Lenses: Inside Reading, Tiller, and Past/Present/Future

Three quotes that made me think again.

Jun 18, 2026

The Lenses series collects thoughts that shift how you see things.

Enjoy today’s lenses:

Inside Reading

Commentator Ezra Klein on reading:

Part of what is happening when you spend 7 hours reading a book, is you spend 7 hours with your mind on the topics in the book, grappling with them, drawing connections, having thoughts you would not otherwise have had.
And so without that process of grappling, without those hours inside that book, it doesn’t get inside you. It doesn’t impress itself upon you. It doesn’t change you. What reading and writing and processing information is supposed to do is change you.

— Ezra Klein

This highlights the cognitive atrophy caused by the extensive use of LLMs. Real understanding is only built upon processing that information.

One of my recent reads, Deep Work by Cal Newport, could have been an article, but spending a few hours with the book helped to digest its content and trigger thoughts and experiments. Writing the article was the pinnacle of processing the content: Deep Work: Meditation, Inversion, Shutdown

What is your relationship with distilling books while reading them?

Tiller

Fear and ego—in other words, ignorance—are keeping your hand on the tiller.
Release the tiller for whatever reason, and the steering takes care of itself.

— Jed McKenna

A tiller is the lever used to steer a boat, and letting go of it is scary.

I interpret the quote as an occasional reminder to let go of control, which I usually cling to tightly. My bet on improving skills I didn’t focus on, like public speaking, depends heavily on letting go. Being on stage has so many dimensions that it is simply impossible to control everything.

Do you release the tiller at times?

Past/Present/Future

Be forgiving with your past self. What’s done is done. No sense in beating yourself up about it.
Be strict with your present self. Win the moment in front of you right now.
Be flexible with your future self. There are many paths to success. You don’t need life to be a certain way to live well.

— James Clear

I’ve recently been preparing to give a talk about 10-day silent retreat takeaways during an engineering conference.

A recurring theme during the retreat was that the present moment is the only thing that exists. Everything else is uncertain. The past is a blurry recording of events stored in our imperfect memory. The future is a blurry plan which can change in an instant. We can prepare for that, but we can’t fully control it. The present moment is all we’ve got.

During the meditation retreat, you exercise this feeling in an amplified way. You go through the schedule and focus mostly on sitting for 11 hours on the floor with your back straight. Winning the moment there is about surviving the struggle.

What is your relationship with this trio of past, present, and future?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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