Why is Reading important?

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

This is a famous quote by Richard Steele and it is 100% accurate. Think of it as trying to hold water in a dirty sieve. The water will definitely flow out from the pores but if you do it repeatedly, it will surely clean the sieve. The same holds with reading. The dirty sieve here is your mind and holding water is reading. You might not remember the contents of what you read in the long run but it will definitely clean your mind.

Reading should be part of one’s daily habit. I myself read at least 20 pages before going to bed. It is a gateway to anything and everything. Reading develops your creativity and imagination. If you google, you will find out many other benefits of reading ranging from improving concentration to slowing the progress of dementia.

When I say reading, it does not necessarily mean read a book. It can be anything - a tech blog, an article, documentation of a framework, research paper but definitely not your facebook news feed 😛. If you want to start, I would recommend you to start with Atomic Habits. It will not just be your first read but also teach how to build a habit. So maybe you can make reading a habit by reading it!!

Even from your career perspective you need to keep on improving yourself. As you gain more experience you are required to know more stuff too. If you want to be a professional, you should know a sizable chunk of your discipline and always keep increasing the size of that chunk. The frenetic rate of change in every industry means that people must continue to learn copious quantities just to keep up. Would you go to a doctor who did not keep current with medical journals or hire a tax lawyer who did not keep current with the tax laws? So how do you plan to keep up? By learning, which again implies by reading.

The reason why I am stressing so much on reading is because in my opinion any material is made of data collated from several resources. The author must have done vast research and finally expressed all his experience and knowledge of that subject in limited words. So, in order to gain expertise on the subject, where the author spent several months or even years, you can get the same knowledge in maybe days. I would definitely say that giving it a try is worth it.