Book In A Bowl - Exposing Modern Myths of Reading

 

The easiest way to gain new experience and new knowledge is by listening to stories. Nowadays, these stories travel to us in the forms of digital media, like short reels and long videos. But there are always the old styled people, like me, who love to read instead.

The art of reading and writing predates digital media by thousands of years. I, myself, enjoy reading a lot, and I could not just let go of a huge felony that recently grabbed my attention.

Following are some of the ideas being promoted nowadays:

• Read more books, like 5 books a month.
• Read faster, like 1000 words per minute.
• Read like a CEO, one book every week.

And people buy into these ideas. But they are outright unhealthy and unnatural. Let me show you how.

Reading a book is like eating food. You consume something. Food itself doesn’t provide energy to you. It first needs to be digested over a few hours, and it is common sense that during this time you should not eat more food, nor should you jump or swim.

Similarly, when you have read a book, you have just consumed a story. You need to give your mind some time to digest it, so that it can extract the key ideas or lessons (nutrition) that are useful to you. Actually, the digestion of food happens by itself. But the digestion of ideas learned from reading a book is not such an automatic process. You need to be deliberate. You need to reflect on what you just read. Because if you don’t do that, what’s the point in reading? It’s like eating a lot of food and letting it leave your body the next morning without even extracting any nutrition for nourishment. That is such a wasteful activity.

Now that you understand the process, answer honestly, do you really thing that reading 5 books a month could make you smarter?

That’s just like eating all the food for next 5 days in one go, hoping you’d become 5 times stronger than usual. But that much amount of food will only damage your body. Similarly, those many books will only damage you as your mind is occupied with consuming 5 different ideas from 5 different authors, and it is unable to draw a single meaningful insight that could be actually counted towards progress.

The same goes for reading faster.

You should properly chew your food, otherwise your stomach has to bear the load, and digestion becomes slower and weaker. Similarly, your act of reading should be deliberately slow so that you understand the story and the lesson it delivers, and not just consume data that you will forget the next minute.

And what should I even say about reading like a CEO? Now you know what to do!

So, it’s important to digest first and then have the next meal.

If you still wish or need to read a lot of books, then you need to increase the speed of digestion, not the speed of chewing. And yes, you should take some break before reading your next book. It’s better to have mastered the lessons of one book in your life than to have read a hundred books and still not practice a single lesson offered by them.

Don’t be just a reader. Be the one who learns from reading.

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Thanks for understanding,

from Khavi Darpan.