Why Reading A Lot Of Books Is Not Always A Good Idea
Remember the saying ‘A book is a window to the world’? I bet you must heard that somewhere in any point at your life so far (or until now). From the moment when we learn how to read, our parents or teachers have began telling us to start reading books. Have you notice? From when we were that young our parents read many storytelling books for us in hopes to make us smarter, more creative, or maybe just to put us to sleep at night. In elementary to senior high school, our teachers commonly gave us various books as references for our homework or papers. We are sometimes given a long period of time to answer our quiz in the library in hopes that we can find the most relevant answer possible (which usually we do the opposite). Even when we are in the first days of college orientation, the faculty members encourage us to read books for a better future ahead. If you realise it, reading books is one of the most directly or indirectly encouraged productive activities in our lives by our society. It is not a boring activity, but usually people give a pretty boring reason to read a book.
For myself, I never imagined i would love to read books in every spare time that i have now. In middle school, I was a very lazy student that ignores most of the homeworks given, could not study well for exams, which leads to getting bad grades all over my rapport and that got me frustated. Then one of my friends told me that his older sister moved on from producing bad grades to being an A+ students just by routinely reading books. That’s a very compelling facts at that age, So I bought a book back then titled Marmut Merah Jambu by Raditya Dika. That was the first time I encountered a book by my own free will. Sadly it only stopped there until in high school, I encountered the first book that moved me and made me fall in love with the beauty of a single meaningful word written beautifully could give. The book was Bumi Manusia by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Long story short, I have read various books through the course of my life until this point.
Yesterday I realized that through the first half of 2019, I had read 13 books. First I was amazed on that achievement because soon it will reach 20 and meaning my reading goal for this year will be completed. Second I questioned myself, “How on earth will I retain all sorts of information that I got from the book in my brain now?”.
My purpose of reading books everyday is to enrich myself with great knowledges and use it to bring good impacts to my surroundings. Reading biographies inspires me to thrive in my own journey to success. Investment books give me the know-how on investing like top stock tycoons that minimizes risk of losing and increases potential gain. Submerging in self-help books will nurture my mindset and build my great habits in the future. I know that all of these types of information would benefit me in some particular ways. But how will I do it if the knowledge only sits neatly here in my brain? Never to see the light of particular problems that seeks to be answered. I forgot to put it in to action.
My original thought is that all of the knowledge that i acquired will help me to create an impact. Yet this is only the cause(knowledge) and effect(impact). Which is pretty abstract and had a lot of grey area. It needs a more concrete and real manifestation to make sense for human brain’s logic. What can we do to put knowledge to good use? What triggers an impact in the first place?
Knowledge is one of the main cause of an action and result is what triggers impact in the first place. Imagine you own a lemonade stand. You know how to transform lemons to lemonades and the business equation of a lemonade stand. Then you decided to sell lemonades through a lemonade stand. The result is there would be people that bought your lemonade for a certain price. Your customer will be happy then it could be considered a good impact for their life.
But what happens if the customer don’t like your products because the lemonade did not taste as good as he/she expected? Could it also be treated as an impact? Maybe we could specified the impacts to create better clarity.
If the customer loves the taste of our lemonade, then it’s considered a good impact. If not, then it’s considered a bad one. From these 2 implications, you can assume that there will be customers returning to buy your lemonades again and there will be some that will never come back because of the bad impact. Certainly we want to keep adding returning customers and minimize unsatisfied customers. Not the other way around.
It’s our job to obtain the insights from the resulted impact, learn from the experience and take it as our learning. To make a better satisfying lemonade and minimize the chances of unsatisfied customer.
Through experiencing what are the impacts of a certain action is, we could take it to evaluation and then turn it into learnings that could be used later to take better decisions in the future together with new knowledges. Avoiding the actions that triggers bad outcomes and focusing on activities that results great impact on our surroundings. This action will gain better result that triggers for significant impact. Then we would have the key takeaways from this impact and enhance our experience. So the cycle will repeat over and over, until one day we can’t do anything anymore.
Wouldn’t be such a waste, If you didn’t do anything from the knowledge you obtained? Oh no, you’re making the author of those books that you had read feel bad about his writings. You don’t want him/her feel that, do you?
Conclusion
From the very beginning of our learning stage, It is nice for us to be submerged with books. Indeed, reading books could gives us a sneak peek to how the world works and shows wonders that it has for us. Read just as much as you need to, as long as you can take ownership of the knowledge gained and take action to do something in your life with it. It would be a waste if all the information stays forever in your head, and eventually it could shift your mindset to be theoretical rather than practical. It will be rendered useless because it’s not giving any returns such as significant impact or some kind of success, which is the main goal of learning in the first place.
“The most important investment you can make is in yourself.”
— Warren Buffett
If this one man, the one that proved the return of his knowledge is enough to make him one of the wealthiest person in the world, then what you got to say?
