all the endless scrolls on the socials, realizing I had, it existed in my periphery like the white on this page.
BLINKIST “More knowledge in less time” BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST “Powerful ideas-15 minutes at a time” BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST “Big ideas in small packages” BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST “Fit learning into your life” BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST “Ideas Shared smaller” BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLINKIST BLIN-
(*as I wiped the blood from my nose*)
I responded with, “The thing that I see ads for all the time?"
“Yep, it’s great. I read all of my books through there.”
And immediately, I thought, “have I really been wasting all of this time?”
“Have the ads I’ve been spammed with as far as I can remember… were… they… actually… trying to… help… me?”
He gave me a referral link and that was it.
A month of Blinkist and a lifetime to reconcile with… for free.
The Blinkist-180-Boo
I have a confession before we continue.
In high school, I barely read a book I was assigned to read.
Sparknotes, yes.
Great Expectations, no.
Being a slow reader and not knowing why a Scarlet Letter mattered, nor having the urge to know why I figured I’d let ole Sparky tell me what’s good.
I’m not proud of it.
“It was the best of times, to be or not to be, a monster born to the world of human parents.”
See? I can feign false smarts, I do have a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, after all.
I remember quotes, references, and whatever of these revered literary monuments to avoid detection from the fraud police. If someone were to ask me what Hamlet was all about I couldn’t tell you other than what Kenneth Branagh interpreted it as. And after using Blinkist… I have a sneaky suspicion that I was fed a faceful of zero calories.
I’ve lived a life as if Robin Williams just started pretending to eat the imaginary food to try and fit in, rather than actually imagining the playdoh-food to be there like all the other Lost Boys had.
“The only way to be a great writer is to read.”
Welp, this top graduate of one of the top institutions of writing in the world, who is writing this right now, is telling you I haven’t read the amount I imagine higher-society deems as the acceptable amount of literary consumption.
And I’m okay with it.
I received the top award for a piece of my writing while I was at NYU beating out dozens of other great writers. You don’t believe me they were great? Just ask them they’ll tell you.
I read the SparkNotes of THE BIBLE for god’s sake.
I’ve never felt like I belonged. I’ve always felt like I was given the entrance to life, but to none of the clubs in it. So, I pretended to try to jockey my way to the top of public opinion rather than just focusing on what mattered most, my own.
I wanted to know what other people found valuable, so I could try it out and try to find the connection point. It was a dual value proposition. It was just a matter of if I asserted myself enough. I always looked for value beyond myself, like a person that is dripping in the hottest swag that has to be insured to leave the house to try and avoid anyone asking what is beneath that gaudy fabric. I used ideas like this and I wanted to be known as someone with secret knowledge rather than the journey I could take to acquire it. It’s like hearing about Disneyland rather than going to experience it. It’s two different things, but sometimes with books because they both are presented as words on a page we can confuse the medium with the experience.
Now, you’re asking, “What does this have to do with Blinkist?”
Well, dear reader, Blinkist is a symptom of something I fear I’ve contributed to, a malignant over-optimization of a valuable human experience to feign the semblance of something intellectually earned.
We are what we consume and I’ve been pretending I’ve ate the good-good for far too long.
Do you know how mad I was that “A Tale of Two Cities” didn’t have a SparkNotes at the time? Or a movie? And barely a wiki?
I read blogs talking about it and cobbled together a paper I got an “A-” on. The dregs of those internet threads allowed me to hide another day.
If the monkeypaw came to me in high school Blinkist would be the wish it gave me with a market cap of 113 million dollars.
Blink And It’s Over
Since leaving college I eventually had to start reading. I was a writer after all. I was the one doing script coverage for $150 a script. There was no wiki-god, or Jane Eyre erotic fan fiction site that is going to save me now.
And you know what? I’m thankful for it.
The good stuff, I mean.
Well, the bad stuff also taught me a lot too, maybe even more.
The human consciousness scrawled onto a page hoping someone would find value in it/them/something/idk? For some reason, some person took the time to put these words together for you to read it.
I started reading Murakami, Coelho, Lovecraft, Poe, Gaiman, Wallace, and so on and so on.
It started to be an almost meditative time. To exist with what these brilliant writers expertly constructed for me to exist with felt transcendent in some way.
And perhaps narcissistically it made me feel like I was gaining valuable parts of my personality by reading these things.
Turns of phrases, metaphors, heartbreak, triumph, and everything in between.
These experiences blasted through the canals of my mind and I felt as though I was absorbing their qualities of them to discover the accumulation of what I wanted to grow into.
When I started being a business owner I then found a love for non-fiction Jim Collins, Robert Kiyosaki, Brianna West, George Clawson, Daniel Pink, and so on… and so on.
It felt like I was able to live with their lessons and figure out how they could fit/break-through/correct my journey. That I had mentors helping guide me through this often confusing existence.
I’ve spent the better part of a year just in the world of non-fiction business/entrepreneur books and I’ve loved it.
I’ve come to know fiction as the life of the unlived and non-fiction as the life lived, both beautiful and inspiring each other to be more.
And there is Blinkist, somewhere in or around those two things, but most likely sucking off the outer layer of both.
The World Won’t Go Out With A Bang, But A Blinkist
The world is constantly moving to optimization and believe me, I’m a person that has built his life around distilling and curating stories/ideas/experiences/businesses.
I’m entranced looking at the process of a juicer, taking this raw form and sucking all of the essence out of it. It’s mesmerizing.
I’ve always wanted to optimize so that I could have the highest value this life has to offer. I grew up being exposed to death in a very personal way and it taught me how fleeting and finite this life is. So I over-corrected in not wanting to not waste any time and I only read summaries. I turned into an experience-collector rather than an experience-experiencer. I wanted to be someone that had traveled, read, made, eaten, earned, overlooking being a person that travels, reads, makes, eats, and earns.
The first thing I tried with Blinkist was its version of, “The Richest Man in Babylon.”
And it made me depressed reading it because I think Blinkist is missing the point.
The beauty of The Richest Man in Babylon is not in its ideas but in its presentation. Hearing the stories that have been translated from the many vases left from Babylon to a book that Arkad could only have dreamed of existing. The stories of a shepherd coming out of the dark willing to sell all he has to pay for the medicine man to save his wife. The heartbreak of a man going into debt to please a group of people that never really loved him, until he winds up being sold into slavery. All of these stories are parts of the lesson. The lesson is not the story.
Blinkist removes the story, the intention, the craft, and more than I have words to articulate.
I can tell you with all of the most flowery languages in the world my favorite dessert I ever had, but it’s not the same as having it. You can go to Prague and eat at Degustation and have the shaved ice dessert. It’s possible. You can go have it, but it’s not worth the space of the substitute.
Art should be a means to experience life, not a vacuum in itself. It is the sun by which we can aspire and grow to not fall away from. It should lead us toward our highest selves, not defeat us to it.
We are what we consume.
And I think we forget that books are food and Blinkist is cotton candy at best. The illusion of massive consumption, but is just empty calories lacking any nutrition. The sugar high of having it, to be left with nothing but wasted time.
I don’t want to listen to The Richest Man in Babylon and hear about their interpretation of the work with a new metaphor of buying 3DTV sets instead of sheep.
Give me the source. The raw material. The magic that makes matter move. That made these works worth it.
These books are more than their ideas. They are something more.
Jack Antonoff, from Bleachers, says, “I’m always trying to find that 1+1 that equals a million.”
And that’s it. That’s the stuff. That’s all life is. It’s the accumulation of things to see if they are more than the sum of their parts.
Great books are great experiences and are the right length (*ideally) by the master that forged them. This was the process they believe was essential for you to see what they were saying.
I’m sad my younger self didn’t read The Alchemist the book, but the Sparknotes first. I went back and read the book later and it devastated me in all the right ways and inspired me to continue when I wanted to give up.
We are all out here in this life trying to make gold out of sand and it’s important as the Alchemist said, “I wanted you to know that it is possible.”
By the time we reach the end of something we paid for it with the life we had, so it’s important to make sure the time is well worth the experience more so than spent.
I want to enjoy life more and the treasures it has to offer. Eat good food, read good books, and hang out with good people that inspire me to be the best me I’m capable of being.
And Blinkist isn’t going to give me that.
And I’m happy I know the difference now.
I don’t care that I’m a slow reader. It’s the amount of time I need to absorb the book. Some may take longer than others and I want to be the one that chooses how long and maybe because I want to savor the experience of being with these brilliant thinkers.
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I choose to read, the courage to abandon the ones I won’t, and the wisdom to enjoy the experience.
EPILOGUE
After the last draft glitched out of existence and I was at the precipice of Self-Pity Town, I realized that this was a moment to grow. That my life was built around some vague sense of having accomplished something. That I valued the end product more than the experience, but nothing is ever really finished. Not really. It is merely as far as it goes before someone else takes the ideas, remixes them, and makes something new. If we are always fighting to get to the end life can easily become that as well. So that’s the thing that made me come back to write this blog and it may be better or worse, but it has this element that wouldn’t have been here had things not gone the way I intended.
And I’m thankful.
I like writing. I believe I’m good at it and I want to enjoy life and all it has to offer.
So, I’ll end this by saying:
Life goes by in a blink, don’t waste it on Blinkist.