Should I be cultivating discipline by rereading the Bhagavad Gita, or combating my perfectionism by rereading the Dao De Jing? Now I wonder whether I should be repeating the same process with new mental habits. These were domains where I hadn’t cultivated strong mental habits, so simply hearing ideas once or twice wasn’t enough. I was new to setting goals, being organized and productive, trying to start a business. Instead, the value was to cultivate a way of thinking. Given the abundance of story telling, and easy explanations, it certainly wasn’t so dense that I couldn’t get the main points from one or two listenings. With all due respect to Ziglar and Tracy, much of their writing struck me as common sense. The value here wasn’t so much informational. Years ago, I remember putting the same CDs of a Zig Ziglar or Brian Tracy book into a walkman every time I went for a morning jog. Rereading to Cultivate Mental HabitsĪlthough I’ve reread few books, I’ve relistened to many audio books multiple times. But for the few books I have reread (such as The Count of Monte Cristo), I found the predictability of the story allowed me to focus on other things on subsequent visits. I’ve only reread a handful of books, so in this practice I’m a novice. Ritual re-reading, therefore, acts as a guide to your thinking patterns, pushing you along familiar grooves, but giving you the freedom to discover new ideas within the same topic. However, the act of reading still primes your mind to think on tangents roughly related to the source material. Rereading has some virtues in that, once read, the material becomes a lot easier. Sometimes you need a different type of structuring to get the kind of thinking you desire. Writing constrains some aspects of the thinking process, freeing mental resources for others, but it does so in a particular way. I’ve started journal entries with the intention to write about one topic and ended up moving to another. It helps organize thoughts, but it doesn’t give a template for having them. Many problems which were fuzzy in my head became clear once I wrote them down.īut most writing is unguided. Not a log of daily events, but a canvas to sketch out my thinking. Long before I wrote a blog, I kept a journal. It can be difficult to sustain contemplation of an important topic for the time required to develop an insight about it. The mind wanders and flits about to different daydreams and emotions. Structured thinking is actually quite difficult to do. The ease of reading opens up more mental space for contemplation. Knowing the exact content of a text means you need far fewer mental faculties to read it. Rereading may be horribly inefficient from the process of gathering information, but perhaps its virtues lie in structuring your ability to think about a topic better. Namely, that the main value of a book is the information it provides. In a world of nearly-infinite books, why spend countless hours revisiting old ones? Rereading as Structured Thinkingīut behind that reasoning, there’s an assumption. Subsequent readings may catch some missed information, but surely less than the first. It must be the case that you get the most information from a book on its first pass through. I’ve read hundreds of books which sit on my bookshelf, barely remembered.įrom an information standpoint, rereading seems absurdly wasteful. I’m fascinated by rereading, although I’m afraid I’ve done very little of it. According to him, this extreme rereading, “provides the physical activity of reading without the mental acuity usually required.” This allows him to appreciate the text in a completely different way. Stephen Marche claims to have read Hamlet over 100 times. Rereading the same book repeatedly seems to offer them new insights on each passing. I have friends who have books they read every year.
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