How I learned to enjoy reading

I don’t think we give enough if not any appreciation to the ability to be able to read, the title of this article actually sounds funny to myself, but this is a very important topic. If there is something which can be considered as one of the cornerstones of civilization and development of mankind, that will be communication. As opposed to other creatures out there who receive just the basic information from their parents and go on to discover the world by themselves, mankind has been able to carry itself to the top of the food chain by taking advantage of information, we are not only able to learn from our parents but even from other humans who have lived millions of years ago, we used this information and built up on it to evolve into something even greater.

Till date we are still learning new information about things which existed in the past and that knowledge just continues to help us get better, its been more than a hundred years since newton died and yet, his teachings have rippled through all the decades. The ability to be able to read and learn from others is such a valuable asset, and it literally saved my life. I know this might sound a little dumb to say, but I’m not just talking about casual reading that everybody knows how to do but rather I’m talking about the ability to love reading and love learning which is something not a lot of people like doing. By this article, I’m hoping to show you the importance of reading as opposed to playing video games or watching countless YouTube videos.

Eternal Renewal

One fascinating creature which exists in the world is the Octopus, did you know an octopus has 3 hearts and 9 Brains, they are the smartest creatures on earth to say the least, they can do a lot of things that other organisms can’t even do. So how come such creatures haven’t made it to the top of the food chain? How come they aren’t even the most dangerous creatures in the ocean (not to say they are harmless). Thats because of the eternal renewal cycle of octopuses.

When the new octopuses are born, there is nobody to teach them anything, nobody to show them how to eat, what to eat, how to hunt, what to do or not do. They basically have to learn everything from zero, just think about this for a second, they learn everything by themselves without no help at all, they have to learn what danger is, what walking is, what food is and so many other things. That cycle of eternal renewal is what prevents octopuses from climbing the food chain, else with their 9 brains, they would have been the smartest creatures in the world but since they can’t build up their knowledge, they can’t evolve past their natural barriers.

How evolution works

Look at your gas plate in the kitchen, you can just light a match and turn on a controlled amount of fire to do whatever cooking you like, millions of years ago, people used sticks to start fires and couldn’t even control the flames, just recently a couple of decades ago, people moved using horses, and now we have cars, just 20 years ago sending a message was done by telegram very expensively, and today we have smartphones which send messages in the blink of an eye. Do you see how evolution works? Things haven’t changed, we used the knowledge that was already developed by our predecessors and pushed them even further, Einstein started the groundwork, and now we are able to explore space, newton studied gravity, and now we have aircraft, Tesla studied electricity and now Elon Musk is building electric cars.

This might be a very wide scope view of things, but my point is that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, you don’t need to create a new idea that no one has ever seen before, you just need to take what already exists to another level and doing so can only happen if you read on the past. The way you can be able to do this is by studying what has already been done so far and exploring it even more.

Sad Irony

The Sad Irony about reading is that the people who need it the most are the ones who love it the less. The progress we are all able to benefit today came from countless persons studying, researching and developing on previous knowledge, we literally go to schools for decades just to be able to grasp all this knowledge and yet, those who need this skill the most are the ones who use it the less. I know in the modern day and age there might be diverse ways of making money but being knowlegeable is undeniable the most prominent path to achievement, thats why every company you go into, you are asked about your school history. Beyond just studying for school to get a job, I believe we should take things even further, there are people who study for entertainment and there are people who study to become more accomplished.

I was genuinely surprised to find the solution to a longstanding problem of mine when I read through the biography of people like Steve Jobs, Tesla and many others. How was that possible? how could a person like myself relate to a white man in America who lived decades ago, how could we go through the same things and feel the same way when we were so different, we didn’t grow up in the same circumstances and our lives where nothing alike, yet we shared the same mindset and the same way of thinking, thats what reading brought to me. A book like “Rich Dad Poor Dad” is so popular because even though we are from different parts of the world, we all use money and have the same issues with understanding money, but now imagine persons who never take the time to read about money or study, they remain stuck dealing with problems which have already been addressed in a book decades ago.

How I learned to enjoy reading

When I say reading here I mean reading those very long boring books which can make you sleep just by looking at the thickness of the cover, those books which have no image and are just full of words, a little like this article but multiplied 100x. I was by no means a fast reader in school, I actually didn’t like reading at all, and I would fall asleep just after a couple lines. Whenever I had a new book, I’ll carefully cycle through all the pages just to see the images, I’ll only take the time to read if the image really caught my attention. Early on I noticed that curiosity in myself, literally every book, I’ll browse through just to see the images, then I got into magazines with bright colors which really caught my attention, then I moved to magazines with fewer images till I finally got to books without images.

I think the trick is really finding the genre of books which speaks to you and your interest, be it anime, fantasy, romans, magazine etc the most important thing is to get into reading and I’ll explain to you why. What you want is to be able to read very long books comfortably without sleeping off and the reason why you want to do this is because the secrets of the world are written in books.

The power in knowing

The reason you want to be good at reading is because books are packed with so much knowlege, I really can’t express you just how much knowledge are packed into books. A book might have a title which means one thing but it could teach you countless unimaginable lessons you could have never phatomed. Be it a video or a game which are generally the easiest content to consume nowadays, they are limited in the amount of information and the weight of that information. Sometimes even 2 hours movies aren’t even 10 pages of a book so imagine reading a full book and all the knowledge you are going to get from there. No matter how good your brain is, I’m sure you don’t remember the movies you watched when you were in nusery, but we all remember that 1 + 1 = 2.

There are a lot of books you could get into so I can’t really recommend you any specific books, get books which really speak to who you are as a person. If you are an entrepreneur, read up on entrepreneurs etc.

Finding satisfaction in reading

Its easy to get lost in all the flux of information and feel discourage, I myself I regret reading a couple of books mainly because they didn’t live up to their titles. Nevertheless, whenever you start a book, make the engagement to take it to the very end, like school, every book puts us through an educative cycle and you wouldn’t like to feel like you gave up before reaching the final page. Each book has something poweful to teach but the bigger question is figuring out what exactly you are after, is it entertainment, is it comedy, or is it education? Sometimes you get to discover knowledge you didn’t even know you needed and that is very gratifying. I didn’t know I would enjoy reading about the gangster life of 50 Cent or the Fancy Life of Donald Trump, I didn’t think the struggle of Nelson Mandela would speak volumes to me, yet these books really touched me on a personal level. I can’t tell you which book is going to change your mindset but I can assure you there is one out there that will.

There is nothing new

As hard as it might be to believe this, there is really nothing new on this earth, things might put on a new form but nothing really ever changes intricately. Poverty is nothing new, oppression is nothing new, corruption is nothing new, innovation is nothing new, starting a company is nothing new, unemployment is nothing new etc. No matter who you are, there is really nothing you might be going through which hasn’t happened to a person before you, its possible that it may have not been written down but somewhere somehow, that information has been recorded, which means that you may be facing a problem which is totally unnecessary. Let me take an example, a wild guess of mine would be that 90% or lets say 60% of those who read the best seller “Rich Dad Poor Dad” have been able to mediate their financial state, they might not have been able to all become millionaires but at least they have more insight on how to manage their money, now think about all those who haven’t read that book, there are some core values of money they would never understand by themselves.

Conclusion

I can’t really convince you about the importance of reading but if you made it this far then you are already much of a reader, drop a comment with your favorite books.

Thanks for reading

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