Cultivating the right intentions leads moral improvement, moral improvement leads to human flourishing.Sometimes we make horrible decisions that, luckily, don’t result in disaster. Sometimes we try to do heroic, loving, or generous deeds but don’t make any difference in the world. Moral improvement is a matter of improving your intentions, developing your character, and better understanding why you are aiming at particular morally important goals. And the good life is one that can be captured in a certain kind of story, one that depicts your own moral development accurately.

The Cause And Effect Of Goodness

The “ultimate good” for human beings will involve satisfying our animal needs while also building up virtuous traits of character, over time and in a rational way.Contemporary philosophers name this state as “flourishing”—the complete state of being a well-developed, accomplished, and happy (in the good-feeling sense) person. Those who achieve this goal will feel and act in ways that represent the best parts of our nature. They will acquire all the virtues—like courage, generosity, and wisdom—and will integrate them seamlessly in an intentional and purposefully lived life.

The Ultimate Good: Flourishing

Asking yourself the right questions, followed by deep contemplation is one way to nurture your virtues.The key to weathering any hardship or difficulty is to continually remind ourselves that what matters is not what happens to us but how we respond to it. Can you respond with kindness to those who offend you, or are you stricken with inner rage?The Stoics believed that once we realize that the only thing that really matters is the state of our soul (or character), we can respond to any external obstacles in life by summoning this truth.

The Only Thing That Matters

<ul><li>The Stoic General gives himself advice on virtue and reflects on what he has discovered about the good life in his own adventures.</li><li>He reflects on nature, change, death—not just for himself but for everything in the universe. When he has a question about reality, he writes that down as well. </li><li>He reflects on the meaning of others’ lives in relation to his own—what he has learned from them and why specifically their lives have been good.</li></ul>

The Three Contemplations Of Marcus Aurelius

The stories we tell ourselves shape our lives, the truth of these stories decide to what extent we live in reality.Storytelling is a skill that requires careful attention to the details of life. It requires developing a “morally thick” vocabulary that brings out the nuance in our intentions. Instead of thinking about our decisions in simple terms like “right,” “permissible,” or “inexcusable,” we need more expressive language to capture our situations and our responses to them. We’re sometimes “cowardly” even when we do the right thing. We can be “selfishly motivated,” or “generous.”

The Story Is The Reality

Think about walking from a very dark room into a brightly lit one. You don’t immediately see more—you probably see less. Your pupils have to contract. Your brain has to process very different information. This everyday visual experience is a guide to the more serious difficulty we face when we try to learn. The hard question is how we can move ourselves to see and love what’s real. Do we want the sun or the puppet show? This is the core drama of any great education.

Desire The Truth

Effective altruism is a philosophical movement dedicated to giving people extremely specific advice about how money should factor into living an ethical life.The effective altruism movement is an ethical system guided by three connected assumptions about the role that money plays in the morally good life

Effective Altruism

<ul><li>Many effective altruists think that our primary moral obligation is to reduce suffering and promote happiness and that we can measure the moral worth of our decisions based on how effective those decisions are at improving net happiness.</li><li>Earn to give:  Earn as much as you can. Then dedicate as much of your money as possible to the most effective causes for reducing suffering and promoting happiness.</li><li>Effective altruists think we should decide who to help and how by using data about which interventions are most effective at promoting happiness and reducing suffering.</li></ul>

Living Generously: The Features Of Effective Altruism

Virtue ethicists are sometimes accused of advocating a self-centred morality, one that overemphasizes how your spending and giving affect you, the giver, and your pursuit of eudaimonia. Shouldn’t morality be about other people—about selflessness? But the effective altruists are selfless in a way that few of us can stomach. Their approach makes it very hard to see where there is any room to grow as a person with moral accomplishments and commitments.

Virtue Ethics

Sometimes we make horrible decisions that, luckily, don’t result in disaster. Sometimes we try to do heroic, loving, or generous deeds but don’t make any difference in the world. Moral improvement is a matter of improving your intentions, developing your character, and better understanding why you are aiming at particular morally important goals.And the good life is one that can be captured in a certain kind of story, one that depicts your own moral development accurately, and incorporates other people and the ways you support them in their pursuit of the good life.

Looking Through A Moral Compass

A thought experiment to understand moral psychology:A trolley is careening out of control down some tracks, on a heading to strike and kill five workers. Do you pull the lever to redirect the train which kills only one person? If it is okay to pull the lever, would it also be okay to push one bystander onto some train tracks to stop the trolley from hitting the five workers (killing him in the process)? If one person dies in every scenario, why should it matter that she was pulled rather than pushed, the manner in which the killing happened?

The Trolley Problem

The surprising discovery is that subjects do have different reactions to these variations. The more “person-to-person” the trolley problem is, the more reluctant someone was to act. So people are more likely to pull a lever to change the tracks, much less likely to push another person to their death!

What The Trolley Example Proves

Emotions and pleasure may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue.

Whereas goal-directed activities get their value from culminating in an achievement—crossing the finish line makes the painful marathon worth running—goalless activities have value apart from how they end.Goalless activities are valuable just because you’re doing them, and they continue to be valuable as long as you do them and aren’t diminished in value because they don’t culminate in some big accomplishment.In this category, we can put things like sitting on a quiet dock to watch the waves come in or playing with our kids until we lose track of time.

Contemplation is Pointless, And That Is The Point

Contemplation is continuous—it doesn’t have a clear beginning or end. If you are absorbed in a thought or a moment, there is no definite point when you have to turn away.And contemplation is leisurely—there is no set pace you should strive to do it at and no such thing as being an “efficient” contemplative. Contemplative activities don’t have bittersweet endings, because they don’t really have endings at all.

Contemplation

Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honours as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth or the best possible state of your soul?

Principles that are mistakenly high and strict are a trap; they may easily lead in the end directly or indirectly to the justification of monstrous things

Two Philosophers Ask and Answer the Big Questions About the Search for Faith and Happiness For seekers of all stripes, philosophy is timeless self-care. Notre Dame philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko have reinvigorated this tradition in their wildly popular and influential undergraduate course “God and the Good Life,” in which they wrestle with the big questions about how to live and what makes life meaningful. Now they invite us into the classroom to work through issues like what justifies our beliefs, whether we should practice a religion and what sacrifices we should make for others—as well as to investigate what figures such as Aristotle, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Iris Murdoch, and W. E. B. Du Bois have to say about how to live well. Sullivan and Blaschko do the timeless work of philosophy using real-world case studies that explore love, finance, truth, and more. In so doing, they push us to escape our own caves, ask stronger questions, explain our deepest goals, and wrestle with suffering, the nature of death, and the existence of God. Philosophers know that our “good life plan” is one that we as individuals need to be constantly and actively writing to achieve some meaningful control and sense of purpose even if the world keeps throwing surprises our way. For at least the past 2,500 years, philosophers have taught that goal-seeking is an essential part of what it is to be human—and crucially that we could find our own good life by asking better questions of ourselves and of one another. This virtue ethics approach resonates profoundly in our own moment. The Good Life Method is a winning guide to tackling the big questions of being human with the wisdom of the ages.

philosophy

Philosophy

religionandspirituality

Religion & Spirituality

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

books

Books

The Good Life Method

Far too many good brains have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge.

To be a great reader, it is not enough that you read, it’s also how you read. The following strategies by no means are a complete list, but if you implement even a couple of them,  you’ll not only be a better reader but a better person too.

Reading Right

If you find yourself wanting to speed up the reading process on a particular book, you might want to ask yourself: “Is this book any good?”You turn off a TV show or movie if it’s boring. You stop eating food that doesn’t taste good. You unfollow people when you realize their content is useless.Life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy reading. The thumb rule: 100 pages minus your age — so if you’re 30 years old and a book hasn’t captivated you by page 70, stop reading it.That way, as you age, you have to endure crappy books less and less.

Stop Reading Books You Aren’t Enjoying 

I cannot call somebody ‘hard-working’ knowing only that they read. I need to know what and how they read too.

From Seneca to Ronald Reagan, it has been a best practice to save or collect notes, ideas and quotes.Type out quotes and passages from great books to feel great writing come through you. Have a rough notepad, a collection of quotes, ideas, stories and facts that you want to keep for later. Or just use the Deepstash app! It will make you a much better writer and a wiser person.

Deepstash Before Deepstash

You were in high school when you read The Great Gatsby for the first time. You were just a kid when someone tell you the story of Odysseus.The point is: You got it, right? You’ve already read them or learned about them, so you’re done, right?We cannot be content to simply pick up a book once and judge it by that experience; it’s why we have to read and reread.

Read The Book Again Because You Have Changed Now

If a book changed someone’s life — whatever the topic or style — it’s probably worth the investment. If it changed them, then it will likely at least help you.Ralph Waldo Emerson’s once quoted: “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”

Ask For Book Recommendations

Humans have been fighting and dying and struggling and doing the same things for eons. To not avail yourself of their knowledge is arrogant and stupid.How dare you waste investors’ money by not reading and learning from the mistakes of other entrepreneurs? How dare you so take your marriage or your children for granted that you think you can afford to figure these out by doing the wrong things first?You must learn from the experiences of others. Drink deeply from history, philosophy, and more. Study the cautionary tales and the screw-ups, the failures and successes.

Don't Make The Same Mistakes Others Have Made

The path to wisdom is not a straight one. The journey is long and circuitous with twists and turns, ups and downs, highs and lows. Maybe you’re in the middle of a low right now, or you’re at the very bottom of the valley. This can be a scary place to be, because it can feel like you’ll be stuck there forever.It helps to revisit your favourite books and be energized again.

Reading As Therapy

Simple advice to help you get more out of the books you read, from author Ryan Holiday.

writing

Reading & Writing

education

Learning & Education

6 strategies that will make you a better reader — and person

British American philosopher Alan Watts was born in 1915. He is known for translating and imparting Eastern philosophy to the Western world. He popularised Buddhist and Zen principles in the West and inspired the beat and hippie movements in the United States during the 60s and 70s, causing a major cultural shift from traditional western values.

Alan Watts

Watt's interest in Eastern philosophy comes from enjoying Chinese and Japanese storybooks in his childhood as well as his attraction to Eastern aesthetics. He was raised a Christian but found that Christianity's methods of understanding and dealing with life left him unfulfilled and often with more problems than solutions, such as the true nature of the universe, the self, the meaning of life and how to deal with it. He rejected the idea of an authority figure controlling the universe.

Alan Watts's early life

Watts was drawn further into Buddhism because there is a universal consciousness in Buddhism, where everything is interconnected and interdependent of a singular essence to life that follows its own nature with no boss.
Every object and person is just an expression of this universal nature and follows its nature for the mere sake of itself. Watts wanted to share his peace and connection with the Westerners.

Drawn to Buddhism

Watts found that the Western world was often obsessed with status, wealth, consumption and success. Yet, even when they achieved success, they still appeared to remain lost and disconnected from themselves, their fellow humans and nature. Watts thought that the Western religious idea of an absolute morality and authoritative God did not help the westerner and their ability to resolve these behaviours or help any spiritual essence in themselves.

Ideas about humanity

Self-identification is mainly regarded as ego. As a result of our ego, we tend to feel as if we are detached from what we are observing. Therefore, if there is an I or Me observing, then my internal must be separate from my external.  Watts refers to this as the sense that we are an ego in a bag of skin. But in Zen, Watson's teachings on this concept are incorrect and a source of most of our alienation, anxiety, suffering and subsequent hatred.   According to Zen and Watts, we are none of the things we identify with but are everything and everything in us.

An ego in a bag of skin

Watts defined the term organism-environment not as an organism in an environment, but as an organism and an environment simultaneously. We are also a feature of the whole, therefore we are the whole.

Organism environment

Within the Watson Zen school of thought, success in life is not to change the world or acquire wealth or have the greatest status or power.  The ultimate goal is to become deeply synchronised with nature itself and to realise your behaviour is one with the behaviour of the rest of the world. Realising one's unimportance has the potential to open the door to a new realm of meaningfulness.

Defining success

For Watts, the ideas he shared were not easy and did not resolve all the challenges of being human. Those who knew him did not find him without struggle, inner conflict or vice. Yet, his attempts at understanding the spiritual essence are not without value. Perhaps it is not the exact accuracy of any philosophical idea that is important but what the idea can do for us.

Criticism of Watts's ideas

Alan Watts’s impact on the world continues to reverberate. His teachings remind us about our potential connection to everything we love, hate, and don't care about, as well as our foolishness in thinking we know enough to take anything, including his ideas, too seriously. Shop Pursuit of Wonder merch here: https://www.pursuitofwonder.com/store If you are interested in supporting the channel, you can donate to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/pursuitofwonder Follow Pursuit of Wonder on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/pursuitofwonder Recommended readings associated with this video:  The Way of Zen by Alan Watts: https://amzn.to/2OpO4rC The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts: https://amzn.to/2rszc2P (Above are affiliate links that generate a small commission that supports the channel)

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Videos

The Philosophy Of Alan Watts - Making Sense Of Senselessness

Alan Watts was a philosopher, writer, poet, radical thinker, teacher and critic of society. He popularised Eastern wisdom and interpreted it for a Western audience. <ul><li>He was born close to London in 1915 and discovered a Buddhist Lodge early in his life.</li><li>In 1938, he moved to the United States and became an Episcopal priest.</li><li>In 1951, he moved to San Francisco to teach Buddhist studies.</li><li>In 1956, he began a popular radio show, "Way Beyond the West."</li><li>By the 19060s, his radio talks were broadcast throughout the United States, and the counterculture movement adopted him as a spiritual spokesperson.</li></ul>

The life of Alan Watts

Watts suggests that at a fundamental level, we are all “I”. He states that when you start to see yourself as connected to the whole cosmos, you break down the illusion of being separate from other people around you. While you are a complex being, you're doing all this without ever having had an education in how to do it.

The real you. Who are you, really?

Alan Watts asks whether there is any way in which one can transform one’s own mind. He concludes that it's much better to just accept how you are right now. He says people spend enormous amounts of psychic energy trying to do the impossible. Instead, accept that you are not going to improve the world, and you are not going to improve yourself. When you accept that, you have a huge amount of energy left to do things that can be done.

How to make yourself a better person

Alan Watts adopted a simple approach to meditation based on what he learned from Eastern wisdom. Watts’ approach to meditation is based on his insight that we are all entirely connected and the cosmos. He helps people get into a meditative state by dissolving the boundaries between the perceiving self and the supposed world external to your body and mind.

A simple trick to meditation

“The art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.” - ALAN WATTS

On the present moment

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” - ALAN WATTS

On the meaning of life

“To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.” - ALAN WATTS

On anxiety

“And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words… As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.”- ALAN WATTS

On who you truly are

Alan Watts has completely changed my life, and he's not even alive.

Alan Watts: The essential introduction to his life and ideas

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Zen… does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

A proper exposition of Zen should tease us out of thought, and leave the mind like an open window instead of a panel of stained glass.

Nirvana is right where you are, provided that you don’t object to it.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now

We seldom realize that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

Alan Watts quotes that will change your perspective on life

Reading isn't easy for most people. Research shows that 23% of American adults say they haven’t read a book in a year. It takes practice to sharpen reading and writing skills. If you struggle to read consistently or want to make reading a daily habit, use your intellectual curiosity to choose what to read. Any topic you are curious about can be a starting point for building a consistent reading habit.

Curiosity drives action

Your natural willingness to learn new things can make reading easier. When you're curious and not under pressure to read, you would be more interested in gaining knowledge. Many people pick books based on recommendations, but intellectual curiosities are a better approach if you are in the early stages of making reading a habit.

Many people think reading is a chore or burden

There are four elements you need to create a reading habit:<ol><li>Desire</li><li>A Reading trigger</li><li>A place to read</li><li>Time to read</li></ol>

Elements needed to establish a reading habit

To start developing a reading habit, it’s important to know what you’re looking for. Do you want to acquire knowledge, solve a problem or want to read to enjoy your leisure time? Knowing your goal can help you become a better reader.

Developing a reading habit

Reading isn’t easy for most people. The human brain is wired to speak; it’s not wired to read or write. It takes practice to hone reading and writing skills. In fact, according to research, 23% of…

productivity

Productivity

problemsolving

Problem Solving

Your Intellectual Curiosity Is The Key to Cultivating a Daily Reading Habit

Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads - the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us - drawing them into our own mental processesBy reaching beyond the brain to recruit these "extra-neural" resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively - to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone

The Emerging Science of Thinking with the Whole World Beyond the Brain

Even our metaphors for the mind have taken us further and further from our essential nature as creatures shaped by our environment and our interactions with other creatures, dishonouring Rachel Carson's science-rooted poetic insight that "there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity."We left Plato's cave of consciousness and, corralled by Descartes and the Industrial Revolution, reduced the mind to the brain and explained its workings by drawing analogies to the technology of the hour.

The Reduction Of The Mind

Thought happens not only inside the skull but out in the world, too; it’s an act of continuous assembly and reassembly that draws on resources external to the brain. For another: the kinds of materials available to “think with” affect the nature and quality of the thought that can be produced. And last: the capacity to think well — that is, to be intelligent — is not a fixed property of the individual but rather a shifting state that is dependent on access to extra-neural resources and the knowledge of how to use them.

Understanding Mental Processes

One major aspect of this extended mind is our capacity for interoception — an awareness of the internal sensations of the body that gives us a kind of non-conscious knowledge, which we might term intuition but which is rooted in concrete embodied experience and somatic pattern-recognition. We might not detect the signals consciously, but we respond to the information they carry.

Interoception - Our 8th Sense

When a potentially relevant pattern is detected, it’s our interoceptive faculty that tips us off: with a shiver or a sigh, a quickening of the breath or a tensing of the muscles. The body is rung like a bell to alert us to this useful and otherwise inaccessible information. Though we typically think of the brain as telling the body what to do, just as much does the body guide the brain with an array of subtle nudges and prods. Researchers have even captured the body in mid-nudge, as it alerts its inhabitant to the appearance of a pattern that she may not have known she was looking for.

Benefits Of Our Interoceptive Sense

Our whole body is connected to the universe, and we have reduced it to a machine.

mindfulness

Mindfulness

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

The Magpie in the Mind: The Emerging Science of Thinking with the Whole World Beyond the Brain

<ul>
<li>While negative thoughts create "limiting beliefs", and in turn prevent positive things from happening, positive thoughts - when focused on specific goals and outcomes - can make those things happen.</li>
<li>You are co-creating with the universe.</li>
<li>One key caveat: "You can only manifest in line with your higher purpose."</li>
<li>Silicon Valley tapped into millennial ennui by taking astrology into the app age. Subscriptions services such as Sanctuary boomed by billing themselves as an "Uber for astrological readings".</li>
<li>If you don't believe what you're saying, you're blocking it with negative thoughts.</li>
</ul>

Manifesting takes the idea of a positive mental attitude and runs with it

<ul><li>Most manifesting sessions end with palms pressed together in a prayer-like pose, though it's "the universe" we're told to give thanks to.</li><li>The idea is to look both at the thing we want to manifest and at ourselves from an outsider's perspective.</li><li>Part of manifestation involves looking at the positive side of everything.</li></ul>

Manifesting is religion without the altruism

It's clearly a growth subsection of a wellness market now said to be worth a staggering $1.5tr.<ul><li>Natalie Benmayor, the founder of the wellness jewelry label Capsule Eleven, launched her brand in the pandemic.</li><li>She had the idea for a company selling high-end "spiritual" jewelry items, which, she says, she subsequently manifested.</li><li>People did need it, they felt hopeless and manifesting became a way to take back control.</li><li>House of Roxy, a manifestation company, started selling do-it-yourself manifestation kits and began hosting professional sessions once lockdown ended.</li></ul>

The business of manifesting is tough to quantify

<ul><li>On YouTube, teen manifesters teach things like the “3-6-9” method.</li><li>on Instagram, they’ve taken to crowdsourcing - remarkably specific posts circulate saying things like “A huge check of $118,811 is about to land in your hand tomorrow! Type YES to Affirm” under which hundreds of people write “YES”.</li></ul>

Gen Z manifesting has taken on some curious quirks

Can hopes become reality just through the power of positive thinking? Yes, say the latest new age gurus and their – suggestible – audiences

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

Making dreams come true: inside the new age world of manifesting

Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.

There are two types of inspectional reading: systematic skimming, also known as pre-reading or intelligent skimming, and superficial reading. 
The first type of inspectional reading is systematic skimming, which you can easily put into practice today.

Inspectional Reading

<ul>
<li>Read the cover and preface. </li>
<li>Read the table of contents, which will give you a feel for the map of the book.</li>
<li>Understand the language of the book. This means skimming the index. Not only will this give you an idea of the range of topics covered but it will also tell you the other people the book connects to and the jargon used in the book.</li>
<li>Identify the pivotal points. </li>
<li>Read the end. Authors generally do a good job summarizing their work in the last few pages. This is where they sum up what they think is most important about their work.</li>
<li>Listen to an interview or podcast of the author.</li>
</ul>

How To Systematically Skim A Book

﻿Skimming helps you reach a decision point: Does this book deserve more of my time and attention? Why?Unless you’re reading for entertainment, if you can’t answer that question, you can toss the book.Mastering intelligent skimming will:<ul><li>save you a lot of time because most books are not worth reading</li><li>offer knowledge of the book’s blueprint and contents so you know where to find stuff if you need it in the future</li><li>and improve retention, if you decide to read the book in its entirety because you’ve primed your brain with the contents.</li></ul>

Deciding To Read The Entire Book

This is used when you’re taking a book that’s notably above your level.
A superficial reading means that you quickly read from start to finish without stopping to ponder the things you don’t understand. The reason this works is that by reading the book from start to finish, you’ll have a great overview of what’s going on. You might only understand 25% of what’s going on but that’s better than nothing. Should you decide to go back and re-read the book, a lot of the things that gave you pause the first time would have been resolved.

Superficial Reading

Superficial reading is the first step towards analytical reading – that is, understanding and interpreting a book’s contents. If you stop and go over everything you don’t understand on your first reading, you get lost. Sure you finish the book but you’ve lost sight of where you’ve been and where you’ve come.
Inspectional reading should be able to answer the questions, what kind of book is it? what is it about? and what is the structure, or blueprint, of the book “whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter?”

Just Read It

There are millions of books out there. Most of them aren't worth your time. This article shows two powerful ways to get the gist of any book in under 60 minutes.

Warren Buffett describes his day as “I just sit in my office and read all day.” Reading more is a common ambition. But how do we do it? And what should we do with all that information once we have it?

Reading more

The average adult reads 300 words per minute. Speed readers read 1,500 per minute. But reading faster is not always the right solution to reading more. Some reports state that speed reading or skimming leads to forgotten details and poor retention. Comprehension and reading for pleasure are more important, yet bumping up your words per minute while still maintaining reading comprehension can help to supercharge your reading routine.

Supercharge your reading

Tim Ferriss describes two techniques for reading faster: <ol><li>Using a pen as a tracker and pacer, the same way people would move their finger back and forth across a line as they read.</li><li>Start reading each new line at least three words in from the first word of the line, then end at least three words in from the last word.</li></ol> The first technique leads you into the second technique.

Read for Speed

A Pew Research study found that the average person reads 17 books a year. 19 per cent of Americans don't read any books. The average person spends 35 hours watching TV every week, some of which could be spent reading books.

Make time to read more

Train your brain with impressions, association, and repetition. <ul><li>Impression: Be impressed with the text. Stop and imagine a scene in your mind, adding elements to strengthen the impression.</li><li>Association: Link the text to something you are already familiar with.</li><li>Repetition will help you to remember more. For example, you can re-read a certain passage, highlight it or write it down, then return to it again later.</li></ul>

Three ways to remember what you read

There are four levels of reading, each step building on the previous step. <ol><li>Elementary reading is what you did in school.</li><li>Inspectional reading takes two forms: A quick read or skimming of the book's preface, table of contents, index and side jacket.</li><li>Analytical reading helps with the context and understanding of the book.</li><li>Syntopical reading means that you read books on the same subject and challenge and contrast them.</li></ol> Reading on an analytical and syntopical level will help cement the impression of the book in your mind and help develop associations with other books.

Focus on the four levels of reading

Books are an investment in a future of learning. <ul><li>Bookmark your favourite passages.</li><li>Take notes.</li><li>Write a review.</li><li>Return to your notes periodically.</li></ul>

Takes good notes

Get this practical guide on how to read more books, more quickly and more often, and how to retain the information that you read.

The Good Life Method

6 strategies that will make you a better reader — and person

The Philosophy Of Alan Watts - Making Sense Of Senselessness

Alan Watts: The essential introduction to his life and ideas

Alan Watts quotes that will change your perspective on life

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