If you want to read books regularly then you should know this

It is great to be a part of the audience when Deepak Ramola speaks. In his recent talk, he shared one beautiful life lesson he learnt from a 7-year blind girl – Concentration is good but the balance is more important.

Then Deepak went on explaining it – “We are good at focusing things. But we are bad at balancing things. For example – you might be focused on your professional life but you forget to give time to your personal life or your hobbies. Or you might be focused too much on enjoying the life that ends up affecting your work life.”

Therefore before deciding about focus, you should take appropriate measures to balance other areas. Isn’t that an awesome life lesson! Connecting to the reading activity, let’s analyse the words – Concentration and Balance.

Concentration – it’s the reading skill – improving focus, speed, improving understanding, retention, and recall of the reading material. This is the only part where people focus. It’s great for students as their reading material is already decided and reading is the number one priority.

But what about adults – you don’t have just one textbook and nor you know which book is better than other. You don’t even know when you should find time to read as reading is not the only priority. Therefore you end up reading during the wrong time of the day. That leads to losing out focus quickly – making you feel that your concentration is poor. But that's not true, the main reason is - your balance in reading is poor and hence you are not able to concentrate.

Balance in reading comes in two ways

1.      Balancing reading with other activities

2.      Balancing the type of reading material

1 - Balancing reading with other activities

People feel their reading time is independent of other time. But that’s not true – reading is a part of life and not apart from life.

What you do throughout the day affects your reading time. Your body can't just ignore all the things the moment you start reading. How you spend remaining hours in a day will determine your reading time. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said – "First be a good animal first." So eat well, drink lots of water and sleep at least 7-8 hours in a day.

If you are having a stressful day, don’t pick up a book which is difficult to read (even though you have read half of that book). Pick something simple. Judge your tiredness and read accordingly.

Concentration is like muscle – you will be tired after reading the difficult material. Therefore don’t plan a mentally demanding activity before or after it. Learn to balance your activities so you can concentrate better.

2 - Balancing the type of reading material

By balancing this part, I was able to read 300 books in 2016. Please read this article. it will explain to you why it is important to read as per your need and not want.

Once you identified your growth need, then follow the pyramid.

First Step – find the exact category of need. Like saying I want to know more about finance is my need but that’s that not specific. Do you want to learn about financial management or investment or how to think like an entrepreneur?  

Once you have identified the specific category then find top 3 books by searching on google. Example – “Top 3 financial management books for beginners” or “Top 3 books on leadership” or “Top 3 books on change management” etc.

Let’s take an example of one of my workshop participant. She had just started her journey as a start up-entrepreneur and wanted to learn about entrepreneurship. She googled it and after researching, she felt these 3 books can solve her need - Rich dad poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and Zero to one by Peter Theil.

All three books are must read but going in detail about each book by reading the summary or watching videos or reading reviews on Amazon/Goodreads, she realised zero to one is most relevant for her. Not that the book “Think and Grow Rich” should not be read but she could not connect with those books. This is how you balance what you are reading with your life.

It's only when you put an effort in something, you will be motivated to read it. Research gives you a clear idea what you should read and plus how can apply that knowledge quickly because it is more relevant to your life.

Concentration is important but without the balance part, it cannot sustain for a longer period. The best part of balancing is - it requires clear thinking but very less action. It’s definitely easy as compared to increasing your reading speed and retention which requires more and daily practice.

Therefore, learn to balance before you concentrate.

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If you want to transform your reading skills, then be a part of our upcoming workshop - rupakshah.com/upcoming-workshops

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