(Translation) On Reading (Books)

Reading has to be effective to be worthwhile; positive feedbacks is critical to sustain reading.

The fact is, most of the people who read for self-improvement, are students or young professionals with under 10 years of working experience. Reading is indeed an expensive activity. (the time you spend reading, you could be hanging out with families, friends, or working on your projects). Thus, reading has a huge opportunity cost even to the motivated readers.

If you are planning to read some background information before diving into a book, I guarantee you would give up before starting the actual book.

So I personally recommend new readers to go straight reading the book without finding any supplementary reading or research. It is never too late to do those after your first or second run through.

99% of the people won’t even be able to finish the first run through, probably not even half. Most people just don’t have the time and patience.

Nowadays, most people’s mental energy and patience are consumed by junk medium articles, twitters or youtube. You have to objectively assess how “fit” you are in reading: I used to be fast, but now I am probably in the category of “fat middle age man with a big beer belly.” Before you set out to run a “marathon” (finish the book and learn to use the knowledge in your daily life), maybe you should make a more practical goal to “run a 10k” (like finish reading all the sentences from the first few chapters of a book)