Reading Your Way to Wealth [Career Development]

Gotta Read!

Reading is the first sentry on the outpost to the life of prosperity. If you cannot read well, your journey never begins! Your ability to quickly and efficiently read, comprehend and judge the material in front of you will open more doors than you may realize today.

Whether it is a short, dense paragraph of information such as:

Psychopathy is an elusive and perplexing psychological construct.Problems posed by this mental disorder are linked to changing historical interpretations impacting the current clinical community's general understanding of it, especially in relation to Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD).

or if it is a miserable mish-mash of adjectives and verbs that passes for serious material (a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing ):

"This change will allow us to better leverage our talent base in an area where developmental roles are under way and strategically focuses us toward the upcoming Business System transition where Systems literacy and accuracy will be essential to maintain and to further improve service levels to our customer base going forward."

These are examples taken from everyday lives. You will also come across well written material- but given your time constraints, you want to absorb the gist, incorporate it into your thinking, and move on!

Simply reading the words without understanding them is worthless. And you must take another step forward: the material should be immediately incorporated into your current thinking easily and effortlessly. Otherwise it will be lost in the torrent of information flowing past you every day. Occasionally, some piece of information may be so in conflict with your known dataset that you will need to mark that information out to get back to it later. But 95% of the time, the information can and must be incorporated into your thinking immediately!

So how can you improve your Reading Skills?

First and foremost is by being whole and present. What do we mean by that?

Being whole implies having your mind, body & spirit all at one place and together. If your mind is wandering, the spirit is sapped and the body is hurting- it will make it difficult to read well! So having your whole self available to you is important.

Secondly, you have only the here and now available to you. Be present in that. Not in the future, or in the past- but in this very moment.

And then read. Read with your body, mind and spirit completely involved. Even now, as you are reading this article, bring your whole self into this subject matter. Be involved. You can be assured that you will not have to read this again. The material will be absorbed by you at a breathtaking speed that you may not have realized you had.

And now that you are reading with your complete self, repeat this in a wide range of areas. Success will follow you effortlessly if you develop that broad understanding in a number of disparate areas. Sure, you will have deep expertise in only an area or two- but you must develop a Course 101 level depth in a broad range of areas.

As an immediate recommendation for improving reading, follow these two steps:

Take a national newspaper of your choice (or 2 or 3 if you are ambitious), and read the editorial commentary in it. Do this every single day the paper is published.

After reading an editorial, write:
1. The single main point the editor is trying to make
2. Then critique that main point to the best of your ability- do you agree or disagree with the editor? If you agree, then what point in the editorial made you agree? If you disagree, what could the editor have shown that would have changed your opinion?
  See an example here

Result Expectation: Doing this for 30 days will improve your reading and comprehension by as much as 50%! It will also vastly improve your general knowledge.

Focus on an area that directly affects your business or career. Say you are in the field of accounting. Your advantage here is your knowledge of the jargon used in journals that talk about accounting. But to improve your reading and comprehension skills, pick the top 2-3 journals in your field.

Pick one article per week, read it, understand it, and write a brief 1 paragraph synopsis of the article, indicating the main point and a couple of side-points that the author is trying to make
Critique the article in another short paragraph. What could the author have done to strengthen his/her point?
Then finally, think about how this information affects the way you do your job, or how the company does its job? Or is the information not so useful to you (at least right now)?

Result Expectation: 1 year. In one year you will be a master of incorporating information from your own field into your thinking; absorbing new material and suggesting techniques to generate more money for your company (and if not already, then you will become the star player- for no reason other than your ability to read and use information)

Recommendations

Newspapers of interest:

And do not forget to Read with your whole self!

There is no simpler, more effective and powerful habit that you can develop than that of Reading effectively to help establish the Career Development Pillar.