Reading a lot of great books improves our knowledge, judgment and mental models. But many people rarely engage with the content of their books. By Thomas Oppong.
When you aim to read hundreds of books a year with no regard for absorption, you probably won’t get all the knowledge you need from the books. To improve your retention rate, you have to slow down and think deeply about the new ideas.
Successful reading requires metacognition.
When you are metacognitive, you are aware of your own thought processes and think about your thinking. It’s a vital skill for learning and retaining new knowledge.
When you apply metacognition to reading:
- You make time to analyze the content and reflect on what you are reading.
- You ask critical, challenging, and analytical questions whilst reading.
- You make time to figure out what you already knew before reading and what you want to improve.
- You’ve thought about what to do to retain more of what you read
- You plan on applying some of the ideas in the book in your life. Successful readers use metacognition to understand what they want from books. They also use it to improve their reading experience.
Most great books require an investment of 5–10 hours to absorb the content thoroughly. When you plan of spending a lot of your time on good books, it’s essential to make sure you are getting the most knowledge out of them without wasting time.
We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words. Deliberate reading means you take your books seriously. It’s one of the best ways to acquire and retain new knowledge. Good read!
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