Why Reading Books Is Hard
And what to do about it
I was reading, The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, a book by Blair Enns about creative professionals and how to succeed in the creative industry.
I thought reading this book would not take more than 3 days. The book has 86 pages only.
I took 30 days to finish this book.
I didn’t procrastinate or get so busy that I couldn’t read it. I was allocating 2 hours every day but still struggled to understand. And every day I spent after the 3 days I initially allocated was making me feel guilty as I couldn’t hold my word.
In retrospect, I found 2 problems that I was unaware of.
1) My unfamiliarity with the author's writing style
The author wrote this book using slang, idioms, phrasal verbs, and industry jargon. My English language wasn’t that good at this time.
I stopped reading multiple times to find the meaning of those strange words and sometimes made lots of guesses when a word contained various meanings.
2) My expertise in the author’s topic was tiny or as if it didn’t exist.
This book covers lots of concepts related to communication, marketing, and branding. For example, business positioning, and perceptions about the selling process.
Those concepts might be easy for someone who was intermediate, but at the beginning, they were a complete mystery.
These problems would have never existed if I prepared the material for reading and set real expectations.
To prepare the material, you skim the book.
You don’t want to understand or absorb every concept but you want to have a general idea of the book, the author’s writing style, the vocabulary, the jargon, novel concepts, and illustrations (if there are any),…etc
From this point, you add meanings to strange words and expressions. You research novel concepts to get familiar with them.
This familiarity with the book will help you gain a deeper understanding when reading time comes.
To set real expectations, you follow the trial-and-error approach. After you prepare the material, you consider the complexity and put your numbers according to it.
For example, if you figure out that a book is filled with jargon, don’t expect it’ll take the same time a book with a similar number of pages will take. A similar book will provide you with the least amount of hours you should put in to understand that book filled with jargon.
Reading books becomes hard when you don’t prepare them for yourself. To make it easy, skim the book, assess its complexity level (how many concepts and vocabulary that you don’t know), and adjust your expectations accordingly.
