Like most people, I am an office worker, and if I want to learn, I can only use my spare time. My hobby is occasional writing, which has nothing to do with my college major. Many readers also want to learn from my learning methods so that I will share these methods now.
First, let’s discuss the question:
Is reading useful?
It stands to reason that there is no need to discuss this matter, but I don’t know why many people have doubted that reading is useful. In the past two years, in the process of writing blog public accounts and blogging, I have met many big self-media VAs, and their reading volume is very high. Some time ago, Ma Qianqiu said that he has to browse tens of millions of words every year, and the same is true for other self-media Big Vs. They write articles based on a lot of reading.
Someone said, “How can you think of something when your mind is empty.”
If a person wants to output, he must rely on accumulation. This is common sense.
Many people are puzzled by this. In their view, with a search engine, there is no need to read books. Even with a search engine, we still need to read books, and the search tool itself is a tool. Since it is a tool, it must depend on the person who uses it.
For example, can you make a cabinet if you give yourself a set of carpenter’s tools? The main function of search engines is to “confirm” your thoughts or to confirm a doubtful point. If you don’t understand some issues deeply, you don’t even know what to search for.
Now that I know reading is useful, how can I read some books between work?
Preemptive
My method is called “preemptive.” This is a special vocabulary for the operating system. What does it mean?
The hardest thing I found early on was starting something. I have a little spare time. When I was about to read a book for a while, I thought: Why not play a “PUBG Mobile” game first?
After finishing playing “PUBG Mobile,” I thought about it again, watched a few Douyin videos, and chatted with friends. Every day like this is wasting time. Generally speaking, you can’t grab the “time slice” for reading and studying every day.
Therefore, I force myself to read two pages of the book every day and then do other things after reading the two pages. I can grab the “time slice” for reading daily. Once you pick up the book, everything is possible.
I bought a set of “History of Britain” before, which has more than a thousand pages. If you read two pages of this book every day, it will take two years to finish it. But I watched it for a month and nearly a half, so a person’s potential is far beyond my imagination.
To overcome the problem of laziness, when making a study plan, the key is to keep your daily goals small and compromise with yourself first. Don’t embarrass yourself too much. If you don’t embarrass “him,” “he” will work for you. That’s right, there is someone inside you that you don’t understand at all, and you need to communicate more with “him.”
To keep yourself studying, you need to reward yourself. When it takes a long time to get something done, you must give yourself an appropriate reward.
For example, if you persist in the goal of reading two pages of books for 30 or 40 days, reward yourself and treat yourself as another person completely. You will be pleasantly surprised to find that you don’t know yourself.
If you persist in doing one thing for one or two hundred days, it will come naturally after you get used to it. The brain builds “highways” for habitual actions. Neuroscience believes frequent repetition of certain actions changes the neural structure, making it more proficient and difficult to undo.
In other words, in the newly formed neural pathway, the spread of information will be accelerated, and a conditioned reflex will gradually form, like brushing your teeth or shaving your beard. After a year of persistence, it will be very uncomfortable not to do this thing every day.
In addition, it is a matter of learning methods. Taking learning history as an example, many readers asked me, I want to know the history of ××. Where should I start?
We should be grateful for this wonderful era. If you find it difficult to arouse interest in reading books, you can start by watching documentaries. For example, if you want to learn British history, you can watch BBC documentaries first.
But no matter whether you start learning from reading books or watching documentaries, the most important thing is that you have to build up the overall knowledge framework first and then read books on special topics—books on the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, the War of the Roses, and the Anglo-Dutch Wars, fill that overall knowledge framework little by little, and your knowledge will be enriched.
When you have been in this field for a long time, your understanding of this field will naturally become richer and richer.
Time always flies, and it is five years in a blink of an eye. If you choose a certain field today, you may be an expert five years from now.
This learning method also aligns with Buffett’s sayings: a small snowball rolls down a long snow slope, getting bigger and bigger, and the acceleration, impact force, and scale all show accelerated expansion. Keep scrolling down. Accumulate over time, and you will achieve something.
If a person can read a certain book several times in his spare time and thoroughly understand it, it will be very beneficial.
How to start
Many people want to master writing skills but don’t know how to start. The best way to learn is to write down your experience after reading something and summarize it in your language. You will find that the more you write, the more agile you are, and the training of thinking is also very powerful, which can make the knowledge organized and the brain clear. And as time goes on, the effect will become increasingly obvious. If you do one thing, it’s useless to do it for a week, and it’s useless to do it for two months, but if you can last for five years, you can make a name for yourself.
The reason why many people don’t feel good about writing is that, on the one hand, they write less, and the brain does not form an information superhighway. Reading two pages a day, writing a few dozen words, and posting them on a blog will have a miraculous effect after a long time. I was writing reading notes on the blog at the beginning, and now I have hundreds of thousands of followers; on the other hand, the brain stores too little, and a lot of reading is needed to solve it.
Many people always ask, what should I do if I forget after reading the book?
This can be broken down into two questions:
First, it is normal for a person to forget some books just after reading them, especially when he is new to a certain field, and it is full of new terms, so it is strange not to forget them. However, the brain’s processing of information relies on “redundancy.” That is to say, after you know the four ways of writing fennel beans. You will write fennel beans for the rest of your life.
You’ve seen an elephant from a hundred angles and can recognize its bones, but you’ve only glimpsed a snapping turtle, and you probably can’t figure out what’s special. The same is true for the cognition and memory of information. When you get a description of an event from different angles, the event will be completely solidified in your mind, and it is difficult to make mistakes.
Second, those who write professional articles also remember which knowledge points are in which book. He has a general impression. He knows which book to look for when he needs to write.
