The Two Buckets of Non-Fiction Books
Do you want to learn for pleasure, or do you want to take action?
There are many kinds of non-fiction books, and they can be categorized in nearly infinite ways.
One interesting way is to bucket them very broadly by what you hope to accomplish by reading them.
Two such buckets could be non-fiction where you can learn something interesting about the world, and non-fiction where you are motivated to action.
There’s an overlap of course and they don’t account for every genre of nonfiction, but I think it largely tracks with goals readers have going into a book.
When I started The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, I was ready to settle in and go deep about biology over many, many pages, and not to necessarily change what I would be doing the next day. I wanted to learn.
When I started Atomic Habits by James Clear, yes, I figured I would learn about habits, but the real goal was to leave the last page with some words of wisdom I could implement immediately. I wanted to take action.
You could think of “action” as “self-help” or “personal development,” but these labels as traditionally recognized in bookstores are only one component to the bucket.
