The struggle
I was never into reading, especially reading a book, it has too many pages for me to read before my patience runs out. Even though I know I should and want to read more, I just did not have the patience for reading.
Things changed after I switched my career to pursue a manager’s role. I realized there’s not much training and learning material related to that “topic”. It’s natural to me to get help from other ways outside of work. There are many ways to learn this topic but one of the easiest ways is, apparently, getting help by reading relevant books from Amazon. So I started to get some books, either kindle version or paper version, recommended by others. The motivation is still not that strong, I just happen to have a problem at work and wonder if others (books) also have some problem and how they approach the problem. So occasionally I open the book to check a certain chapter (topic) that I’m interested in or is related to my problem at the moment, but most of the time the books are just sitting there and become dusty.
The change
I do find the book very insightful to my problem and I also find a lot of content resonating to me, which leads me to read the whole book. This lasted a couple of years until at some point, I started to quote from the book when having 1:1 with the report, which made me realize those books indeed are useful. A question occurs to my head, “People already experienced what I experience now, why do I have to learn the hard way?”, “why can't I just learn from them?”.
Resonating, interesting to my problem, and improving the learning efficiency, I started to read more books and blogs in the past two years. I learned a lot from reading in the past year. I became more hungry for reading and learning.
Recently, in the book, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio, he mentioned this,
“Learning from one’s own experience is not adequate because, as explained earlier, many of the most important lessons don’t come in one’s lifetime.”
This made me realize that I don’t have to learn the hard way, and sometimes, I don’t have the opportunity to learn the hard way. The question is how can I be able to better handle those first-time encounter tasks?
After thinking about reading and learning, I concluded that gaining that knowledge beforehand can prepare us from falling too hard to get back up. And at some point you might realize that learning from experience, the error-trial approach, is necessary and good at certain stages of life, but not the only way, and efficient way, because each one of us has limited time to each day. Reading other people’s experiences is one of the great ways to grow fast and efficiently.
Now I have developed a habit of reading at least one hour per day, either books or blogs, to gain more knowledge, see things through other people’s perspective to gain more understanding about how the world works.
What you learned in the past year and from now on and those experiences are all experienced by others before. They shared those many years’ experiences either in books, blogs or talk. People have the patience to write the whole book or give the talk to share those experiences, and I’m pretty sure they also spend so many nights reviewing and revising it again and again. I guess I can have the patience to read, right?
Read more
I also learned some tricks to encourage myself to read more.
First, solving my problem can be a very good motivation. That’s what I did in the beginning, I tried to use those books as guidance, kind of like a dictionary. When I happen to meet a problem, I have the vague idea of dealing with it based on my limited experience, but I also want to know how others approach the problem and to validate my approach. In that case, I don’t use any patience at all, I just want to solve the problem in the most elegant and effective way possible.
Second, I can use curiosity to keep me at the front of the desk to continue to read more. Often a question can lead to an answer, which leads to another question, and so on. Also some topics are related to another topic. A question is like a puzzle, seeking and finding the answer to solve it can make me happy. Because of those connections of previous questions or topics, they seem interesting enough to continue exploring. A trick to arouse curiosity can be writing down my own approach to a problem or topic and trying to validate through the reading material, or simply asking myself a few questions and trying to find answers in the reading materials.
I find no use of effort to read something interesting. One of the routines I’m doing is to cherry-pick something I’m most interested in, blogs or talk. During the reading, sometimes I find more references, articles or books, and I add those references to my reading pending list. This is one of the most important ways I increase my reading queue.
Third, momentum can help reduce the usage of patience. Momentum can be formed relatively easily when reading something interesting. Once the momentum is formed, I start to read something not interesting but I think it’s important. Not interesting enough probably results from my lacking experience or mental model needs to be upgraded. This is kind of the only time I need to use some of my willpower to force myself to read.
Fourth, taking notes to track the progress. I did have a habit of taking reading notes when reading books. Sometimes I lose patience after reading two chapters. But after a few months I found it interesting and wanted to read it. I have to read it from the start again. And it happens multiple times when for a single book. It’s frustrating. So I decided I need to read from the last spot to progress on the previous effort. Taking notes and reading time log seems to be an obvious solution to me. In that way, I always know what effort I use for reading the book, and how much time I spend. Also, it seems I can plan reading more accurately because I know the reading pace for a certain book.
Last, don’t expect to fully understand or master the reading material once. I used to believe I needed to understand everything when reading the book, which gave me a lot of pressure unconsciously, which leads to the feeling that reading the whole book is really challenging. As a result, I never started to read the book. That’s why I set the expectation mentioned above to use books as reference, which means I don’t need to read from beginning to the end. I can pick to read any chapter I’m interested in. I just need to take the notes and record the progress.
Now I hold this belief and accept that I cannot fully understand everything in the book once, but that’s okay. Even if I think I understand everything, this is based on my limited experience so far. I might have a different point of view when I read it again some time later, e.g. after 6 months or 2 years. With taking notes and recording reading logs, this significantly reduces the pressure when reading a book and I find it more enjoyable and fun to read and find some interesting ideas or examine my own view.
Happy reading.