Books
Why The Masses Fail To Learn From Reading Books
Why it’s not about how much you read
One of the things I hear about reading very often, is that a lot of people think reading is all about memorizing facts. But this is not the REAL goal of reading for learning, and thinking this even holds back your learning potential. Most people will never find out what reading really is about..
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” — Groucho Marx
Ever since I picked up my first non-fiction book and started my self improvement journey I have been obsessed. Not only about reading itself, but also about what I call ‘the meta of reading’: have you ever thought about that?
When you read books for the purpose of learning, naturally there is a strong desire to get better at reading itself. If you want to learn more, learn faster and remember more, find out the real secret to reading for learning..
“Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible.” — Barack Obama
Quantity
This means looking at reading as a skill that you can improve over time, just like planning.
One study found that reading skills are easily improved with the use of reading strategies:
The results of the study pointed to a noticeable improvement of students’ reading skills once they had used reading strategies to do their exercises. As a conclusion, the article aims to point out that reading strategies are essential for the improvement of reading skills and they should be promoted in English language teaching.¹
The most important things about the reading skill itself are:
Reading speed: the amount of pages that you can read in a certain amount of time. Increasing your speed will possibly result in a loss of retention.
Retention: the amount of information that you have successfully been able to store in memory. You can get better at this by applying different reading strategies, as well as by reading in a more focussed way. The former you can learn once and apply. The latter is especially something you can actively work on yourself.
Volume of reading: the amount of (for example) books you read in a year. This one is often the greatest achievement for readers that read for self improvement. However, reading a book a week might be cool but what is more important, reading quantity or quality?
Quality over quantity
This is where most people go wrong. People repeatedly read the wrong books, and often read for the wrong reasons. Let’s find out if you are one of those people.
Meta-reading quality means reading the right books for the right reasons.
No matter how well you can read, if you are not reading the best books out there, you are wasting your time (at least a big part of it). How much time do you normally spend to choosing a book?
Choosing the right book to read is worth a little research. As you are probably going to spend at least 8 hours on a book, taking 20 minutes to make sure these hours are spent on the right book might be well worth it.
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles” — Steve Jobs
If you read books, it is very important to read for the right reasons. This is where I think people go wrong all the time.
Because of the way traditional education works, people tend to think about education in terms of memorizing things, only to vomit bare facts out on a test the morning after.. as a consequence they take this mindset to reading books, are you doing this as well?
You probably have had this thought while reading an interesting fact:
“I am going to remember this fact and then I’m going to use it to amaze my friends”
The problem is that when you are reading to memorize, you are not reading to understand. The will to memorize facts becomes the primary goal, while the aim should be seeking to understand; the goal of learning. If you are seeking to understand life, this life lesson might be perfect for you as well.
While reading you should at all times question yourself:
Do I really, really understand what the author is saying?
In case you understand what the author is saying, ask yourself whether you agree or disagree. Ask yourself if what is written is in accordance with what you already know. This is what active reading really means. Of course this is more work than using a bit more of a laid back reading style, but this is also what separates the rapid learners from the rest.
Thank you for reading. If you are also interested in my most successful articles, check them out here!
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