Documenting Success

How to save money, become smarter and more successful
Published on December 6th, 2006

“See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you’re gonna start doin’ some thinkin on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certaintees in life. One, don’t do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library” – Will, Good Will Hunting.

I love reading. I read a lot. And ever since getting my first apartment a few years ago, I nurtured a dream to build an extensive personal library. I envisioned vast walls filled with most fascinating books, and every one of them would be special to me. The dream was born from thinking fondly back to childhood, when I used to spend a lot of time in my grandparents’ apartment. My grandfather was a prominent scientist, and his library was FANTASTIC. He had books on every possible topic – history, philosophy, archaeology, paleontology, biology, languages, science fiction, mystery novels, classics, poetry, books in Russian, English, German, Ukrainian … I credit much of how incredibly smart (and modest!) I’ve turned out to spending time at my grandfather’s library.

When I just moved out, I was quite naïve about capacity of a Brooklyn studio apartment and size of my wallet – I thought they were both limitless. Naturally, I bought every single book I could get my hands on. As it was bound to happen, soon enough I ran out of both. And that would’ve been fine, since both can be found if you want them bad enough. But here’s the thing – I noticed that out of all the books that I got, I didn’t like about 70%. Either they were boring, badly written, made me feel like killing myself and vowing to never read the author again (hello, Dostoevsky!), or some combination of all.

And out of the other 30% that I did like, almost all were “just ok” – not bad, an interesting read, but certainly nothing I would ever want to pick up again. Eventually, those books turned into fancy bookends, taking up shelf space at worst and making me look sophisticated at best (“Oh wow! Is that Borges?” – “Yes, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you want to end it all rather sooner than later.”) I was getting quite frustrated with this, and my frustration reached a peak when I bought four books by Neal Stephenson. A hundred dollars, four thousand pages, and half-a-bookshelf later, I decided that those books were ok, but nothing special. Clearly, there had to be a better way. And then it dawned on me. According to a rumor heard whispered once in a dark hallway, I could have easily gotten all those monsters from the mysterious place one block away from my job – the library! I decided to look into it.

One big concern I had with the library was that I envisioned the way it works just like it used to in my high school days. You come in, look at fancy titles for a while, find section that you need, spend half an hour browsing through all titles in that section, then finally realize that the book you’re looking for is not there, and leave. In today’s crazy world people don’t have enough time to talk to their family, much less spend an hour at the library to search for a book. That is the exact argument I’ve used to convince myself over and over when I went on Amazon to buy the book I wanted for $10: my time is more valuable. I can’t afford to spend that much time at the library, there are more efficient ways to spend it, and an hour wasted is certainly worth more than $10 to me.

The only problem with that argument is while it might have been true in 1999, most libraries don’t operate like it’s Stone Age anymore. For example, New York Public Library has learned to make our lives hundred times easier by fully taking advantage of this wonderful new invention called The Internet.

The way it works now is like this: you login to NYPL website, and search for the book you need. If it’s not there (some books aren’t, my success rate has been about 90% so far), you’re finished and need to buy it. If it is found, you can request to have that book available for pickup at a branch closest to you. Then when it does become available (and how fast that’s going to happen depends on the book’s popularity and how many copies does the library have), you get an email notification. After that, you go to the branch, pick it up and that’s it! The whole process takes about 10 minutes, depending on how fast you walk.

Of course, if you need the book right away, that’s not an option, since there’s no telling when it is going to be available. You can go to the library and try your luck painstakingly going from shelf to shelf, Stone Age style, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Your time is worth far more to you, just go on Amazon and order the book there. So this method doesn’t work for school assignments, and any other books that you have to read by a certain deadline, because there’s no guarantee you’ll get it soon, or at all (I’m still waiting for Arthur C. Clarke’s “Songs of Distant Earth”, which I requested back in August.) But that’s an exception rather than a rule. The library fits PERFECTLY for those of us that have a list of “books to read someday.”

If your friend tells you that you should read “Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov (ok, that friend is me and you really should), you add it to the aforementioned list and forget about it for the time being. Then, during a particularly slow day at work lunch break, you open your list of “books to read”, head over to your library website, and request it. Two days later, you get an email that it’s available, and you go pick it up. It’s that simple.

If you get into the habit of getting your books through a library, you’re going to save a ton of money over your lifetime. Moreover, you’re going to notice that you start reading more, which makes you smarter, which in turn, has a high likelihood of making you more successful. For example, Mark Cuban attributes a lot of his success to reading the right books. I think your humble local library is a great tool for getting ahead, and it’s a shame few people ever use it. With this article, I hope that changes at least a little. So what are you waiting for? Think of a book if you’ve been meaning to read for a while, go to your local library website, and start searching!