Marcel Legros - Play the Game of Life

Why read a book? I Have TV.

Language is the primary force that separates man from all the other animals. We gain our understanding of the world through language, from the moment we’re born. Learning new information is best explored through books. Most magazines are very thin on content and do not count as reading. Newspapers or news sites can be helpful, but are loaded with filler. Here’s a good example from today’s CNN’ website home page:

It looks very informative and loaded with content. Watch what happens when all the graphics, ads, and non-informational content is removed.

Now we can see how thin on real information most news sites feed us…

Books are the single best way to learn new material because they are content rich, focused on a specific topic, and don’t rely on advertising for their existence. The invention of written language, the printing press, and now the internet have each revolutionized the speed of human progress and human communication - yet very few people actually read.
Here are some scary statistics (source - http://www.parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm):

• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
• 57% of new books are not read to completion.
• Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.
• Only 32% of the U.S. population has ever been in a bookstore.
• The time Americans spend reading books:
  • 1996: 123 hours
  • 2001: 109 hours

It’s obvious there is something wrong here. There are a lot of reasons for this alarming trend but I want to focus on just one of them now - people think they don’t have enough time. This isn’t true of course, we have more convenience and time-saving tools in modern life than ever before. The problem is we also have more distractions available to us as well. People waste more time today than in the history of man - it’s called entertainment and it’s everywhere.

Speed Learning

I have a simple suggestion for all of you who don’t feel they have enough time in the day to read a book. In my post, “Slow Down, Get More Done,” I mention that most of us waste an enormous amount of time every day in our cars - usually on our daily commute. Although there is no substitute for reading, there is no reason to be wasting all that time sitting in traffic. Audio books are readily available from bookstores and online. Often, the price of an audio book is less than the actual thing. Go to iTunes and you can find thousands of books on almost any topic that you can upload to your iPod or burn to disk. Instead of listening to news or music while you drive to work, play your audio book. Almost anyone can finish at least one book a week using this method. I drive a lot, so it is nothing for me to go through two books every week, just in the car. Start now and you’ll have listened to 52 books in a year from now.

Congratulations, that one hour drive through gridlock traffic just made you smarter!