Read more than 10 books this year, You probably didn’t learn enough
Yes, for most of you who had read more than 10–12 books this year, you have missed most of the learnings. When I am making this statement I am considering books that enhance your knowledge, books that are good in size (300–350 pages), and books that are read to add some learning and some enhancements in one’s life. For the people who indulge in comics, small books of up to 100 pages, you probably won’t be affected by my statement.
There are multiple types of books that we read. Each book serves its own purpose which can be to learn, educate, feel good, and kill time, etc. Depending on the purpose for which the book is being read there are expectations of retention of the text. You would not mind forgetting the quirky story of a book you read for pleasure while you would want to retain the learnings of any educating book for 6 months to 1 year. For some books about productivity and life growth, you might want to remember the learnings for the rest of your life. This blog is for readers who wish to learn and add more to their lives, they are reading to empower them with more learnings and not to add a badge of the number of books they had read in the year.
No matter how good you are in reading and how fast you read a book, you cannot retain and use the learnings of the book if you didn’t stop using them. There is a limit of what we can retain in one single session of reading and it is very little. Of course, you can read 50–70 pages in one session but you cannot learn that and when it comes to adopting those learnings in life you can hardly cover 5 pages. That’s the reason why most of the content you read doesn’t usually reflect in your lives.
The first question that you would be thinking right now would be “how can Lalit say this ?”, The answer is: “I read a lot”. I read almost 6–8 hours per day, I have been doing this for the last 10–12 years. The types of books & content that I have read in that time is vast. How much do I remember now, maybe less than 2%. And what I remember now is something that I learned in a long time, something that I didn’t just read for completing the book or blog or research paper. I learned the content where I spent a lot of time, where I revisited the content a few times and where i took many stops to see how the flow of text was going, what I had learned from my session, and what all other possible meanings I missed.
Learning and building knowledge is very different than simply reading. It requires you to hold the ideas in your brain and play with them, think about them when you are lying silently, thinking about how many alternate meanings those words had. Adopting those ideas and lessons in your day-to-day life, in the questions that we face, in the discussions we have. And all this process is time-consuming, it requires patience, effort and time. If you complete reading something and jump to the second text, you fail to give your mind the time it needs to process the information and thus you lose the opportunity of learning. That’s the reason people keep buying self-help books, they keep reading them while being average, students keep switching from one set of notes to others without excelling in exams. Those who actually improve and excel in exams or lives are not the ones who had access to a lot of material, but those who had studied limited things well.
So, the next time if you happen to read a book or blog or text. Ask yourself: “why are you reading it?” and if the answer is for retaining the learnings for a good amount of time, read it slowly. Indulge in the text, think about the meanings, arguments, and learnings each paragraph is having. Stop once you feel full. Let your mind play with what you have read for a while. Read it again every time you get confused about the argument or situation. This process is time taking but it is permanent, it gives you the learning for a longer time. And once you have learned it, use it in life, apply the learnings in discussions, arguments, situations that appear in your life and that’s how you create learnings for a lifetime.
