Why you should READ LESS*

by the time this video will be uploaded we're going to be quickly approaching the end of january by this point a lot of people's 2021 resolutions are dwindling and your enthusiasm for the goals that you've set out for yourself is no longer as strong as it was just a few weeks ago when we were all letting out a big sigh of relief as we put a lid on 20 20. so i understand if you've jumped into 2021 hoping to enrich your life with renewed principles and just plain solid knowledge but just like in the case of everything else sometimes slow and steady wins the race so if you're one of the people taking on the challenge of plowing through 50 books this year here's why you should probably read less now if you're an experienced reader who's already been through thousands of books in your life and i've already found the secret to being consistent and productive i'm happy for you but you're probably not the target audience for this video there's plenty of content out there of people flexing how many books they've read last year oftentimes making the uninitiated viewer feel less than putting them in a position of either ordering 50 books in one go that are just gonna gather dust for the next 12 months or feeling discouraged because they'll never find the time to read as much so they never even bothered to give it a shot in the first place [Music] if we look at the search frequency on youtube for terms like books or book lists there's a pretty clear upward trend in the past several years which means there's a growing interest in reading as a hobby this of course is great news but one trend that i see over and over again is the one that you have to read a book every week which is 52 books in a year i made the commitment that i will read a book a week it's about 50 books per year 52 books one book a week a book a week business finance self hope spirituality you name it i probably read it right off the bat there's a couple of things that i find wrong with this strategy first of all how do you define a book i guess you could describe it as a set of pages of written words often divided in chapters bound between two covers but then again there is a huge difference between paula coelhos the alchemist and dostoevsky is the idiot even between books in the same series you can't draw a comparison harry potter and the philosopher's stone is little over 200 pages long while harry potter in the order of the phoenix is almost 800 pages long so when you set yourself the goal of reading a book every week and start getting overwhelmed with other activities you're not going to grab the count of monte cristo you're probably going to go for the 100 page self-help book that largely repeats the same concepts you've heard elsewhere you see when the goal is to just read whatever book every week there will always be a temptation to take the easy way out while still telling yourself that you're doing the right thing if you look at the reading lists of people who have taken on this challenge of reading 52 books every year most of their books fall in this category of personal development and it's hilarious to me the reading advice some of these self-help gurus oftentimes give i know there are people talking about i read a book a day i read a book a week or whatever i read about two to three books a week if i'm looking for any book that i read i have a simple question what are the three ideas i think i can get from the book that i can implement right now sometimes i got the idea just from the table of content if i got rid of the table and read the table content that gave me enough three ideas i put it away and then just implement i mean of course you're gonna read a book a week if you're just reading the table of contents that's gonna be the dumbest advice i've ever heard but hey he's in the back of an expensive car he's in a suit he's wearing aviator shades you can't go wrong with that and that's why i'm here to present my three-step course into reading more books step one buy 100 books step 2 throw away any book that wasn't written by me in fact you know what just buy 100 copies of my book and step 3 just read the front cover every morning you wake up you pick up a new copy of my book read the title and boom you got all the knowledge you need to become just as successful as i am which leads me to my next point [Music] now i don't want to be misconstrued self-help books aren't entirely bad think and grow rich was a book that lit a spark in my mind at the right time in my life and i'm sure there's many other books in the genre that can do that for you but just filling your reading list with self-help and personal development is simply a waste of time this is why it's important to understand the nuance of books not all collections of written words bound between two covers equal valuable knowledge and because the self-development industry generates tons of revenue there is a clear incentive to just regurgitate similar concepts with 90 filler text that's why this genre is a dangerous rabbit hole to fall into and it's a seamless trap because you are reading but you're getting very little benefit from it so instead of setting a goal of reading 52 self-help books this year it's a much better idea to choose four books to read in the next three months but choose books that are vastly different from one another different in topic and style in length fiction nonfiction preferably by authors from different countries and cultures around the world start low and build up from there allow yourself to not just be concerned with the number of books you read but rather with exploring a few different areas that are naturally going to open up gateways for you further down the road and before you know it you're gonna start seeing a pattern of what piques your interest what you like and what you don't like you're gonna know what to organically follow that up with whether it's history you're interested in psychology science or whether you're just into reading fiction all of these are options that will stimulate your mind and expand your understanding of the world around you when faced with the idea of reading history or science stuff that you've learned or are still learning in school a lot of people might bring up the argument that we have the internet now i don't need to know everything anymore if i'm curious about something i'm just gonna google it and i have to be honest here this is something that i myself believed for years as a teenager but i've learned through my own experience that this argument is just wrong not to mention that there's research to prove it three separate studies were made in 2015 pointing out that and i quote the tendency to rely on intuitive rather than analytical thinking is related to a modern form of cognitive miserliness whereby information is sought out from an external source such as a smartphone the association between cognitive miserliness and the extended mind is specific to a reliance on outside informational sources in other words relying on your phone or on google to know things for you makes you scientifically dumber on the other hand studies have also been done to determine the benefits of reading on the brain and the results were staggering it was found that reading increases your ability to empathize thus leading to a more healthy social life reduces stress and depression symptoms improves your vocabulary prevents cognitive decline you may not care about that now but you're gonna be old one day too you know and reading just puts an overall balance in your life which i think anyone can benefit from and here's an interesting fact that i feel gets overlooked reading a physical book puts your brain to work in a way that listening to say an audiobook or a podcast could never match up studies have found that reading involves several brain functions including visual and auditory processes phonemic awareness fluency comprehension and more so when you look at words with your eyes the brain has to process the image and somehow translate that and make sense of it using concepts that it already knows while also forming new connections in the process reading can increase fluid intelligence aka the ability to solve problems understand things and detect meaningful patterns to this day scientists do not understand how exactly the brain is able to do this it's genuinely fascinating reading is unlike anything else there is no other activity that you can undertake that will develop your brain to the same extent so if you're on a journey of reading one self-help book a week for the rest of 2021 i suggest you read less books this year if you have to but read thicker books more diverse books and more importantly than anything else don't do it just so you can cross off a checklist or brag about how many books you've gone through in a year and if you're one of the people who think reading is useless like i used to believe when i was younger i hope this video made you reconsider let me know in the comments what's your favorite book that you've read or if you don't have one in general what type of books do you like to read i'm hoping to see a lot of recommendations in the comments so that those who haven't read as much maybe take your recommendations as a starting point my favorite book that i've read recently is called the last days of the russian aristocracy by douglas smith it's a harrowing compilation of real life stories of how vicious mob mentality can be and how some of the richest families in russia went from having people dress them up in the morning to having to huddle at the center of a freight wagon so as to not freeze to death it's not a sponsor or anything but if that sounds interesting to you i definitely recommend it but that's going to be it for this video as always thank you for watching and we'll see you again very soon [Music] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Andrei Terbea

Views: 1,236,784

Keywords: @andreiterbea, andrei terbea, andrei terbea animation, book, books, why you should read less, why you should read more, reading books, how to read more, how to read more books, how to read more effectively, how to read faster, booktube, books to read, books to read in 2021, books you should read, books you have to read, books you should read before you die, book list, one book a week, one book per week, 1 book per week, 52 books, 52 books challenge, self help, self development

Id: 1EA2GfMZjvs

Length: 8min 45sec (525 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021