Hello and welcome to our little asylum here. And in this week's post, again, continuing on with the theme of something practical every single week that I can share on 4chan: why is it a case that so many people want to get into more reading yet we we somehow just build a case around in our heads. So by the end of the week, we still struggle to read anything.This is something I didn't particularly appreciate when I was younger. is just that with every year that goes by, your life is going to get a lot more busy. Your life will never reach a point where it's like the toilets scrubbed, dinners made, the TV has good internet, and you're just sitting there thinking to yourself, "Life is perfect." Even in my own life right now, there are just more projects to do, more people to see, and more relationships to maintain. And my question for you is, with all of that happening, how do you fit reading into your life?And now here's problem number one. Whenever we want to get into reading, there's a very very good chance that we are still carrying some kind of literary trauma from our high school years. We still think of reading as this kind of 4 hours in a library trying to read a book before an exam kind of thing. Or we think of reading as this kind of elegant activity and you have to do it among great paintings or with a butler next to you.So now we kind of have a double whammy happening. On the one hand, as you get older, your life is going to get busier. And as you race towards that kind of your your prime career building years, uh you're going to realize, man, that luxury of, you know, getting locked up in the library in high school for 4 hours just to finish an assignment. That is a luxury right now. I'm lucky if I get 10 minutes on a train to read something.And on the other hand, you have this thing in your head building a case around reading. You think of it as this grand ritual. And in particular for people who are just getting back into reading, it's really easy to let those memories of early engagements with literature and all the stuff that your teachers try to get you to read and all that like dislike and all the disgusting sensations of sitting through a 600 page book because you're getting tested on it. They're actually preventing you from just seeing reading as what it is. It's just staring at words on a page. That's it. Staring words on a page. There's nothing complicated about it.
About like 6 years ago, I read an article that completely changed how I look at reading. No, it's not an academic article. It's something actually quite readable, insanely readable. It is called how to read more a lot more. This post by Ryan Holiday. I used to read a lot of Ryan Holiday. And in this article, he basically said, "The key to reading lots of books begins with stop thinking of it as some activity that you do. Reading must become as natural as eating and breathing to you. It's not something you do because you feel like it, but because it's a reflex, a default. And once you get this idea into your skull, you'd realize that you can basically read anywhere. You can read in your front yard. You can squeeze in a few minutes when you're on a work break. You can even read when you're on set for a photo shoot. Are you done yet?So, you see, the possibilities open up and you start to realize that long stretches of reading time is indeed a luxury. Because this weekend, it was a weekend filled with like IKEA shopping because I I'm redoing a whole living room. And even today, I went on a photo shoot to finalize a newsletter launch. Finally broke my way into the studio. It's got a New York City kind of vibe and it is super echoey. We're trying to make this work, which I will announce very, very soon. You can go check out that newsletter, but I'll walk you through it in the next post. It's one of the more exciting projects that I'm working on.Anyway, if there's one takeaway that you want to take away from this week's video, if there's one experiment that I want you to do this week, is that simply slip reading into your everyday life, it doesn't have to be complicated.I carry a Kindle with me all the time. And now I try to rewire my habits instead of scrolling on the phone for 20 minutes when I'm riding in a carriage. I would read. I would scroll on my Kindle. It's the same, you know, motion with your with your thumb, right?So, instead of scrolling on your phone, find a book that's really interesting to you and just start reading. It doesn't matter if it's a romance novel. It doesn't really matter if it's fanfiction.And in fact, following the theme from last week's post of deliberately underperforming or underdoing everything so that it becomes more sustainable and consistent, I want you to find a book that's deliberately below your reading level. Now, you might be a university graduating literature, so you're comfortable with like Toltoy and all those impressive thick books. Or if you're like me, you're more into like the theoretical stuff. Literary theories is my all-time favorite.
go back to youtube, waldun
But something that I've been reading is Malcolm Gladwell. I think his books are incredibly well written and they're very readable and I learn something new every time I read a Malcolm Gladwell book.So, you don't choose something that is so difficult throughout your day. We're talking about a busy week here. You might be able to carve out a few hours over the weekend to read something that's more like a little bit above your level, but during the week, if you want to get some extra reading time in, choose something that's deliberately under your reading level that is still informative and practice this idea of training yourself and viewing reading as a reflex so that over time you can start to break this association in your head between reading and this kind of laborious thing that you do in a high school library.And the beautiful thing is reading is a skill. So, the more you read the kind of stuff that's kind of like a peg below your current reading level, the more you're going to get better at reading. You're going to get better at interpreting arguments. You're going to get better at noting thoughts down. Your reading speed is going to start to increase the more you read.And once you train up those muscles, you can gradually level up your reading level to the point where you can sneak some pretty impressive reading material throughout the week.And that is how I recently managed to squeeze more reading throughout the week. So I don't build a case in my head about how I need to read something very difficult over the weekend. Because if that happens, reading will forever remain a boogeyman in your head. Reading will just not become a part of your life.And the quickest way for you to start reintegrating reading back into your life is by deliberately reading a little bit every single day. And deliberately read under your current capabilities.And also, I'd love to know what you're about to read this week if you want to try out this experiment. Rob Molden here. Hope this experiment was quite helpful and I'll see you in the next one. Take are and goodbye.
>>25162354*Take care and goodbye. Sorry about that.
Are you the fella that posted about how to read shakespeare?
>>25162366He's been posting this shit for a week now
>>25162366He's copying and pasting Waldun's youtube transcripts
