When You Read, Look For Things To Use

Reading, no matter how beautiful the words may be, is incomplete without working good and new things into yourself. If what you do goes no deeper than the words, you’re wasting precious opportunities.

Books draw us in like no other medium; even music differs and usually comes up short. When you read long-form content (aka, a book), you’re taking ideas into yourself, or at least have the opportunity to do so.

So, when you read, your standard mindset should be to look for things that are of value to you: Ideas that you could use in some profitable or healthy way. Find parallels as you read, see how a new idea might connect to something else, consider how the things you read might combine with other things, and so on. Read to pull something out of it.

I can tell you that this has been immensely valuable to me, and drove me forward in ways that my non-reading or poorly-reading fellows could not match.

If you don’t regularly do this, please start. It will change your life.