Anyone who has ever visited my office or home knows this: I love books.
There are the fiction ones...little escape hatches into worlds inside other people’s heads, which we now need because many of us have forgotten how to imagine our own. And then there are the non-fiction books, all promising to make us better: happier, stronger, richer, more productive, more serene, fitter, more beautiful. Always better, because perfection is the finish line we’ve collectively hallucinated.
After spending far too many hours wandering bookstores (an experience I highly recommend), I’ve realized something odd: there are too many books in this world, and yet we keep printing more while inventing machines that slowly discourage us from reading them. But this is not a rant about machines...that is so November 2025.
Here’s the real issue: much like how we turn seniors into “the elderly” instead of “elders,” books today overflow with information but rarely offer wisdom. We tease MBAs for jargon, but we all secretly enjoy sounding complex. Simple feels too basic; complex feels intelligent. And we like these illusions we create.
So where do we actually find wisdom?
In the children’s section.
Read How to Hold a Cockroach. Revisit Winnie the Pooh, Charlie Brown, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Little Prince, or What Do You Do With an Idea? These tiny books, powered by astonishingly clear minds, fit more truth and gentle brilliance into twenty minutes than most adult books do in four hundred pages.
A few gems from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse:
“When have you been at your strongest?”
“When I have dared to show my weakness.”
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Kind.”
“Is your glass half empty or half full,” asked the mole
“I think I am grateful to have a glass,” said the boy
“I wonder if there is a school of unlearning.”
I’m not claiming to have the answers. I don’t even have all the questions. I would be lucky if I could tell you that test we are taking, but I do have two ideas worth trying:
1. Pair every adult book with three children’s books.
Think of the kiddie books as movie trailers…quick previews that remind us how to live before we plunge back into the self-improvement Olympics. It’s ironic (and slightly tragic) how quickly we abandon the values we preach to children once we join the rat race.
2. Read less. Reflect more.
This will be hard. We measure success with money, learning with grades, and knowledge with the number of books or pages consumed. But what we truly need is not more reading…it’s more thinking. More letting ideas percolate. More sitting quietly with a sentence until it leaks into our dreams. God knows we need new dreams tonight.
So let’s drop our masks and embrace our imperfect selves.
As that little book reminds us:
“The greatest illusion is that life should be perfect.”
Wisdom for the Child's Soul
