On reading books

Contrary to popular opinion, I believe reading more books does not lead to success. It is not reading for the sake of reading and increasing the number of books that you read per week that does it. It is gaining knowledge from books that and then acting on it, that does it. 

 

This may sound common sense to some, but to me two years ago, this would have been belief shattering. Back then, I was concerned with reading more and more books in a shorter and shorter time. But the truth is that I wasn’t going anywhere for two reasons.

 

1) I was reading, not as a means to an end, but as an end itself.

I may have gained this habit through reading fiction, which definitely can be read as an end. However, when it comes to practical books this is harmful. Reading a book on productivity cover-to-cover and then barely exerting as much effort as reading into the practice of the lessons. This is a blatant time waste. Rather to “learn” in the sense of “changed behavior” from books – I learned to read a book for its knowledge. Stopping to read all the way through the book if I gained the whole idea of the book. Skipping to chapters that dealt more closely with the issues I was currently facing. Through these habits, I started to treat books less like things I must absolutely and definitely finish unless I wanted to be guilty. And more like gold mines in which I could search for knowledge.

2) I was reading but not practicing. Knowing what to do is just the first step towards accomplishing something. A very big step is to actually apply what you learn. I realized this the hard way – way too many books and zero change in life circumstances later, I realized that books had become dreams. They promised improvement and one felt good while reading them imagining that the improvement was happening. But it wasn’t. You can read a thousand books without accomplishing anything. And you can read no book, get the knowledge from somewhere else, and still accomplish the thing. The point is that books are not a necessary part of the process. They are necessary to gain knowledge. But to accomplish the goal, you must act. 

 

That’s my rant on book reading. This whole blog might sound like common sense, but then again, yesterday I saw an ad of a productivity guru preaching reading seven books a week.