Read Not the Times. Read the Eternities.
Why stepping away from the noise might be the clearest move a leader can make
Earlier this morning, I caught myself doing it again. Sitting in front of a screen, thumbing through headlines, scrolling social feeds, refreshing the same few websites under the pretense of “staying on top of things.” The subject didn’t even matter—this time it was global affairs and economic noise, but it could’ve just as easily been the latest political spat or some shiny new market prediction.
I told myself it was responsible. That I was staying informed. That it was my job to monitor the situation.
But if I’m being honest, I wasn’t learning anything. I was just feeding a low-grade anxiety.
There’s a difference between paying attention and being consumed. One helps you lead. The other leaves you numb.
What’s strange—and what I’ve noticed time and time again—is that when I resist that urge to plug in, something happens. When I stop chasing updates and stop reacting to every new headline, my thinking gets clearer. My sense of direction steadies.
The less news I consume, the more informed I feel.
Which raises a tough but necessary question: What if the modern news cycle isn’t helping us lead better—but actually making it harder?
“Read Not the Times. Read the Eternities.”
That line from Thoreau comes back to me often, usually in the moments I most need it. He wasn’t suggesting that we retreat from the world. He was offering something more radical: a different way of engaging with it.
The day’s headlines offer urgency. But understanding requires something else—distance, depth, perspective.
You don’t get that from Twitter. You don’t get it from live updates or push notifications. You get it from history. From psychology. From old books. From people who’ve lived through harder things and thought about them more clearly than we do now.
If you want to understand how power works, how it moves through systems and people, you’ll find more clarity in The 48 Laws of Power or The Dictator’s Handbook than in a year’s worth of think pieces. These books aren’t just about manipulation—they’re about structure. About the timeless patterns that show up in every empire, every boardroom, every campaign.
If you want to know how fear spreads, or how movements form around ideas that are half-baked or dangerous, read The True Believer. Or It Can’t Happen Here. You’ll start to recognize the rhythms—the promises, the scapegoats, the certainty that drowns out thought.
And if what you’re after is peace—some steadiness amid the noise—go back to the Stoics. Pick up A Guide to the Good Life. Their challenges were different, but the emotions were the same. They knew how easy it was to be pulled off course. Their wisdom has lasted because it was built for real life.
There’s also a quiet kind of instruction that comes from biography—especially the kind that doesn’t try to turn someone’s life into a series of slogans. A General’s Life, for instance, gives us Eisenhower not as a marble figure, but as a man under strain. You watch how he measured his words, how he bore the weight of decisions, how he didn’t let the moment dictate his character. That’s a form of education you can’t rush.
So many of the answers we’re looking for aren’t on the front page. They’re sitting quietly in the stacks. They’ve been there for years, waiting for us to remember them.
The New Illiteracy
There’s a kind of surface fluency that passes for wisdom now. We know a little about a lot, but we rarely go deep. We’re quick to react, slow to reflect.
Modern media rewards urgency over understanding. It thrives on emotion—outrage, panic, tribal pride—and packages it as insight. The faster the reaction, the better. The more dramatic the take, the more attention it gets.
But once you’re caught in that loop, something subtle but important starts to break down. You lose your filter. You lose your ability to tell what matters and what’s just noise. Everything feels urgent, and nothing feels clear.
We’re surrounded by information. But information isn’t knowledge. And it certainly isn’t wisdom.
Being informed isn’t about knowing the latest headline. It’s about understanding what’s underneath it. How we got here. What patterns are repeating. What choices we actually have.
Pattern Recognition, Not Panic
Reading widely—especially the right kinds of books—teaches you to look for patterns instead of reacting to headlines.
You start to see how cycles play out. How people behave when they’re scared. How leaders rise—or unravel—depending on whether they lean into character or chase popularity.
You also begin to spot the deeper human tendencies that sit underneath our systems and institutions. Fear of change. Hunger for control. The need to belong. The urge to simplify complexity into good guys and bad guys.
Books like The Art of Strategy don’t just teach theory—they give you tools. They show how people think under pressure. How they navigate uncertainty. And they offer something rare in today’s world: frameworks for choosing wisely when the stakes are high.
That kind of thinking doesn’t come from a push alert. It comes from sitting with something long enough to let it change how you see.
Why It Matters for Leaders
As a leader, your job isn’t just to know what’s happening. It’s to make sense of it—for yourself, for your team, and sometimes for the people who trust you with their livelihoods.
You don’t need to be the fastest to react. You need to be the one who sees clearly when everyone else is caught up in the storm.
That means building a foundation of thought—not just knowledge, but wisdom. It means reading the things that last, not the things that trend.
At B:Side, we’ve tried to orient around that idea. We don’t want to just keep up. We want to think ahead. To look at systems, not just symptoms. To study what holds up under pressure—not just what’s popular in the moment.
We try to read across disciplines. To study behavior as much as economics. To understand people, not just numbers. Because leading through uncertainty requires more than data. It requires judgment. And judgment is built through practice—mental reps, thoughtful inputs, time spent with big ideas.
A Better Loop
Here’s what I’ve been trying lately. It’s not a prescription, just a pattern that seems to help:
I check the news at set times—usually morning and evening—and ignore it the rest of the day.
I keep a book nearby. Not one written to sell copies fast, but one written to last.
I write something every day, even if it’s just a short note to myself. It helps me think in my own words, not someone else’s.
I pay more attention to how I feel after consuming something. Am I clearer? Or just agitated?
And when in doubt, I remember Thoreau: “Read not the Times. Read the eternities.”
Because the point of all this isn’t to withdraw. It’s to come back stronger. More grounded. More thoughtful. More capable of leading in a world that doesn’t pause for clarity.
We don’t need more noise.
We need more depth.
And we’re not going to find it in the news cycle.