The Lazy Method To Reading More Books That I See No One Talking About

I wish I had known this earlier

Everyone and their grandmothers know that reading is a superpower.

The virtuosos of our times, right from Warren Buffett to Elon Musk have expounded on how knowledge adds up and compounds itself to magnificent results.

We live in a world where information is easier to access than at any time in our history. Yet, so few people read.

Reading a book a week puts you into an esoteric club of the 0.1% of the world.

Nevertheless, our attention spans are at rock bottom.

How can one expect to sit and read for hours together while having an attention span of mere 8 seconds?

Fret not.

As a certified waste-man and wannabe productive guy myself, I have skimmed through the endless morass of information and advice on the internet.

This is what I finally ended up with, which has revolutionized my reading habit and rekindled the curiosity candle that burned bright as a kid.

Use Your Weak Attention To Your Advantage

Turn trials into triumph, darkness into light, paper into green bills. I’m neither a Genie nor a Russian oligarch.

However, my laziness forced me to find a way to read more without putting in more effort. I had to let go of my mental barriers and deification of books in order to truly rekindle the reader in me.

Starting a book but never moving to another while reading it for puritanical reasons.

Reading even a page and feeling compulsively obsessed with finishing the entire book before reading another.

This did everything apart from making me a reader.

I have a poor attention span, can’t focus on something before having to consume something new. My dopamine sensitivity is screwed up as a result. The way I turned this to my advantage is I let go of my self-imposed purist barriers and started reading multiple books.

One could be fantasy fiction, while also reading a book on human evolution on the side.

I just started reading whatever I wanted to and felt like at the moment.

If that meant giving in to my poor attention span and thirst for novelty, so be it. Counterintuitively it worked!

Emancipate Your Mind

How did I let go of my mental barriers?

• I realized that you can and should read multiple books at the same time. Think of school and university, you are consuming multiple subjects at the same time.
• There are no rules. Every reader reads in his own unique way. Break the rules, go make a few of your own. You are your own dictator.
• Read for enjoyment. Think what is your brain hardwired to gravitate towards? Pleasure. Even non-fiction can and should be read for pleasure. Indulging in the fulfillment of your curiosity is a pleasure few indulge in.

At Thy Whims and Fancy

Read multiple books at once, read whatever you want to read.

If that means Geronimo Stilton's graphic novels for children while you are a full-grown homo sapien, by all means, go ahead.

Some days, I just want to escape and feel lost in surreal worlds, I pick up fantasy fiction as George Martin beckons me.

Some days, I’m more intellectually curious and might open up another book that satisfies those desires. Just like social media and the internet where you consume content at your whims. This plays the attention span to our advantage as you are constantly interested and never bored!

If you are never bored and always interested as what you read is what you enjoy, you will keep showing up again and again to it. Just like most of us keep going back to our vices. That’s how habits work. It’s a cue-action-reward cycle.

You also end up covering more books than you would have otherwise as you are constantly devouring multiple books of a wide variety.

Compounded Knowledge

Cross-pollination of ideas is big in today’s corporate world. But, it is common sense, isn’t it?

When you read about different topics, our brains are inherently wired to connect the dots and make sense of our environment and the information that we consume.

I have had my best ideas and realizations when I was reading multiple books that are slightly connected by logic. This happens best with non-fiction.

For example: If you are reading Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz and also reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari at the same time, you will invariably connect the psychology aspect of Maltz with how humans evolved throughout history.

This is wisdom compounding. Best of all, you don’t need to fight your way through a book, just read whatever you fancy at any given moment.

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