I had to clear them out of my daughter’s bookcase because the space needs to be freed up. As I picked them up one by one, I found myself looking at them, recognizing some, remembering when I bought them. Others surprised me because I had completely forgotten I even owned them.
And the books I moved today are only a fraction of what I’ve accumulated over the years. There are still boxes and boxes of them at my mother’s house. I don’t even know exactly how many. I only know there are a lot.
At some point, I stopped and thought about something.
How do so many people go through their entire lives having known, for the most part, only the books they had to read at school?
I’m not saying that as a criticism. I’m genuinely curious. For me, books have always been almost a natural part of life. I can hardly imagine my life without all those years of reading.
And yet, right after that thought came another one, much harder to sit with:
What have all these books really given me?
I’ve spent thousands of euros on books. I don’t even know how many hours I’ve spent reading them. Psychology, philosophy, history, economics, politics, human behavior, success, relationships, spirituality. I’ve looked for answers almost everywhere.
And then I look around at other people’s lives.
I see people who have probably read very little and yet have things I don’t have. Large houses, swimming pools, expensive cars, businesses, money. Not necessarily because they’re smarter or more capable. Their lives simply took a different direction.
And that leads to a question that isn’t easy to admit:
Maybe reading a lot doesn’t necessarily get you very far.
My father used to tell me that.
He said that by reading so many books, I was only making myself more mentally confused.
Back then, I didn’t like hearing it. I thought he didn’t understand what reading meant to me, that he saw only the time I spent with my nose in a book and not everything those books left inside me.
Today, as I pack books into a suitcase without even knowing where I’m going to put them next, his words come back to me differently.
Because maybe my father had noticed something I couldn’t see.
Every book adds something.
A theory. An explanation. A different way of looking at a situation. Then you read another and find someone arguing the exact opposite. Then another, and you discover that perhaps both are right, but only under certain circumstances.
At first, it feels like wealth.
After a while, it can become noise.
And the more you read, the harder it can become to tell the difference between what you actually think and everything you’ve absorbed from other people.
You can read a book about discipline and feel ready to change your life. Then you read one about motivation. Then habits. Then psychology. Then fear.
And after fifty books, you may be able to explain perfectly why you aren’t doing what you know you should be doing.
Yet you still don’t do it.
That is what interests me most today: reading can become a very sophisticated form of inaction.
While you’re reading, you feel as if you’re moving forward.
You’re learning.
You’re thinking.
You’re growing.
And sometimes you really are.
But sometimes you’re simply postponing the moment when you’ll have to put what you’ve learned to the test.
And that’s when I picked up one particular book today, one I decided to entrust to my daughter.
I told her, “Don’t sell this one.”
She can sell the others, give them away, get rid of them.
But not this one.
It’s The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman, in the 2003 Italian edition published by Sonzogno. I’ve always liked the cover: green, with four four-leaf clovers.
Why this book?
Because after everything I’ve read, I’ve come to believe that there is something many theories about success tend to overlook:
we don’t all start from the same place, and we don’t have the same degree of control over the outcome.
We like to tell ourselves that life is a kind of equation.
Study hard, and you’ll succeed.
Work hard, and you’ll succeed.
Be intelligent, and you’ll succeed.
Try hard enough, and eventually you’ll make it.
But life isn’t that simple.
There’s the family you’re born into. The place where you grow up. The historical moment. The people you meet. The opportunities that come your way. The ones you miss. Chance encounters. Coincidences.
And then there’s what we call luck.
That doesn’t mean everything is luck. That would be just as wrong.
It means that luck exists, and it plays a much bigger role in our lives than we like to admit.
That’s what makes Wiseman’s book so interesting to me. It doesn’t simply say that some people are lucky and others aren’t. It looks at what people who consider themselves lucky actually do, and whether certain behaviors make them more likely to encounter opportunities.
In the end, it feels very practical to me.
I can’t decide when luck will arrive.
But I can decide whether I leave the house.
I can decide how many people I meet.
I can decide whether to try something new.
I can decide whether, when an unexpected possibility appears, I immediately close the door or at least take a look at where it might lead.
Maybe we can’t control luck.
But we can put ourselves in places where luck has a chance to find us.
And that idea feels much more useful to me today than most theories about success.
Because it also forces us to be a little more honest with ourselves.
Not everything we have achieved is necessarily entirely due to our own merit.
And not everything we have failed to achieve is necessarily entirely our fault.
That’s a difficult thing to accept, especially in a society that keeps telling us that we can become anything we want if we want it badly enough.
I don’t think that’s true.
We can do a great deal.
We can prepare, study, work, improve, keep trying.
But we can’t control everything.
And perhaps that is one of the things it took me far too long to understand.
For years, I tried to understand life.
Why some people make it and others don’t.
Why some people find love and others remain alone.
Why some people become wealthy while others work their entire lives without ever building much wealth.
Why some people seem to stumble into opportunity after opportunity while others always seem to arrive at the wrong place at the wrong time.
I looked for answers in books.
Maybe my father understood that not every question has an answer in a book.
And maybe some answers simply don’t exist.
Or rather, they don’t exist in the form we would like them to.
Today, as I packed those books away, I didn’t think they had been useless.
That would be unfair.
Those books have been part of my life. They kept me company. They taught me things. They changed the way I thought. Some helped me through difficult moments. Others I have completely forgotten.
But today I realized something:
I don’t want to confuse what I know with what I have actually done.
They are two very different things.
I can know a great deal and still have done very little.
Someone else can know relatively little and build a great deal.
And perhaps life doesn’t keep score based on how many books we’ve read.
This realization doesn’t make me regret the books.
It simply makes me want to stop accumulating them.
Not necessarily stop reading, but stop believing that the next answer is always inside the next book.
Maybe now I need to step outside the pages for a while.
To try.
To fail.
To act.
To see what happens.
That’s why I told my daughter to keep The Luck Factor.
Not because I think that book contains the definitive explanation of life. No book does.
I want her to keep those four white four-leaf clovers as a small reminder.
You can prepare as much as you want. You can study. You can work hard. You can be intelligent, determined, capable.
And something can still happen that you never saw coming.
You can meet someone by chance.
An opportunity can appear.
A door can open.
You can simply find yourself in the right place at the right time.
Or you can find yourself in the wrong place.
And not all of that will necessarily be your fault or your achievement.
The important thing is not to turn that awareness into an excuse for doing nothing.
Quite the opposite.
If I can’t control luck, at least I want to be there when it comes along.
And as I closed that suitcase full of books, I realized that maybe this is where I’ve finally arrived.
I’ve spent a huge part of my life looking for ways to understand the world through books.
Today I find myself moving those books from one house to another and wondering what to do with them.
There are still so many at my mother’s house.
Maybe one day I’ll sell them. Maybe I’ll give them away. Maybe I’ll keep a few.
But I no longer think the fundamental question is, “How much did all that reading do for me?”
Maybe the real question is:
“Now that I’ve read all this, what am I willing to do with it?”
Because at some point, you have to close the book.
And start living what’s written outside it.
My father used to say that reading so much only made me more mentally confused.
Today, as I carried away a suitcase and a duffel bag full of books, for the first time I thought that maybe he was right.
Not because reading was useless.
But because perhaps I didn’t need to understand more. I needed to do more.
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