Read hacks
How to make the most of your reading?
OK, it’s Thursday, so I’ll be laconic.
Most of us read. We need to. Kind of have to. And it’s fun as well. And good for health, they say. That’s how we learn. Today, as the education paradigm has evolved towards universally acessible resources, my read hacks might come handy:
To be a better reader, embrace the risk of shattering your long formulated habit. Maybe you were doing it all wrong. Not obligatorily though.
There are three types of reading: delusionary, self-affirmative and liberated.
“Delusionary” reading is when you read, while being somewhere else doing something else. The reading for the sake of reading just sucks out information in the best case, suffocating creativity.
Self-affirmative reading is a tiny bit more productive endeavour; it activates the processing of information obtained, but curtails its span, when we try to fit things into our own perspective.
Finally, liberated reading is the real deal; a mindful practice of focused consumption of information, without intentive categorisations or impeding through one’s own presumptions. On the contrary, it is the fast contextualisation of the acquired pieces putting them into the short and long-term brain boxes of “to be processed”.
You can either return to this layered information later on, making use of the read by deliberately analysing it. Or, if you’ve hacked the process, the mind can do it automatically, bringing about analogies and putting data to work subconsciously.
How, is the question.
- Take mental notes. On the background, while reading, have a clear area of the brain, asking why you might need this. Filling it in, you make a comfortable zone for the mind to adapt/arrange the pieces to your stated cause, accordingly. This is not the same as planting new information into your presumptions, as mentioned before.
- Repeat what you read mentally , like a kid learning a poem, but without the hatred. The information finds home in you quickly by doing this, bursting out in places needed, as if you knew it all since birth. Nobody did. Becoming native to a variety of topics is a piece of cake, trust me.
- Exhale after paragraphs and chapters, asking so what? Like this, you co-write your personal conclusions and take away the most and for the best.
By the way, not every read is worth these hacks, but once you master them, the filtering comes super easy.
Happy reading,
