You’ve Been Reading Wrong Your Entire Life
A Lesson from Marcus Aurelius That Forever Changed the Way I Read
Social media is filled with people telling you,
- “how to devour 1000 pages a day”,
- “how to read 789 books a year”,
- “how to remember every line you read”
…and then they go on to explain a 7-step process that you forget the moment you scroll past the content.
Yet Marcus Aurelius explained it all very simply in a single line 1,853 years ago.
Let me share a piece of wisdom from the world-renowned book Meditations, that forever changed the way I read…
Skimming Is More Harmful Than You Realize
In a world full of stimuli, where everything and everyone is vying for your attention, we take to skimming through content in an attempt to save time and energy.
But it does more harm than good.
For books that are packed with wisdom without any fluff or redundant examples, skimming only wastes your time by equipping you with a limited understanding of the subject.
And remember, having partial knowledge is more dangerous than having none at all. It is the easiest way to get misled and fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect by overestimating your abilities.
That is why, Marcus Aurelius, with all his infinite wisdom, wrote in his journal (which was later compiled as Meditations) this one line:
To read attentively — not to be satisfied with “just getting the gist of it.”
Reading is a Cheat Code For Life
Reading is a shortcut to knowledge that somebody else had to fail to learn.
Reading enables you to bypass your failures and directly realize the lessons the failures have to teach. But reading half-mindedly, or in a hurry by skimming only does you harm.
You are already saving so much time by not having to make those mistakes yourself. The wisdom that took years for the author to learn, you can extract in a matter of a few hundred pages. Do you really need to save more time?
Stop skimming and stop getting satisfied with “just getting the gist of it”. Get to the core, read between the lines, and ponder over each new realization. Reading is a habit that can change your life if you give it the respect it deserves.
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In this age of digital noise, never have there been more people telling us who we should be.
But it’s never been easier to become who you want to become.
And it all starts with honing your mind. A mind that is able to solve problems is necessary to reimagine your life and reinvent it any way you want.
If you want to level up your thinking and learn to use mental models to evolve into an independent thinker, grab a free copy of my ebook and never look back.
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