Shane Parrish – Mastering Mental Models

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:46)
My guest this week is Shane Parrish. Many out there will be familiar with Shane, and if you are not, you should be. More than 100,000 people, myself included, spend their Sunday morning reading what Shane and his team have written that week to learn more about themselves and about the world.
I tell Shane at the start of our conversation that we need to avoid just talking about books, and then we proceed to talk about books right away. I guess it was inevitable. Luckily, we cover a lot of other ground as well. Fans of Shane's multifaceted take on the world will enjoy our discussion of business, mental models, and unavoidably reading. You can find show notes at investorfieldguide.com forward slash Shane. And now, please enjoy my conversation with Farnam Street's Shane Parrish.
All right. Well, Shane, thank you so much for taking the time to do this with me today. We'll talk about a lot of different interesting areas. And we'll try to actually steer clear of books. I think that you and me could tend to go down the book rabbit hole. So maybe we'll try to leave that for the very end.
And instead start by talking about some of the things that you think have led to your success just in general, but also maybe particular elements that people can emulate or replicate in their own lives. So one fun way of thinking about this is to ask what things feel pretty easy or natural to you, but might look like very hard work to those on the outside looking in.

**Shane Parrish** (2:10)
Oh, like everything is hard work.
Explaining kind of what's happened would be simple. It's luck, right? Like, it's a lot of hard work on my part and a lot of effort, but it's never been easy. I mean, I didn't even start out as a big reader of books. I hated reading. I hated reading through elementary school. I hated reading through high school because other people were telling me what to read, and I didn't like that. And so I was never really involved in kind of picking out books and reading them until maybe late in high school and university. And people think that reading comes naturally to me or that I read much faster than everybody else. I don't. I mean, I read at a very average pace.
I just probably spend more time reading than most people.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:55)
Have you tapered that back at all? I know in years past that you probably read upwards of 100 books a year. Are you still reading at that pace?

**Shane Parrish** (3:04)
Well, in 2014, I read 152 books and cover to cover. So that was an actual number. And I think I started over 300 and then the Delta being the books that I gave away and didn't finish.
And I think that was flawed. I mean, what I learned from that was towards the end of the year specifically, it just became about getting through these books. It became about like, oh, I'll just pick a short book. I'll pick an easy book because I was getting fatigued and tired. But the problem with that was, I mean, we read for, if we're not reading for entertainment, we read for learning. And if you're just trying to get through a book, you're not really learning.
So one of the biggest lessons I learned from that was, you know, it's about reading and reading for fluency and understanding. It's not about how many books you get through. So my reading has tapered.
The time I spend reading has definitely not 140 books a year. It's probably, you know, 10 to 15 hours a week at this point. And I think that that's a good pace for me. And a lot of it's become rereading too, which is really important to me. So when I finish a good book now, I'll go back and I'll start rereading it. And usually I won't even, if I know it's a good book beforehand, I won't even take a note while I'm reading it because I know I'm going to want to read it again. And it's the second time through, which is after I know the journey that the author is taking me on, after I know where we're going and some of the subtleties and the nuances that all kind of come out with a pen. And what I'm finding is like I'm actually taking less notes from the book, but I take way more away than I would expect from reading it twice.