Field scabious.
When You
Start To Read More, These 10 Things Will Happen
Annie Mueller
I have a confession. I’m an addict.
It’s almost a lifelong thing, really. Since I was a kid. I should
be embarrassed… but I’m not.
I should get help… but I won’t.
I’ll just go back to the bookstore. Back to the library. Back to
my endless queue of ebooks.
Back to my stuffed shelves.
They know me. They love me. I’ve got everything I need here. Why
would I stop?
And why wouldn’t you start? When you read more, life expands.
Here’s how.
1. You
will find a safe way to escape when your own life is depressing,
overwhelming,
or just boring.
No need to turn to drugs or alcohol. Save your money. Get a
library card, or start downloading
some of those thousands of ebooks in the public domain. Get
wrapped up in a story.
Get lost in another world. Get into a character’s head and out of
your own.
It’s instant. It’s economical. It’s portable: your own personal
escape route
when things get to be too much.
And who’s going to look down on you for reading a book? You smart
thing, you.
I won’t tell them what’s really going on. Promise.
2. You
find out that you have a family.
Okay, I know. You have parents and maybe siblings, and maybe a
whole slew of aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and whatnot.
Or maybe not.
Maybe you do feel alone in the world, bereft.
Whether you’re a literal orphan or you simply feel like you
totally don’t fit into the family you’ve got, becoming an avid reader is a way
to find the family you can fit into.
It’s a worldwide, totally open, and really awesome family.
It’s the family of readers. Book lovers. Literary addicts.
Bibliophiles. Become one of us,
and you have an extended family that you can find anywhere.
There’s a signal, of course,
like a secret family handshake. Just pull out that latest book and
read it. That’s all it takes.
We’ll see you.
We’ll know.
We’re always nearby, whenever you need us.
3. You
will become part of a timeless, global conversation.
Books are the way that the past communicates with us. And books
are the way that we communicate across cultures and national boundaries, across
social lines and class divisions.
Books let us enter into each other’s lives and worlds in a
completely unobtrusive but immersive way.
Yeah, it’s pretty awesome.
Have you ever wanted to be someone else, to go somewhere else,
to
experience some other life than the one you got?
Books, baby. What are you waiting for?
4. You
will learn to talk pretty.
Reading is the most painless way to improve your vocabulary,
spelling, and grammatical proficiency.
Did you catch how I just spelled “proficiency” without even
looking it up?
Yeah. That comes from reading.
Read more, and you’ll be able to snicker smugly when your friends
post status updates
with egregious spelling errors. You can correct their misuse of
common words.
You can be the Grammatical Tyrant you’ve always dreamed of being.
5. You
will look forward to lines, layovers, and waiting rooms.
This could be the biggest turning point of your life, actually.
Instead of tapping your foot impatiently, huffing and sighing like dyspeptic
cow, or otherwise displaying your wrath and frustration
in a socially acceptable
way, you can simply… read.
Whatever book you’re currently lost in should be with you, in your
pocket or purse.
Pull it out and you’ve got entertainment, companionship, and
intellectual stimulation.
All in one handy portable package.
My friend Leigh says that reading gives her “the ability to be
happy anytime, anywhere,
even when waiting ridiculously long amounts of time.”
That’s a superpower everybody needs.
6. You
will be a nicer person.
You might not care about being a nicer person, but the other
people in your life probably do care.
Reading, as my friend Christine put it, “allows me to experience
another’s emotions,
which in turn makes me more sensitive to those around me.”
And she’s right.
Maybe you’ve never been a victim of racism, abuse, or poverty.
Maybe you don’t know
what unrequited love feels like. Maybe you find it easier to
criticize than to sympathize.
Reading won’t take that away entirely (my Criticize-O-Meter is
still in good working order,
even after decades as an avid reader) but it will help you to slow
down a little bit on the judging.
And speed up a lot on the empathizing.
Because when you live other lives through books, you begin to see
the other lives happening
in the world around you. The lives you know nothing about.
And you begin to have a little more understanding. A little more
interest.
A little less “us versus them” and a lot more “we’re all in this
together.”
7. You
will learn stuff.
Even if all you read is fiction, you can learn quite a lot about
cultural influence, relationships, history, fear, human psychology, the various
expressions of spirituality, the effects of war, the way robots will definitely
take over the world, and how superheroes manage to keep their capes clean.
All very useful information.
Want more? Branch out into non-fiction. Biographies, history,
current events. No, just kidding; skip the books on current events. Read
history instead; you’ll learn more about current events that way.
Philosophy. Psychology. How-to books. Memoirs. Science.
Exploration. If you’re interested in it,
you can find a book about it. Probably you can find an entire
section of books about it.
And hey, if you can’t find a book about it, maybe you should write
one.
8. You
will discover that you were dumber than you knew.
In the time prior to your avid reading addiction (also known as
“The Years Which Must Not Be Named”), you thought you had a pretty
open mind, didn’t you?
Go ahead, you can admit it. I won’t laugh.
You thought that you knew kind of a lot, and that you had a broad
perspective on life,
and a pretty accurate view on the world and how things worked.
And then you started reading.
Maybe the first few books weren’t such a big deal. They probably
kept you safely in your comfort zone. But then one of the members of your new
reading family gave you a recommendation.
“You’ve got to read this,” she said. “It’s so great. Really.”
So you did.
And you realized that something you thought you knew—really knew,
truly and certainly—
was not right at all. You felt the edges along your mind begin to
crack open a little bit.
You felt a little light seeping in and you started seeing the
interior of your mind the way it really was: dim, dusty, and crowded with a lot
of assumptions.
You kept reading, and the more you read, the more those cracks
opened up. One by one,
those assumptions slipped and slid out of the cracks. The light
grew. The air cleared.
You started populating your mind with different things: images,
conversations, perceptions, insights, data. Poetry. Fragments of lives you
didn’t live, but somehow experienced through a book.
Emotions that didn’t belong to you, but that you felt just as
strongly.
Real things, from the real world, instead of that crumbly old
stack of assumptions and expectations.
9. You
will be more creative.
As you fill your mind with fresh material from all these books,
something wonderful starts happening.
Your mind wakes up.
Creativity is really all about making connections. The creative
people in life, the ones we admire
for their ingenuity, are the ones who can make those connections
really well. They have a broad database of knowledge, and they don’t bother
keeping the categories separate.
They let poetry seep into science. They let faith and history hang
out together.
They understand, in fact, that all those categorizations are
imposed. We put labels on things
so that we can feel like we understand them, but sometimes the
labels are counterproductive.
Reading helps you tear the labels off.
Reading helps you tear the labels off.
Reading helps you to fill your mind from as many sources as you
want,
and then let all of that beautiful stuff mingle and mix in anyway
it wants.
10. You
will become more imaginative and less afraid of being weird.
When you read books that are the product of someone else’s
imagination,
you start to trust your own
imagination, and use it.
What a great idea! Using that brain, in all of its crazy,
unnerving, glorious potentiality.
Reading will help you do that. If you feel like your mind is
strange, start reading.
After a few runs through the world of surrealism or science
fiction (or surrealistic science fiction), you will feel like the most normal
person in the world.
Who are these crazy people who come up with these weird,
fantastical ideas?
Of course, you’ll want to read more. So you will. And then your
own imagination will start to blend what you’ve read with the real life you’re
living, and you’ll add in your own unique collection
of information, experience, education, and personality. Who knows
what will result?
Don’t you want to find out?
Why don’t you have a book open yet?
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/when-you-start-read-more-these-10-things-will-happen.html
Turbo Charged Reading: Read
More>>>Read fast>>>Remember more>>>Years
later
Contact
M’reen at: read@turbochargedreading.com
You can TCR specialist
and language dictionaries that are spontaneously accessed.
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
I can TCR an instructional/academic book around 20
times faster and remember what I’ve
read.
A practical overview of Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
How
to choose a book. A Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Emotions when Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Advanced Reading Skills Perhaps you’d like to join my FaceBook group ?
Perhaps
you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com gives many ways for you to work with
the stresses of life
www.ourbusinessminds.blogspot.com
development, growth, management. www.mreenhunthappyartaccidents.blogspot.com
just for fun.
To
quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will
know.
The
more that you learn; the more places you'll go.”
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