Thinking about reading books?
When I asked this question to myself, I paused for a moment and thought about reading itself and realized that there is lot more to reading than just books. This post is an attempt to understand this 'reading' a bit further and thus learn how we can benefit from it in our daily lives. Shall we?
The first thing that comes to our mind when we think about reading is books followed by news papers, magazines and so on. But what we forget often is that we read a lot more than just books or news papers. We read incidents, experiences, people and their behavior, environment and a lot more. It is interesting to note that we actually derive a lot of knowledge through these instruments of information. Of course reading here means not just reading some text, but understanding and interpreting them. I hope you get what I am trying to say here.
So now that we have a broader understanding of reading itself, let us see why we should read a lot more than we normally do. Don't worry, I will not ask you to become a full time researcher :-)
One of the main benefits of reading a lot is a better comprehension. To understand this, it is necessary to understand how we understand things in our daily life. Usually we learn a lot of new things by relating them to the things which we already understand. This means that every new learning about a subject actually corresponds to an understanding of it in relation to something which we already understand plus a little extra which we do not know yet. This can be called as incremental learning. It actually helps us a lot to make sense of a lot of new things which we encounter in our daily lives. We might not realize this, but this is what we do most of the times. Don't believe me? Try looking into how you understand some thing new this time. This is not to say that we learn 'all' of the things in a similar way. We do learn some 'ground truths' which form the base for all our further learning. One good example in our daily life is how we learn to use new gadgets. Once we use a phone or a software, we get a broad understanding of its behavior and the next time we have to use a new phone or software, we realize that we already know a little bit to get started. Make sense?
So how does reading more help us in this regard? Well, by reading more on varied subjects we increase our overall perception of things and our mind tries to form relationships which might not be very obvious. This helps in reducing the amount of that 'extra' information that I mentioned in the earlier paragraph we need to know to understand some thing. This in turn means that we can now make sense of things in a more easy way. The example I mentioned in the earlier paragraph can be used here also to understand better. So what I am trying to say here is that we need to consciously read things beyond just casual encounters with them to understand the new ones better.
I will end this post by talking about one more area of benefit - problem solving. In our daily life we do a lot of problem solving without even realizing it. A lot of the times, we hear people suggesting how to solve problems. Some of them say that we need to look at them from a different perspective. I feel that most of the times we are stuck with our existing knowledge. It is at this time that a diverse knowledge helps us. By reading a lot more on varied and diverse subjects and environments, our perception is increased a diverse way. It is with this knowledge that we can try to solve the problems in an innovative way. Steve Jobs once mentioned that we need to have a lot of varied and diversified experiences in our lives to come up with innovative ideas. I believe he meant that we need to have a diversified knowledge and not to get stuck in the silos.
So are we reading enough? :-)
