Things that connected - Part 1

Sunday. February 03, 2019 - 3 mins

I recently started to develop a habit of reading regularly. Though failing miserably in the process, I came across some content that connected with me and motivated me to keep trying.

Usually, I forget things that I read but this time to make it persist somehow I thought of documenting it. Thus, this series of posts is an attempt to collate thoughts, blogs and books that connected with me at some level. These are not recommendations but highlights of things that connected with me.

First things first - Why?

A few days back one of my senior asked me “Why do you want to read?” , when asked upon what is the strategy to complete a book because I am not able to complete most of the books that I start with.

My first reaction to it was “because everyone does it ?”. Then I thought about it more and realised my aim was to broaden my mind and learn new things that help me understand & push myself in different aspects of life be it personal or professional. But still, there was something that I couldn’t say it confidently.

The other day I was talking to one of my friends, who was telling his experience of a bad interview. While talking, we stumbled upon how to prepare for interviews and keep up the motivation. When we were deep into the conversation I started recommending him to make a system of studying and not goals (explanation). This thing immediately connected with him as well.

This recommendation was from a book that I read sometime back and thus I realised the gradual change in my thinking process. This cleared up my doubt on the question “Why to read?”.

But how?

Initially, I used to pick a book and try to complete it. I promised my self that I would not pick up another book until I finish the previous. I thought this will push me to finish my previous one, but as a result, I never finished that book and in turn, couldn’t start a new one.

This went for some time and I thought of searching “How to read a book”. Initially, I thought how stupid is this but it turned out to be quite helpful and in a few months I have finished one book, completed more than 80% for two books and read a lot of blogs. This is a big improvement for me.

Some blogs that I remember on this topic:

Why reading 100 books a year won’t make you successful - https://medium.com/swlh/why-reading-100-books-a-year-wont-make-you-successful-1863dad5944d

I stumbled upon this when I was trying to hack myself around reading more number of books. I used to set targets to complete the books and fail alomost every time. Reading started to become an uninteresting task that I just had to complete.
- The blog post talks about the importance of reading slowly and thoughtfully rather than just running to complete a target.
“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you”
Everything I Knew About Reading Was Wrong - https://hackernoon.com/everything-i-knew-about-reading-was-wrong-bde7e57fbfdc

This really helped me to change my thought process around reading books. Some interesting takeaways:
- If you are not liking a book allow yourself to quit reading, and this quitting may not be forever
“The right book for the right person is not enough. It needs to be the right book, for the right person at the right time. sometimes you need to go on a little detour before you’re ready for what the book has to give you. The nice thing about books — they always wait where you leave them.”
- Read more than one book at a time - If you want to read a book go ahead and do it, don’t wait for the previous one to finish
“You skim very very quickly to find the ones that grab you, that are important and interesting for you, and then you stick to those and go really deep. There’s exploration, and there’s exploitation. So you explore a lot of books until you decide that there’s something there to exploit”

Aditya Chowdhry

Software Engineer