How to improve your reading experience

This is the first article in the Knowledge category, Knowledge is an important skill and I want to acquire as much as possible. Never. Stop. Learning.

Why Should I read ?

There are 2 main ways to acquire knowledge, the first one is through your own experience, and the other one is through the experience of others.
The best way to learn through the experience of others is to read books, because authors and writers took the time to organize, refine and tune their thoughts to deliver them in the most comprehensible way possible.

I like to consider books as the most primitive form of “mind uploading” as they are basically the thoughts of someone put into physical form, and words are the code you can use to access those thoughts.

As you can’t ever experience everything by yourself, books are a powerful way to increase your knowledge quickly and efficiently (sometimes it can saves you years of experiments, because someone else did it for you).

Although books’ sales are rising again with the emergence of eBooks, an average American human read 2 books a year, and that’s counting fiction books.

That is not enough for a Smart Business Cat, is it ?

A typical book can take only 1 week to read if you take 30 minutes to an hour a day to read. This means that in a year you can read 26 times as much books than the average guy, and that’s a slow pace. The knowledge you can acquire in just a year is huge, especially if most of these books are non-fiction, insightful ones.

Now, there’s still something we’re lacking, of course you can always increase your reading time and spead and read 100 books a year, but how do you process that much information ?
I’m sure you can’t possibly remember in details the last 50 books you read, right ? Me neither. When I read a book, there is a good chance that when I finish it and put it away, I wont process everything I learned and eventually forget a good chunk of it.

However I decided this had to change, so I have developped a reading routine that optimize the information i’m getting from books a geat deal.

Do you want to take your reading to the next level ? Here are 3 tactics you can start applying now :

1. Take notes

This is the same principle as journaling. Whenever an interesting thought pops in your mind, you shall note it, or it will be forgotten soon later.
This is especially true with books. As you are uploading the thoughts of someone else in your mind, it’s likely A LOT of new ideas will pop in your mind at the same time.
Actually it’s common when I read : suddenly I notice I have stopped reading and let my thoughts drift away. This is a signal for me, because most of the times, those thoughts are very valuable. So I jot them down on paper, to use them later.
It’s also good to summarize each chapter so that you can later remember the main points of the book quickly.

2. Read it several times

When a book contains valuable knowledge and is several hundred pages long, I can’t possibly extract all of its substance in just one read. So I read it several times, easy enough (takes more time though). I can of course read it several time in a row, but that’s quite boring to me, and probably less effective so here’s what what I actually do,
It’s quite a simple tactic : whenever I finish reading a book, I read a few other ones (possibly about the same topic) and get back to the first one then.
Reading again a book, with an increased knowledge on the topic allow me to form other ideas as well as increasing my understanding of the book.

3. Share your thoughts :

This is something I experienced recently. I used to keep the knowledge I got from books for myself, but then discovered that when I found likeminded people that read the same books as me, I could multiply my reading experience through the experience of those people.
Let me explain : When I read, my thoughts echo with the thoughts I’m getting from the author, creating new thoughts (which I have duly noted). When YOU read, your thoughts echo with the author’s thoughts, creating new thoughts.
Now if we share our thoughts to each other, we earn new thoughts that echo again and again.
That’s how I can multiply my reading experience and eventually make it more fun !

What about you ? How is your reading experience ? I’m curious to learn about it !

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About Baptiste Laurenge

I'm a Business Student and a writer on www.thesmartbusinesscat.com , where you can learn with me about the skills you need to be successful in the Digital Era.