Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.
—HARRY TRUMAN
Reading can do a lot of things for you. Just like stacking books one on top of another can literally help to extend your reach beyond your physical height, reading can help you grow to greater intellectual, social, financial, and spiritual heights; explore limitless destinations and places of interest; and extract wisdom from the minds of history’s great thinkers, innovators, inventors, and leaders. Reading can help you solve problems, unveil mysteries, and develop new insights. It can give you an understanding of things that are not easily understood by non-readers.
Reading opens new, old, and even unopened doors of wisdom. Reading completely engages the mind. If you are looking to live a rich life intellectually, embark on a daily reading journey. Highly accomplished individuals all share one thing in common—they read. Reading elevates your mind; it exercises your brain and causes you to become a better, more effective thinker. Other forms of media do not place as high a demand on your mind to process concepts and ideas as does reading. Think about it. Movies, TV, and anything highly visual in nature delivers all of the images to you. When you read, your mind is forced to imagine the images. Your mind is the creative force in the process of reading.
Books have the ability to take you into great minds and pivotal times. They let you explore the decisions that were made, the mistakes, the triumphs, and the defeats, as well as the principles that were learned and lived. Reading lets you explore beyond the boundaries of what is accepted as possible and say, “Why not?” Books invite you to learn from the mistakes of others without having to make those same mistakes yourself. You can gain insight into the personalities and humanity of great men and women of God, or learn about your industry, history, politics, innovation, humanitarianism, or whatever other field piques your interest.
As author George R. R. Martin put it, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies…. The man who never reads lives only one.” If you desire to experience new levels of intellectual abundance and prosperity, make reading a regular part of your everyday life!
Do you like reading? What would you say prevents you from reading more? Can you commit yourself to read, learn, and become a student again? Are you up for the challenge? Choose a book you’ve always meant to read and go buy it or check it out from the library—today!
If you were to develop a reading plan, what would it look like? Thirty minutes before bedtime, ten pages on your lunch hour? Write down some ideas for a doable daily routine below. Be creative. Remember, these exercises are not about giving you more “busywork” to do in life. They are dedicated to helping you cultivate daily practices to usher you into new levels of intellectual prosperity and richness.
A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.
—MADELEINE L’ENGLE
Now that you’ve had a moment to think about how an ideal reading plan would look, start to put it into practice. We will never reap the benefits of reading unless we read…even if only a little at a time.