The Power of Reading
Some thoughts on the transformative power of reading, the exploration of new worlds.
Through the pages of books we enter the world of the narrator in a way that no article or summary ever allows. Reading for me is joy, peace, exhilaration and rest.
Reading for me is the mother of all habits. It is the groundwork that, when built solidly, allows for a great structure to grow. For when one has the reading habit set in stone, new ideas, new habits, new goals and new motivation will come almost inevitably.
Reading is not only learning, but inspiration. There are few things that spark new thoughts and creativity more than taking up ideas and concepts. That is the power of association at work.
Reading is like a trip into new areas of life. A kind of shortcut to a manifold of experiences through the eyes and perception of others. Books don’t replace travel, nor do they replace experience. At best they precede it, mostly they complement.
Reading is Non-Ignorance.There are so many remarkable people out there who have changed the way our world works. People who have grown from nothing to everything in every imaginable aspect of life. Humans who have lived through the worst circumstances imaginable. Groups who’ve made the unthinkable the status quo. Their books are the compressed version of their life experiences. It is the greatest source of inspiration and knowledge, right there. Not to read, thus, amounts to pure ignorance of the lessons learned by others.
Lastly, what few people consider are the effects reading has on your mental journey. For life is nothing but the journey of our mind through an abundance of experiences that make us hurt, learn, grow, love and change. With the remaining constant of a reading habit, you are given an unfailing tool to steer the train that you are riding. Not the experiences, but the framework you have to perceive them.
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
- Josheph Addison
Reading Habit
Getting to the effortless intake of new content.
As with every habit, start small and start genuine. No habit will work if there is not a deep commitment to the higher value that motivates you in the phases of difficulty. Consider for some time what vision your desire rest on and what goals you are reaching for.
Once you’ve committed to the value and principle, the task will seemingly come along easily. Methods upon principles, otherwise it won’t work.
Start with books you’ve always wanted to read, but that are also easy to read. See below for a small selection of books that offer a great start, depending on what you are aiming for.
Set a time and place every day and get into reading 20–30 min, undistracted. Over time, increase that time span as much as you can afford, ideally to about an hour a day. Here again it is essential that you’ve committed to the value beforehand so that you can make time for it. After all, we don’t have time, no one has. We can only take it for things that matter to us.
Once you’ve mastered the habit you can look into things like speed reading, to accelerate your input and learning rate on non-fiction books, but this is optional for now.
A good Selection
Now comes the powerful part that you can unlock through the reading habit: Your choice of books. This is a point often understated when talking about the power of reading. To read a book is good, because you gain the knowledge of the author in compressed form, but a reading habit is that input multiplied over time, which results in a powerful compound effect of association.
Also, this habit is only as powerful as the books you choose.
I’d like to introduce two concepts I found particularly useful in choosing books.
Areas by Areas or Topic by Topic
In your life you often stumble upon topics that sound interesting or promising to you. Instead of thinking how nice it would be to know more about it — and then forgetting it over time — you can now put 3 or 4 books about the general topic on your reading list. That would take about 1 to 2 months, depending on your speed and the books you choose.
But consider how much content you can take out of 3 or 4 books on one specific topic alone. Say, you stumbled on the Lean Startup or Lean Manufacturing movement in an article or in a lecture at Uni and you found the idea mesmerizing. Take 5 minutes and research the best books, put them on your next-up-list and you’re all set. This could be ‘Lean Startup — Eric Ries’, ‘Running Lean — Ash Maurya’, ‘Scrum — Jeff Sutherland’ and the classic ‘Toyota Production System’. Important is that your list is not set in stone, because while reading a book you will often come across recommendations and if you find them to be better suited you are free to replace your original choice. In hindsight, your choice will never be ‘perfect’ as in optimally covering the topic with all its facades, but in any way you will have a massively improved insight into the area. 4 Books, I would say, is often worth 30 to 40 years of compressed professional experience that the authors poured into them.
Two months later you know the lingo of the field, you know the core concepts and you have tons of real life examples, because that is what makes books so much greater than pure textbook material. Books are stories, journeys of an author grasping a new concept. And if you read them attentively it is the shortcut to that journey.
Modes of Thought
This is rather a subset of or different viewpoint on the above topic by topic approach which I’ve found to be an important consideration.
When choosing books and topics I often pick out of two major categories. Spirtual, Emotional and beletristic on one hand and technical, conceptual, self-improvement stuff on the other. This stems from my personal pursuit to grow as whole, not only in the ‘what-i-can-do’ and ‘what-i-know’ dimension. Reading good literature is still a delight and reading spiritual books, like Eckhart Tolle or Alan Watts or even the psychology of Freud is a powerful way to keep growing as a person.
Generally, this should be reflected in everyone’s choices of books. Maybe not in these specific dimensions, but you have to be considerate of the effects certain books have on you. If you end up reading only ultra-positive self-help books for a year you get caught in a filter-bubble of thought. To get out of it you either stop reading for some time or you read something totally different.
Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
- Mark Haddon
Good use of Knowledge
In order to optimally keep what you have learned it is essential to use one or two days worth of ‘reading-habit-time’ summarizing and elaborating on the thoughts of a book.
My ideal routine is to note down quotes and core concepts while reading, mainly as notes in my ebook reader. Then afterwards I only have to go over the table of contents, recollecting from memory and notes what each chapter consisted of.
You can then either write a small summary along the argument of the book or write your own take-aways and understanding independently. In any way you want to have a brief summary that is meaningful and self-explanatory to you, so that you can look back one day, read it and recollect the main point of the book.
Because after all, most books can be summarized in a few pages, but reading the summary doesn’t come close to reading the book. The book is a journey that you take while reading it. It sparks thoughts, ideas and doubts in you, that a summary will never be able to invoke if it wasn’t written by yourself and for yourself.
One side note: Again, be aware of the influence a book has on you. Some authors are manipulative in their use of language and over-emphasize their ideas to the point where you will be drawn to deep into their mode of thought. These books often contain great insights, but only if you are able to realize from a second standpoint what happens to you while reading. If you are able to rationalize and appreciate the effect without it taking control you can filter out the valuable and leave what’s left. An example of such a work in my opinion is ‘The 4-Bour Work Week” by Tim Ferris.
So without further due: why do you want to read?
Some recommendations:
- Big Five for Life — John Strelecky (for self-management, principles and motivation)
- Ishmael — Daniel Quinn (for thoughts about the world and humankind in it)
- Born a Crime — Trevor Noah (easy, entertaining read with some beautiful life lessons and deep insights into the Apartheid in South Africa)
