How to Get Smarter

Marketing guru Seth Godin said, “every time I finish a book, I get smarter.”  If you agree with Godin, why don’t all of us read more often? Similar to not exercising regularly and eating healthier, the excuses of not enough time or energy to read are really statements that reading is not a priority to you. 

Neil Pasrich, author of six books including The Happiness Equation and The Book of Awesome, and an avid reader, offers the following advice on how to read more.  

• Create a path of least resistance to reading.  Just as Google places healthy snacks on countertops for employees and hides the chocolate in cookie jars, place books that you want to read in easily accessible and visible places, e.g. coffee tables, night stands, car seat pouches, kitchen countertops, etc.

• Use a red light when you read in bed because theory holds that red light helps produce Melatonin and bright lights can make you feel more alert.  Reading in bed should help wind you down, not up.

• Put your smart phone to bed so you resist the temptation to look at it every few seconds.  Pasrich suggests if you need to sleep with the phone nearby, put it on "do not disturb" to block calls after dinner and leave it like that until you wake up (if you can).  

• Develop an organizational system.  “There’s a reason why every library uses the Dewey Decimal System,” writes Pasrich, because it makes sense.  Pasrich uses the Dewey Decimal System to categorize his books, which he claims has caused him to find his books faster, read more purposefully and become more engaged in what he reads.  He uses classify.oclc.org to determine the Dewey Decimal number for books that don’t have the code on the inside jacket and a Decimator app to look up what the number means.

• Looking for what to read next? Check out BookTube and podcasts What Should I Read Next, Get  Booked or 3 Books. 

• Determine what takes up your free time and determine if It is worth the investment.  Do you really need to watch the news for so much time per day, read multiple newspapers or spend hours upon hours on social media sites?  Wouldn't that time be better spent expanding your perspective buried in a good book?

• Don’t read books on a tablet, smart phone or other device that can distract your attention from reading, e.g. checking email between pages.  Reading a bound book on a printed page has benefits.  If you need to read on a device, make sure it’s one that can't receive email or texts.

• Find a local bookstore instead of relying on best seller lists and expert reviews.  Walking into a local, independent book store (if there still is one in your neck of the woods) provides a great source for books that you will thoroughly enjoy but may never have encountered online.  

Need more reasons to read more?  According to The Annual Review of Psychology, reading opens up parts of the brain responsible for developing empathy, compassion and understanding.  Reading makes you a better leader, teacher, parent, partner, sibling and boss.  So read more, because as Pasrich writes, if you are what you eat, you are what you read.