Improving Yourself Through Others’ Written Wisdom
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
Cicero’s Shortcut That Isn’t Cheating
Cicero frames reading as a disciplined way to compress time: by taking in what others have already struggled to learn, you “gain easily” without repeating every mistake yourself. The ease he describes is not laziness, but leverage—standing on accumulated insight rather than starting from zero. This becomes clearer when we remember Cicero’s world of rhetoric, law, and public life, where competence depended on absorbing precedents, speeches, and philosophy. In that context, self-improvement meant apprenticing yourself to a tradition, and writing was the most reliable teacher when direct mentorship wasn’t available.
Books as Mentors Across Centuries
Building on that idea, writings function like mentors that never retire: you can consult them repeatedly, at your own pace, and in moments when guidance is scarce. Cicero’s point implies that the dead can still tutor the living, offering tested arguments and hard-won clarity. This is why many classical works were treated as conversation partners rather than artifacts. Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius (c. 65 AD), for instance, reads like practical coaching in ethics and resilience, showing how a reader can borrow steadiness from someone else’s experience and then translate it into daily conduct.
Learning Without Paying the Full Price
Next comes the economic logic behind the quote: human knowledge is expensive—paid for in error, conflict, wasted effort, and years. Reading lets you inherit that cost already paid by others, so your own learning curve steepens without demanding the same toll. A simple anecdote illustrates this: a novice manager who reads Andrew Grove’s High Output Management (1983) may recognize predictable failure modes—unclear objectives, misaligned incentives—before living through them at full scale. In that sense, writings don’t replace experience; they reduce unnecessary suffering by making experience more informed.
Selective Imitation and Intellectual Humility
However, Cicero’s advice quietly requires humility: to improve through others’ writings, you must accept that someone else may have seen further than you. That doesn’t mean surrendering judgment; it means beginning with receptivity rather than ego. From there, the task becomes selective imitation—taking what is true, useful, and applicable. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (4th century BC) models this posture by treating virtue as practical wisdom shaped through reflection and example, inviting readers to adapt principles to their own circumstances rather than parroting doctrines.
From Reading to Internalizing
Even so, improvement doesn’t happen at the moment of reading; it happens when insights are retained, tested, and converted into habits. Cicero’s “employ your time” suggests deliberate practice: notes, summaries, discussion, and revisiting texts until they become part of your thinking. This is where reading shifts from consumption to formation. A person studying rhetoric might read Cicero’s De Oratore (55 BC) and then apply its lessons by rewriting arguments, practicing delivery, and seeking critique—using the text as a blueprint for repeated skill-building.
A Lifelong Curriculum of Chosen Voices
Finally, Cicero’s counsel points toward a lifelong curriculum: you assemble a small library of minds that consistently refine you. Over time, these voices shape your standards—what counts as a good argument, a worthy goal, or an honorable life. The transition from occasional reading to an intentional canon can be transformative. Whether one turns to Plato’s Republic (c. 375 BC) for questions of justice or to modern works for strategy and science, the unifying aim remains Cicero’s: to let others’ labor become your starting point, so your own effort can be spent advancing rather than merely catching up.