Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Someone who spends a lot of time with business and self-help material can look at great things outside that area and see how they rhyme with the work. Rick Rubin suggests going to museums and taking the walking tour with the headphones to hear the stories, reading the great literature, and watching the greatest movies of all time. For literature there is no single list, but if three people recommend a book, read it.
Great ideas often come from something that has nothing to do with what you're interested in. Steve Jobs's love of design and typography is the kind of thing no university would have recommended to a would-be programmer. What makes someone good at what they do is usually that they don't do it the same as everyone else.
Old books beat new ones, since ancient wisdom is the best and the place to start is very old. Rubin first read the Tao about 30 years ago, just after moving to California. When he read it again six months later, it was an entirely different book.
How did a calligraphy class shape the Macintosh?
Steve Jobs told Stanford graduates in 2005 that after dropping out of Reed College he sat in on a calligraphy course there. He learned about serif and sans serif typefaces and about varying the space between letter combinations. Ten years later, he said, that knowledge went into the Macintosh, which was the first computer with beautiful typography. The original 1984 Mac shipped with multiple fonts and proportionally spaced type.
Why are old books worth reading?
The writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the Lindy effect, which says that the longer a non-perishable thing has survived, the longer it is likely to keep surviving. A book that readers have kept for 2,000 years has already passed far more tests than one released last year. This makes old works a filtered selection of what people found worth keeping. The Tao Te Ching, dated by scholars to around the fourth century BCE, is an example.
More from The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
