If You Can Apply All You Read, You’re Simply Not Reading Enough
And you’ll make very needless, costly mistakes.
A piece of common advice hammers on applying what you read. As the advice goes, don’t read another book or article until you apply the lessons of the last one.
The theory is that you’ll learn more by applying what you’ve read than picking up the next book or article.
Which is all fine and wonderful. Only that, even for very practical advice, not every practical information you read must be practised by you.
In fact, I’ll go as far as saying if you can apply everything you read, then you’re simply not reading enough.
As a rule of thumb, you’ll only be able to practice maybe 5% or less of what you read, if you read enough. That’s about one in every twenty practical idea or information you consume that make it to the application stage.
What about the other 95%? What’s their point? They make the other 5% possible.
The truth is, if you’re consuming enough, you simply can’t act on every information or idea you get. You simply don’t have enough time, energy, focus to pursue every single idea.
But should that stop you from consuming them? No, not necessarily. Why? Because the 95% per cent…
