To a certain extent, a person’s understanding ability can determine how broad their path is. Reading comprehension is a fundamental ability of a person, which is very important. It affects your memory, your expression, your thinking, and also your communication skills. Sometimes, you feel like, “Why can’t I always remember things?” Then you blame yourself for your poor memory and want to learn some memory techniques. But it’s not necessarily about memory, it might be that your understanding or reading comprehension is too poor. Because you can’t understand and process the material well or find its logical line, you can’t remember things. I’ve seen that among people who have problems with memory, eight or nine out of ten have problems with reading comprehension.
There are also some people who feel that their expressive ability is poor and often don’t know what to say or don’t know how to respond to what others are saying. That’s because they don’t have enough input in their minds. In other words, they have too little information input in their brains, so they can’t think of what to say, and they have nothing to say.
And then there’s thinking ability. Many people feel they’re not clear in their thinking, which is because they’re not capable enough to process information. There might be a pile of things in their brains that are not organized or logical, and they get more and more confused as they think. Reading comprehension is essentially about processing information; seeing an object and reading and understanding it is processing the information the object gives me. So if your reading comprehension is not strong, and your information processing ability is relatively weak, your brain will not think clearly.
Finally, why is reading comprehension related to the ability to communicate with others? If a person has no problem with reading comprehension, then when he listens to others speaking, he can understand the logical flow of the speech, what the key points in the speech are, and easily understand the speaker’s intention, making it easier to communicate. So reading comprehension is actually the foundation for all of these, including thinking ability, the ability to communicate with others, expressive ability, and memory. It’s very important. This is why we need to read a lot. There are many benefits to reading.
Firstly, reading can make a person rational, and if you don’t read, it’s easier to lack rationality. Because once a person doesn’t read, then his judgment on all things will mainly come from his own experience. But how much experience can a person have in his lifetime? Sometimes his strength is quite thin, so when he looks at things, he easily lacks rationality, is biased and lacks the ability to think critically. When a person doesn’t have much idea or concept about something, it’s also easy to be blind.
For example, I once heard someone promoting a weight loss tea, saying it’s not only good for weight loss, but also very healthy. You’ll realize your fatty liver has improved and your body fat percentage has risen or fallen after drinking the tea, in any case, your body will get better. There were testimonials on the spot: “I used the weight loss tea and it worked.” Based on experience, wouldn’t most people doubt that this testimonial could be fake? But if you actually tried it and found that it does cure your fatty liver, what would you think? Would you find it reliable?
You would feel that it’s safe and healthy, that it’s a good weight loss tea. You buy it right away and recommend it to your friends. But if your reading scope is a little wider, such as when I first learned about weight loss tea, I remembered a book about medicine I had read before that mentioned many medicines can treat one disease, but can cause another.
I thought that the tea might improve your fatty liver, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the tea is healthy, because you don’t know how it affects your other bodily functions. So I would be prudent and wouldn’t buy it lightly, which is a display of rationality. This is the source of a person’s ability to judge. When you see a statement, a method, and you think it’s right, you believe it.
However, you have seen contrasting statements and actions. Among these two types of statements and actions, you need to decide which one to believe. This process is judgment. So the more you read, the more information you have in your head, the more different perspectives you know about one thing, the stronger your judgment will be.
The second benefit of reading is that books themselves are a valuable educational resource, and reading good books is a shortcut. You might say, “I have no money to attend extracurricular tutoring classes from early age, nor to travel.” It doesn’t matter, you can read books. Good education is not necessarily given in schools, especially in today’s exam-oriented education system. Good education is in books.
If I could only choose one extracurricular class for my future child, I wouldn’t choose dance or piano, I would definitely choose reading. You can have direct conversations with Bill Gates, learn directly from Buffett by reading. When you want to learn, you read good books. Books can help you break through your reality, and have conversations with the smartest and best people in the world.
Many people overlook this resource. They’d rather chat with a friend who can’t tune in or ask a teacher who’s not reliable, but they don’t want to read books, thus completely wasting this resource of good books.
The third benefit of reading is that it can make you confident. Here, we divide confidence into conditional and unconditional confidence. Conditional confidence is simple to understand, it means that confidence is conditional. For example, looks-confidence, people who are good-looking can be confident. Why do some beautiful girls lack confidence? Because they don’t realize they’re beautiful. Those girls who realize their beauty often feel a sense of superiority. Another kind of conditional confidence is material confidence. Being rich does make people confident. If you don’t agree with this, it means you’re not rich yet.
When a person suddenly makes a lot of money, you’ll find that he speaks louder, he realizes that he has money, which gives him a sense of confidence. In addition to looks-confidence and material-confidence, there’s also a kind of conditional self-confidence, which is called knowledge-confidence. When others don’t know something but I do, when others don’t know why but I do, when others don’t know how to do something but I do. So gradually, every time I am recognized by others, I become confident, I can often guide others, and I become a so-called KOL (Key Opinion Leader).
Among my classmates, there was a girl who knew a lot. When we were in the first year of junior high school, kids just realized being fat was not good-looking and they needed to lose weight. But this girl knew the principle of weight loss. She told us at that time: “You shouldn’t eat carbohydrates. They’re the first source of energy. When you’re lacking energy, you’ll first use these carbohydrates. So if you eat too much of this stuff, it’ll turn into fat and be stored in your body, making you fat.”
I was amazed when I heard this. I only knew about weight loss at that time and didn’t know these principles because we hadn’t taken any biology classes. The girl knew this, she said: “As long as you don’t give your body too many carbohydrates, your body will burn fat when it needs energy, and in this way, you’ll lose weight.”
And then she told us: “You can’t be too hungry because if you’re too hungry, your body will think that you’re lacking food, you’re experiencing famine, and it’ll protect fat and slow down the rate of consumption to let you survive in a famine, so you can’t be hungry.”
She was clear, rational, and had grounds for her statements. Everyone believed her, and she became more and more confident. But where did all this confidence come from? It’s from the books she read, so books can make people confident.
Lastly, reading can make you smarter. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s not. Reading can indeed make people smarter.
Once you’ve read a lot of books and have accumulated many background knowledge, you’ll find your understanding is constantly improving. Gao Xiaosong, who has read a lot of books, and a person who, on a regular basis, doesn’t read books are both reading the same book. Who do you think will understand faster, more deeply, more accurately?
Definitely Gao Xiaosong. So Gao Xiaosong seems smarter because the process of reading is actually a continuous input of book information into the brain. Also, you have to keep filling in the gaps while reading.
A book cannot possibly list all the theories, knowledge points and all background-related knowledge for you. If it did, the book would never end, so it omits a lot of things. Therefore, people who have a lot of background knowledge can fill in the gaps, and understand quickly and correctly.
Also, it’s possible that two people read the same book, one person reads very deeply and gets a lot of new knowledge through the book, while the other person reads superficially. So, reading more books allows you to read faster and understand faster.
Reading is an important input for the brain. The more you input, the more you read, the faster you can think, and the smarter you are. This is because your brain is processing this information every day, so the more you use it, the better it gets.
Why do rural people, those farmers who face the earth and sky, sometimes look not so smart, and sometimes they seem to react slowly and are a bit blunt? That’s because their life experiences are very single — go home to eat, work during the day, most of the time they’re facing the fields, there is no other information input, so their brains are getting duller.
Reading makes people react quickly. For example, if you talk about an economic theory today, you can react quickly, because you have a lot of information stored in your brain. You can quickly call upon related knowledge, information to give feedback, and you won’t appear ignorant. So, reading can make people understand faster, react faster, and appear smarter.
Above is the explanation of why reading? I’ve added some small theories. These are not empty talks or clichés, but the real benefits of reading that I have experienced. If you are confused, anxious, inferior, then reading is the right solution.
When reading, we often encounter several problems. The first problem is not knowing what books to read. Every day people recommend books to you, 30 must-reads for young people, 20 must-reads, 10 must-reads to boost your EQ, these books will accumulate on your bookshelf, and you don’t know which one you should read first, which one you should read later, which one you should read and which one you shouldn’t.
Therefore, this is the first problem we encounter, which is not knowing in what direction to read. The second problem is that reading is difficult to persist in, it’s hard to keep it up.
You often make a plan “this year I must read 100 books,” and in the end, you only read one book, and you didn’t even finish it. The third problem is that you often forget what you’ve read. I have a friend who reads a lot of books and takes notes on Goodreads every time he reads a book. The next time I recommend this book to him, he realizes he’s read it and even took notes, but he just forgot it. So, this is the third problem we encounter.
How can we solve these problems? Books can be divided into four categories according to their functions.
The first category is books that offer experiences. The most typical are romance novels. After reading a romance novel, what specific and useful things can you get? You can’t really say, but the reading process is really enjoyable. You can finish it in one breath because in this process, you can follow the main male and female characters, experiencing joy and sorrow, and you even cry during key plot points. This is called experiencing. So after reading the whole book, the only thing you get, or the most important thing you get, is the experience. These are the books that provide experiences.
The second category is books that provide information. Some books can give you some information, like a fashion magazine that gives you some fashion news. Also, every year I buy some industry reports, which are filled with industry information. From these books, the most important thing we get is the information we didn’t know before.
The third category is books that offer knowledge. For example, if you read an economics book today, you learn about the term “sunk cost”. The term didn’t exist before and it’s also a knowledge point that you didn’t know previously, which economists discovered and summarized through long-term research. Once you learn it, you obtain this knowledge point. Basically, books in this category like economics, law, and psychology, they all give you some knowledge.
The last type of book is one that provides ways of thinking and methods. Such as philosophy books, they help to broaden your way of thinking and provide a method for thinking. These are books that provide methods of thinking.
Actually, it doesn’t need to be divided too clearly, as long as you have a general concept of it. I use this classification to emphasize one problem, which is the importance of a balanced reading selection. From the first to the fourth book category, you can see that the reading difficulty is increasing. The experience-oriented books are the easiest to read. Reading novels can be quite enjoyable, and perhaps books that offer knowledge and methods are more difficult to read. Therefore, we tend to prefer reading novels and the first category, which provides experiences, the second category, which offers information. We like these, which leads to an imbalance in our reading structure. In fact, the third and fourth books, which provide knowledge and ways of thinking, actually expand our knowledge.
The reading method we are discussing today is mainly for the third and fourth types of books, because the first and second types basically do not need any special methods. For experience-oriented books, you do not need a method, you can read it in one breath, quickly, without procrastination. So, we mainly talk about how to read the third and fourth categories.
The third and fourth books are more difficult to persist with, so we suggest: in terms of reading direction, read only useful books, only read those books that can change your life. For example, if you’re a lawyer, then you should first read some psychology books, professional lawyer materials, or if you have a problem recently like “wanting to get a divorce” and you don’t know what to do, then read some books related to divorce. In short, remember this principle “only read useful books”, either out of interest or to solve a problem. As we mentioned in the theory of learning before, only learning for these two purposes is not painful and can be persevered with.
So everyone must develop a habit, when you want to learn something, when you want to solve a problem, you must get used to using the internet and reading to solve problems, this can be considered as a basic literacy for modern people.
When people often ask me some questions, I always feel that my answers may not necessarily be better than those of the masters. So instead of asking me, you might as well read a book. Sometimes, for some common-sense problems, it might be better to search on Google than to ask me.
In summary, when there are problems, and when you want to learn, you should use the internet and read books to solve your problems. This should be a basic literacy for modern people.
Let me give you an example, I recently encountered some problems in the company’s strategy, so the first thing I thought of was actively searching for some books related to company strategy. In this way, I don’t bother others and I can ask for advice from some experts whom I wouldn’t otherwise be able to connect with.
After I find these books, I am eager to finish them, and the reading efficiency is also very high, and the experience is also good.
So everyone must remember this, this is also Li Ka-shing’s reading method, called “only read books that are useful to yourself”.
The biggest mistake I made in reading was my belief that one should start reading from classic books. This idea was imbued in me from young by teachers and parents: that one should read good books, read like “Wuthering Heights”, read domestic classics like “Dream of the Red Chamber”. They are all good books and they should be read.
But in all honesty, as a kid, I was unable to read these books. They deterred my passion for reading. I would wonder why I can’t understand these books deemed as classics, touted as excellent by others. Why can’t I appreciate their goodness? I would force myself to read them over and over again, ending up unconvinced and disinterested.
As a result, these classics, which I would only come to comprehend and take interest in my 20s, were spoiled to me in my teens. Having gone through them at an age too young, the pleasure of reading was significantly diminished when I revisited them later on.
So I want to share my experience here, in this world, there’s no such thing as a must-read book. Simply start from your own interests and needs, read whatever you’re interested in and what can be useful to you. Starting from the second perspective would serve you better.
Next, I’ll introduce you to a reading method called “thematic reading”. It means when you choose a topic, such as entrepreneurship, you delve into all the good books under this topic.
The merits of thematic reading are significant because you’ve done various readings on this topic, naturally you’ll come across different perspectives. Hence, your understanding of the topic will be more nuanced and rational.
Additionally, your reading speed will increase along with your reading efficiency. When you’re reading a book on this topic, you probably already have a decent understanding of this field, the background knowledge from the previous book will allow you to read the next book at a quicker pace. As you read more, you’ll find that your speed continues to increase, which is a benefit of thematic reading.
Let’s move on to the method now.
Step One: First, search for books based on your chosen theme. You will definitely have a keyword for your theme, use the keyword to search on Goodreads. For instance, if you search for “entrepreneurship”, you’ll find many high-rated books under the keyword. So look for books with relatively high ratings, this is just one searching method.
Once you’ve found the books on entrepreneurship, you’ll see that there are other recommended books relevant to your first book. For example, if the recommendations include the word “strategy”, that’s a related keyword, you can use this keyword to conduct another search.
Another method is that the book you found may be collected in some Goodreads lists, these lists might represent a theme, you can certainly find relevant books from these lists.
In conclusion, you should try to locate, by all means, the good books under your selected theme.
The second step is to read the introduction and reviews of the books, to get a feel whether or not you want to read them and how you should read them.
Many people write book reviews on Goodreads, these reviews basically serve as notes. Most of the time, they provide a framework. By reading other people’s notes, you can have a rough idea of what the book is about and whether it’s good or not. Judge whether you should read the book, and how to read it.
Step Three: Through the reviews and notes, evaluate which book is worth reading and select it.
Then, check if there are digital versions of the book on Goodreads, or you can search for the Kindle version on Amazon, or look for the PDF version on Google. I advocate reading eBooks here, as much as possible, drop the paper books.
Firstly, physical books are not convenient to carry, hence, it could cause procrastination in your reading habit. Second, moving paper books during relocations is quite a hassle. Third, reading physical books is time-consuming.
So, unless you have a peculiar penchant for collecting physical books, I would not recommend reading physical books. Try to adapt to reading eBooks, which increases reading efficiency and speed. If you find the book exceptionally good after reading, you may purchase a paperback copy for collection.
After picking the books to read, the next step is to read it. Here I want to reiterate two principles.
First, you can start reading from chapters you’re interested in. When I read “Dream of the Red Chamber”, I insisted on starting from the first chapter and wasn’t interested no matter how hard I tried. In fact, starting from the middle is also fine, at times, it could even motivate you to continue reading.
So, when we read books, we are not obligated to start from the first chapter, or read word by word, page by page. You can select chapters that intrigue you, and if you find parts of it confusing, you’d be more focused and efficient when you revisit the previous chapters with those questions in mind.
Second, you don’t have to finish every book you read. Sometimes, after reading chapters you’re interested in, you may find the rest unappealing. There’s absolutely no need to read every single word. Reading a book is like having a meal. Once you absorbed all the nutrients you needed, that suffices.
We tend to treat books as some kind of solemn and sacred objects because from a young age, we were taught to respect and take care of books. So, we think we should read every word from the foreword to the author’s concluding remarks. In fact, that’s not the case. There’s no necessity to finish a book because there are too many books out there, and a lot of them are great books.
So what exactly are the correct steps to read a book?
Here’s what I suggest everyone should do.
First, read the table of contents to grasp the general logical framework of the book. This step is extremely important. Many people finish a book without understanding its framework, only remembering bits and pieces, and aren’t sure of the author’s logic.
Therefore, the first step is to study the table of contents since most authors arrange them logically.
Second, read the preface. A professional author usually explains why they wrote the book and what it covers in the preface. Do not bother with useless commendatory prefaces.
Third, begin to read. We used to read chapter by chapter. When setting up a reading plan, we would write “read Chapters 1 to 2 on May 1st, finish the book in a week, two chapters a day”. We would plan like this and then read chapter by chapter, two chapters today, one chapter tomorrow.
But when you’re finished reading, you won’t understand the connection between the chapters or the book’s framework. Therefore, you shouldn’t lose sight of the framework and table of contents while reading.
You should read based on the table of contents and try to understand each chapter within this logical framework system. This method will make it easier to understand.
My best reading experience is on Kindle. Everyone must download Kindle on their computers. When you’re reading on Kindle, you can pull out the table of contents, with the book content on the right. As you read page by page, you know exactly which chapter this page belongs to from the table of contents and its relationship with the previous and following chapters.
In this way, the reading experience will be wonderful, more efficient, and have a deeper understanding. When you read, you should read with the mentality of output, that is, if you were to explain this book to someone else, what would you say?
So when you are reading, you must read with this mindset. This is an experience I recently shared with a friend. We both enjoy reading a lot. During our recent discussions, this topic came up. I had to host a book reading event, so I had to share this book with others. I found that my reading efficiency increased significantly, and the results were better.
We should definitely read with this mindset, and while reading, ask ourselves the following three questions. Firstly, what is this book about? Secondly, how does the book convey its message? Thirdly, what are my thoughts and assessment on it?
After finishing every chapter, you can ask yourself these questions and then provide an opportunity for sharing.
For example, after finishing a book, you can share what the book mainly talks about in your circle of friends. During the sharing process, you will find that your understanding of this book is deeper and your reading efficiency is also higher.
Some people may ask, “Wouldn’t reading in this manner be slow?”
Actually, it’s not. In my opinion, there are basically three reasons why someone might read slowly.
The first reason is rereading. After reading, they don’t know what this section is about and feel confused. They also don’t understand the connection with other chapters, so they have to read this chapter again to understand it. When we read, we should start with the table of contents to avoid repetitiveness, and this already improves speed.
Secondly, some people like to copy while reading, copying each sentence and taking notes, sentence by sentence. This leads to slow reading speed.
The third reason is forgetting after reading, which is also indirectly a reason for slow reading. If you forget after reading, you have to read it a second time, so it is also considered low-efficiency, slow speed.
Next, let me share a method of note-taking to increase the speed of note-taking.
How should we take reading notes? Here, I introduce a tool called “Evernote”, which is a great companion for ebooks. After downloading Evernote, you can see a small “elephant” logo in the top right corner of your Evernote. If you click on it, you have a screenshot function. When you are reading, you can open your ebook on your computer, with the table of contents on the left and the book content on the right. If you read a particularly good paragraph and want to quote it, it’s simple. Just click on the Evernote icon in the top right corner, select a screenshot, and take a screenshot of the place you want to quote.
If you want to annotate this image, or if you want to record the framework of the book while reading, you can click on the “elephant” in the top right corner. A box will appear where you can enter the current chapter and section you are reading, then insert the screenshot.
When you have taken note of everything you need to record from this book, you can export everything to Evernote with one click. After it is exported, you can further organize it. At this point, you should have a good understanding and memory of the book.
There is also a possibility that you can’t remember the specific content of the book, or there’s a certain knowledge point mentioned in it that you can’t recall later.
Not at all, Evernote supports you to search. Its search function is very powerful. As long as you remember the general content of the book, you can search for it when you think of it later. You don’t have to, like before, first find the book on the bookshelf, then look at the table of contents, and find out where you highlighted the important parts, or flip through the notebook you wrote in to find which sentence you copied when. This is very inefficient, but Evernote supports search, so just remember roughly, forget the specific knowledge points when needed, and you can search.
This is the method I am sharing with you, called Evernote paired with an e-book is a perfect match for reading.
At the end of today’s lesson, we’ll introduce two more methods: the first is called “point reading” and the second is “exclusive reading”.
Firstly, point reading. If you find it easy to be distracted while reading, you can point to the text with your fingers. This can focus your attention on one hand, and guide your reading speed on the other hand. If you want to read faster, move your fingers a little faster subconsciously.
The second is exclusive reading, which is only reading for an hour. When you are setting up a reading plan, don’t be greedy because reading is a gradual process. Honestly, many times it’s not as fun as watching TV or reading novels. So when you are setting your own plans, don’t make them too complicated or too ambitious. Remember the concept of “only reading for an hour”.
This concept, used in conjunction with the “Snail Reading” app by NetEase, has a benefit that it only gives you one hour of free reading time per day. Within this hour, you have to pay after you finish reading. Just finish this free hour of reading, it feels like you are getting a bargain, and it’s not a long time so it’s easy to stick to.
The NetEase reading app is especially suitable for reading in fragmented time, such as reading for five minutes on the way to work. It will record that you have read for five minutes. When you close your phone to go to work and read for another five minutes after work, it will continue timing for you. After accumulating an hour, you can get a snail reward.
If you can just ensure that you get this snail every day, that’s already impressive. An hour of reading a day is a lot. Over long periods of time, you can read many books. That’s why the concept I proposed, “just read for an hour”, can prevent us from delaying reading.
That’s about it for today’s lesson. Lastly, here’s a suggestion. Try doing two to three thematic readings during longer holidays in the year, like May Day, National Day, and Dragon Boat Festival. You will find that having a deep understanding of two to three topics in a year already accumulates a great deal of knowledge. If you do this for three or five years, you would have a deep understanding of ten topics.
So, I suggest that everyone should dedicate an hour for reading in their fragmented time, and do some in-depth thematic reading when one has a longer period of time. After you have done thematic reading in a particular field, when you see some related information in the future, like news reports or certain views, your reaction will be very quick and your understanding will be very deep. It will be easy to integrate these new pieces of information, comments, and views into your original knowledge system. This way, you won’t feel like every day is either related or unrelated to you and waste your time reading, as others might feel.