Reading a book a week for your career
commoncog.com
commoncog.com
This can be quite liberating. On the one hand it’s tempting to work through a book you don’t like but in the end this is often very exhausting.
I also used to look down on a lot of books but now I have no problem reading Stephen King. He is a damn good writer and fun to read.
People who walk out of films, though...
If it's difficult, but you're learning a new skill, expanding your perspective or capacity, or enjoying the challenge, by all means, keep going.
If you're not enjoying it, and the payoff is just having completed it, and you could do a lot more valuable/enjoyable stuff with that time, then stop reading Finnegan's Wake, for goodness sake.
There's always the option of resuming it if you feel like it.
Exactly. Sometimes you just aren’t in the right mood/phase if life or simply not ready for the material.
Maybe I'll try again soon, i'm honestly not sure why I've never finished, i like the storey well enough.
Carrie should be on the bookshelf next to other somewhat recent masterpieces like the Grapes of Wrath, Invisible Man (Ellison's), Lord of the Flies, the Great Gatsby, and Ulysses.
Reading x books doesn't count as learning x topics.
And then you can mix in other readings. A chapter in a technical book may only survey its particular material, but you may want to explore the ideas further. So you go out and get some papers to read or another book.
I may not finish many books in a year, but I do get a lot of reading in.
Even though I love fiction, I couldn't pick up a second book from Stephen King without fully finishing the first. I'd lose interest in the first one otherwise.
Warren Buffet is cited as an example in this article. Sure he reads a lot, but most it consists of SEC filings and balance sheets. If you examine his quotes, you'll find he cites ONE book (the Intelligent Investor) over and over again. He read that one book, and LIVED it for decades. In my opinion, that's a much better goal than reading a book a week.
What reading does to my mind is that it shapes "personality". I am not going to live by the "How to win friends..." but what I got from it is to be more friendly and open to other people and to be more empathic. I think it kind of stayed with me even thou I read that book once and did not follow recommendations to live by it and challenge myself to do all stuff there is in that book.
Then if you read multiple books and see common ideas presented by many authors you kind of get really great insights that stay for longer than when you read one book. Because then you see that more than one person thinks that way.
I get contact to a lot of ideas from a lot of different points of view. I am literally bathing my brain in ideas from many different people. Especially when I am listening to fiction these ideas tend to mingle.
This year, as an additional step, I am playing with the ideas behind the so called 'Zettelkasten' to better structure the ideas I extract from the books. And to reach a higher level of retention.
Non the less I mostly listen to books to relax while commuting. So every idea I gain as additional knowledge is an extra win in my book.
This is the value I look for too, being able to see references to ideas in other fields. But I don’t know what it will be until I read and make the connection
See: Frequency illusion or Baader–Meinhof phenomenon
If you are going to read a lot of books, then reading for pleasure (e.g. fiction) or books that are intended merely to convey information, is probably a better way to go.
It really depends on the kind of books you read. If you are reading a self-help book of some sort and you think its ideas are sound, sure, you should at least try to practice what it says. On the other hand, I don't think I am expected to jump under a train after reading Anna Karenina.
The one downside is that they generally take more time to go through and it's hard to know beforehand whether what you are going to listen to is worthwhile
Everyone wants to read but don’t enjoy reading as much.
I have a hard time finding people with similar habits.
Most of my friends work on tech industry and is aware of benefits.
Bringing up people like Warren Buffet constantly as capitalist idols and role models is horrifically annoying, too. Nobody’s going to become Warren Buffet by reading the same quantity of books as him.