How it all began
Before
As a kid I didn’t want to read books at home. In a conversation with my teacher, my mother asked: “Does he read in class?” My teacher answered: “Yes he does, maybe you can try to give him a children encyclopaedia?” From then on I started reading at home and I started reading for myself.
My mother often took me to the library since then. It started with animal and dinosaur books as a kid. Then came Geronimo Stilton, Ranger’s Apprentice and Percy Jackson in high school. The last three years of high school were filled with compulsory book reviews to stimulate us to Read More. It inevitably had the opposite effect. I stopped reading.
After
A few years later, 2020 came and people suddenly had more time (you all know why). Someday, all of a sudden I had the idea to go back to the library. It was a long time since I borrowed a book at the library and read it, but I loved it. I realised I love reading as long as I can choose which books I read.
I was hungry for more books, so after a while I started to develop a system which helped me to read more books. When I read more books, I realised even more that I loved reading so I would work on my system which in turn ensured that I could read even more books. This cycle went on and on.
At this point I was reading a lot of books, but internalizing none of them.
My reading philosophy
I felt something was wrong. Reading for the sake of reading isn’t what I wanted to do. I started asking myself what the purpose was of reading. I came up with two answers:
- Enjoyment
- Learning
“Enjoyment” is important as we will touch upon in this blog, but I will mainly focus on the “Learning” part. If the purpose of reading is to learn, then we should not aim at passively reading a lot of books so that we can brag: “I’ve read 30 books this year!”. Instead we should aim at:
- Engaging actively with the book
- Experimenting with the concepts handed to us
- Implementing them in our life
It’s more work then reading passively, but definitely worth it. To keep us from slipping back into our old habits of reading passively we have to have a certain mindset. That’s where the Warrior Mindset comes into play. When you see reading books as an adventure in which you will slay beasts, find treasures, make friends and go on side quests, you will definitely learn a lot from this journey.
Remember that reading is the method, not the goal. Reading is the journey and learning is the goal.
