AbdulSalamLet me tell you why you should read slow and love more. One of the essential habits I carry from school is book reading. I can proudly say that this habit has the most influence on what I am today; it shaped me more than anything. Let me tell you a simple, short, yet amazing story about my love of books. We didn’t have any library in our school, village, or even city. My brother used to read novels that he bought in bulk from a far-off city. Those novels have some titles on their cover pages, and I used to buy those books through posts one by one with my pocket money. It used to take 22 to 25 days to afford one book. And when I start reading first, I use to start collecting money for the second one, and that’s how it goes for about 3 years.
Later, my brother started gifting me books for 2 years, and then I moved to Lahore, the second most populous city in Pakistan. I found myself among the countless books my brother bought from numerous book fairs and bookstores. He is a more kind of book-buying person than a book reader(book reading is an entirely different hobby than book buying). Returning to the story, my reading speed was Improving at that time; I had more books than I could read, so I was trying to read everything. More pages, more chapters, more books, more content, more knowledge. I used to read about 4 books a month, spending about two hours a day reading books. This continued for two years, I read more than 120 books in the meantime, and then I realized something more meaningful than reading books.
One day, I started penning down the book titles I had read by then. Out of those 150+ books, I could only name 73 after an hour of brainstorming. I have realized how limited my memory is and how much data I have already forgotten. It was unfortunate to realize that hours of my reading practice weren’t effective. This realization led me to accept that the more I read, the less I will retain, so I started doing something that I still do.
Instead of reading one book a week, I started reading 1 book a month, and then I started reading 1 chapter a day. Currently, I am reading Robin Sharma’s Guide to Greatness, it’s my 42nd day with this book, and I am on the 42nd chapter. I have started loving them instead of trying to finish them, and it has changed my perspective about many things we try to finish but end up creating meaningless products.
Every guru will tell you to read more books, they will tell you about the CEOs who read 56 books a year, they will make you believe in the fact that book reading will make you live hundreds of lives, it will enrich you with the insights of successful people and more. But this is different when it comes to reading books wholeheartedly. I am okay with reading one book weekly or 52 in a year. This book is not about how to read more. It is about making life meaningful. So, in this context, I firmly believe that just like we can’t enjoy anything in a hurry, we can’t enjoy books when we try to finish them instead of reading them.
Besides this enjoyment factor, memory plays a decisive role in the number of pages we can encode, store and retrieve from our mind at the time of need. Our minds have limited power to process every detail. I know you won’t be able to retrieve the discussion we had on the second chapter of this book. This is how tiny our working memory is. So, instead of reading more that we will forget, why not be more productive and efficient by spending more time with fewer pages? It is a quality vs. quantity phenomenon, and you must choose your side. If you are looking for a self-centered life, you need to be on the quality side, where you can enjoy each book story, quotation, chapter, and section. You will read less, but you will have more to consume. Your memory will encode more information. You will remember more details about what you have read. You will not say, “ I have read this book; you will say, “I have enjoyed this book.” This will make you different. This will make you more self-centered. This will make you fall in love with yourself when you can connect your book’s lessons with your life’s experiences. Your life will be more relatable to you. Your memory will make more associations that will help you remember more. You will have more to feel. You will have more to tell.
A Chapter from: “The Art of Living a Self-Centered Life”
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0BNF3WLP3/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2
