PRESCRIPTION (1). READING FOR MEANING.
I don’t do personal birthday parties.
Prefer a day of withdrawal from humanity, a deliberate mindset of reflecting on all the blessings bestowed on me everyday, since I was born. And how to give back and allocate scare resources. One major blessing, that keeps on giving, is reading everyday.
I was fortunate that both my parents loved reading. My father enjoyed daily newspapers and medical journals, reading the monthly National Geographic and weekly Time magazine, from cover to cover. My mother loved novels, and word puzzles.
My early memories are dotted with reading interesting pieces in encyclopaedias, Hardy Boys novelettes, and the sports section of the weekend Sunday Times. And reading prose for meaning is where I am at, now. Hundreds of themes about the mysteries of the human condition are condensed into books, and there are thousands of them sitting quietly on my heaving bookshelves. Meters of my best friends: mindfulness, cognitive therapy, habits, Judaica, poetry, biographies, psychiatric disorders, addictions, world history, business administration, investment theory….
Books are my best analogue colleagues. At all times, for many decades now, there must be at least one book open that I am currently reading. (Today, I am reading: Connections - The New Science of Emotions by Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford psychiatrist and neuroscientist describing the new brain investigative field of OPTOGENETICS.)
A lot more of my reading time is now online – sometimes a kindle book, more often a range of news websites that cover a current problem from different angles. I settle in best to 2000 word essays. Social media (What’s App and email) is confined to messages. I don’t do Facebook, or TikTok, or Instagram, to read. Most are highly charged visual images, click bait, anyway.
Everyday I read the digital form of the Financial Times, focussing on the daily BIG READ page. On Sundays, I purchase the weekend paper edition, that stretches over three days to read its contents from front page to the back, especially the Life and Arts section. I also devour the weekly magazine version of The Economist, beginning at the end with the lively obituary. Truly, a blessing.
When the printing press was released in Europe, it ushered in the scientific period with huge advancements in human health care and standard of living. There was a massive shift from illiteracy to both numeracy and literacy. Both underpin job creation, but knowledge workers were better rewarded. The digital economic revolution is upon us, and will probably destroy most jobs that are mundane and replaced by machine learning and artificial intelligence.
The human winners will be those that can read with meaning, fast and in-depth – picking up nuance and providing creative imaginative solutions to current problems. They will be well practised in the craft of reading for meaning.
That is why the 10,000 hour rule applies to developing any form of expertise. So too for reading for meaning. Curiosity is the lubricant, the growth mindset is the engine, and synaptic strengthening the competitive advantage.
Lesson). Read for Meaning, Everyday, In Every Possible Way.