Here's a Q: Should you be reading?
Let's face it.
It’s hard to find time for reading. Cutting out a slice of your day is challenging when there is just so much going on. Yet, despite this, presumably millions of people somehow find time to read.
As a small business owner, former student, former minimum wage working two jobs to make ends meet, how am/was I ever supposed to find time to read?
As an owner, I feel like I have much more important immediate concerns.
As a student, I already had to read other works of literature for school how could I find time for something I actually wanted to read?
As an overworked cashier and laser tag referee I was too busy running around town trying to get paid to worry about anything other than games after work.
What's more so, I would argue that most people don’t read. It’s far easier to endlessly scroll through social media than it is to turn a page. Given that there are many more people out there that are business owners, students, and the overworked that struggle to find the time to slow down, they might find what I have to say to be worthwhile.
So most people don’t read, but would agree that they wish they could read more.
If everybody knows that reading is good, why even comment on it?
It’s because far too many people fail to see the full value of reading.
Why?
Because if they understood the true value of reading, they would be doing it.
A few good things reading books can do.
- Engage with you.
- Teach you something new.
The right story can hook you in, just as well as any other engaging topic that you find interesting. While science fiction and fantasy novels where what I read when I was younger, now I am much more interested in business development and entrepreneurship books. (If I find a good game related niche I will be sure to share, as of now the only book closest to my industry is Blood, Sweat, and Pixels.)
Audiobooks were a resource I never seriously considered before a professor of my made the audacious claim of reading 7 books the month prior on top of his other work he normally does.
I never understood the place of audiobooks. If I was going to listen to anything it would be music, followed up by a podcast. Music is stimulating, and podcasts are interesting or funny. Audiobooks were just books with less value since you can’t even hold them!
Hearing my professor go on about how he commutes daily to The Bay, a 3.5hr drive from our area, and digest the book while he drives was eye-opening. True, music and podcasts are stimulating, but I’ve listened to plenty of them before and there will always be time for them later. They haven’t really ever changed my life in the way that a good idea from a book has done.
While I was working multiple jobs I felt like I was always spread so thin. Any downtime between work would be met with music or a funny podcast. There was never a real want or drive to read, I couldn’t see much value in it.
With certainty, I can attribute a lot of my business success to the knowledge I got from reading.
In college I started to listen to books on the way to class and work and found that was a great solution. Now, I work from home so there’s less time to commute. Errands and other activities are still great opportunities but since I don’t listen to audiobooks as much I’ve ended my Audible subscription. Excuse the promotion, but my local library has a ton of free audiobooks available to rent on apps like Libby.
Of course audiobooks aren’t the end-all solution. They won’t check off every box that a book offers since it’s in a different medium (and free the way I do it now).
You don’t have a physical book to display at the end. For some books that I really enjoy I will eventually end up purchasing them. Supporting authors and creator’s is integral to getting good quality books out there, but hoarding books and getting a pile of “I’ll read them later” is another extreme.
Now, I like to periodically take trips to Barnes and Noble and look at the business and entrepreneurship sections. I prefer this over browsing on Amazon since I find it easier to encounter newer books (IE not Amazon’s top sellers). From there I try to find the book off of my library reader app. New releases seem to be on there frequently. If it’s of high interest to me and not available from the library, I’m at the right place to go home with it.
If it’s a good book with a good idea in it, I will try to offer my copy to friends and family that I think would get the most out of it.
Here's my A: