The Power of Reading: Learning, Growing, and Changing for the Better.
I won a reading competition when I was 9 years old.
I don’t recall getting the congratulations of my peers. To be fair, I can’t even remember if I won any prizes for it. But I do remember my teacher saying congratulations to me for reading the most books in that 1 week period.
On the week of the competition, my friend at the time, Daniel, invited me over to his house.
In semi-rural New Zealand, he grew up in a big house with a wonderful grass paddock that banked onto a creek where we would swim in sometimes. Yet that week, we sat in his lounge — reading and reading and reading. It wasn’t really a surprise to me at the time that I won the competition.
Finally, something I can excel at, I remember thinking at the time.
I always had a habit of reading either fiction or non-fiction before sleep for an hour or two from about 6 or 7 years old and the habit continued right throughout the university.
It served me well during law school when some weeks I had ‘required readings’ in the hundreds of pages. Unfortunately, it was all the required readings that left me a bit burnt out and I fell out of love with reading for pleasure. Reading became just another obligation, something to do to get through in order to get grades, pass exams, whatever.
But I’m happy to say that some years later, I have renewed pleasure in losing myself in a book.
It’s no secret that some of the most successful people read. Books offer big, powerful, and time-tested ideas that can change the way you think. By changing the way you think, you can change the way you act, which in turn determines the course of your future.
Books let you explore someone else’s interpretation of the world.
Successful people learn from people who have come before them and constantly absorb wisdom from the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Alva Edison, and Warren Buffett.
I have also realised that building a reading habit doesn’t require reading many books in the beginning, and one can start small and improve gradually. I am not aiming to win a competition like I was when I was a child, I am aiming to learn new things that can inform my decisions in order to change my life for the better.
Modern life is busier and more distracting than ever before, but there are now technologies and applications that provide different ways to learn from books. These include audio books, using a Kindle which might be loaded with 100 books, and apps such as Headway that offer quick and accessible summaries.
New ideas give us new ways to interpret the world in order to apply them to our own lives in order to realise our goals.
When you find an important idea that resonates with you in a book, you should stop reading it and write it down.
We read books not to compete, as I did when I was a child, but to gain meaningful insights that can lead to positive change. Even a single page that presents an idea for improvement can make a significant impact on our lives.
In his book ‘Building a Second Brain’, Tiago Forte discusses the concept of divergence and convergence. Divergence entails the collection, acquisition, and expansion of one’s horizons, which can be a delightful and fulfilling experience for those who enjoy learning and discovering new ideas. Once you have opened your mind and gathered enough information, seize the moment to take note of the essential points you have learned and converge by reflecting on your life goals, considering how the new idea can be applied to you, and devising a plan to implement it.
Currently, these are the thoughts that come to mind when I read a book or blog, or listen to an insightful podcast. There is no reward for reading most books, but the thrill of learning new concepts that I have never considered before, in order to better inform my thoughts and, ultimately, my behaviour, to become a better person.
We all have the capability to learn and develop through this process.
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