Learn To Read-Read To Learn

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I am a reader. 

 

The reason I am a reader is not just because I am in the newspaper business. Yes, I do read the newspaper daily. 

The reason I am a reader is because I have learned, by reading, that leaders are readers. 

There is a building in downtown Lawton, Oklahoma and hundreds of other cities and towns in America, that prominently displays that it is a Carnegie Library. 

Andrew Carnegie was a self-made, rich-man. A total of 2,509 Carnegie Libraries were built between 1883 and 1929. All of them were built with Andrew Carnegie's money!

Andrew Carnegie believed that the knowledge contained in books would provide the “industrious and ambitious” the knowledge they needed to succeed in whatever they chose to be successful at. He was not interested in helping those that did not want to be helped. 

You must learn to read, and you must read to learn. There is no short cut to this prescription for accelerating and sustaining your success. 

Most of my reading is business and self-help books. I read with a highlighter and the more relevant and impactful, the more I highlight. I can then revisit the books and reread the highlighted portion to reacquaint myself with those messages that meant the most at the time I was reading. 

A business book I recently read is:

The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni.

“Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business”

What I learned from The Advantage;

1. Companies must be smart and have great organizational health

(Health is the way the author describes companies that have a strong culture) 

2. You have to slow down to go fast

3. People in healthy organizations learn from each other

4. Leaders must overcome the tendency to run from discomfort

5. Conflict must occur, and trust must be established for that to happen

There is much more I highlighted, but this is a great look at what I learned in just this one book! 

Currently I am reading a collection of Harvard Business Review articles on Mental Toughness and it is very enlightening. 

Not all of my reading is business. I just finished The Lords of The Plains by Max Crawford. Max Crawford is an amazing writer. 

There are thousands of sources to choose from that deliver edifying reading material. It is probably a good idea to be somewhat selective in your reading material, but read something, daily. Ask your friends what read and what they have read recently. 

The positive benefits to reading are too many to list, but an expanding vocabulary is surely near the top of that list. And if you don’t know what a word means, look it up!

Learn to Read-Read to Learn.