Reading Should Be A Flow Activity
Over the past few weeks I have tried to up my reading. Normally I am a pretty active reader but lately I have been feeling some resistance to the activity. I think often times when I start to read I get really excited over a new book, then once I settle in the reality of the book sets in. This is where I think I have been conditioned from early ages in school to just grind through and finish the book. This leads to less enjoyable reading sessions and this feeling of resentment toward reading this book. Often I find myself saying no I need to finish the book or that I need to continue to grind though it and get to the end.
Unfortunately I have found that good books that hold my interest over 200 plus pages are hard to find. One author who has done a great job of this over my life has been Walter Issacson. He is an illustruous writer who often has books of over 300+ pages. Normally when I have read his books they have been really well written and often his storytelling makes them engaging throughout the whole book. His works that I recommend are Jobs, Leonardo Di Vinci, Code Breakers. I have run into two of his books that fall short of these three though. The Innovators. Now I the first half of the Innovators lives up to its billing as a titan of technology history. But I didn’t find this book as engaging after a certain point. Now this posting isn’t meant to be a book review but rather a look at a new reading strategy which should be reading for flow.
I’m going to commit to reading over the next few weeks several books that I want to read for the enjoyment of it. I don’t want to read them because I feel I need to finish, or that I someone am letting myself down when you hit a road block. These feel like older strategies for reading. I want reading to be a flow activity for me. Something that I get into and after reading I don’t even realize where the time has gone. I want reading to be enjoyable and fun. I don’t want reading to feel like I am going to work. Reading though work intensive, should not feel like a drag on your life. I find that my best reading experiences have always been when I find books that are engaging to me specifically. Reading because others are reading or reading because we feel like we need to finish are negative value adds. The fact that we live in a world where books are so plentiful and so many topics that we should somehow find our way to finishing every book we start is not the way that we should be approaching reading.
Making reading more engaging and not work related should be the goal. My goal over the next month is to stop reading books that don’t engage me past a certain point in the hopes that I will somehow gain something from from. The value that I am losing in not exploring other books in the mean time is really what I am missing by not moving off of my current book is what I want to avoid. Lastly I want to avoid not reading which is the bigger issue that we face as readers. We want to read books, so being an explorer when it comes to them is probably more important than not reading. So I say have a scout mindset, stop when you find the value is a negative add or you are starting to resent reading. Get a new book, find a new author and move on to different material.
