I got into reading at a very young age. I first started to read when I was 3, and it got me into trouble very soon. During the siesta time at my kindergarten, I was absolutely uninterested in sleep, but wanted to repurpose the time for reading. One of my teachers did not believe that I yet had an ability to read, and, apparently, to educate me about the importance of being honest, they made me read in front of everyone. And I did. And I changed kindergarten soon after.
At 20, I stopped reading books. I became utterly convinced that there was no point whatsoever to waste my time on fantasies of others. Instead, I was very focused on acquiring practical information on analytics, algorithms and world order in general. Also, there were loads of parties. And some boys.
This morning, at 34, I finally found a counterargument to my then reasoning. Reading is, perhaps, the only way to understand people. Human relationships are hard. They were extremely hard for me, and, with age, they only got slightly easier. It is still a massive challenge to catch and internalise the waves that others send, let alone being able to do so on a constant basis with multiples of very different humans.
Not doing so hurts, too, because human contact is an integral part of our mental and physical well-being. It is hard-wired into our system. There is no way out of it.
Being a data professional for the last almost 15 years and having designed recommendation systems for end humans for a living, I still cannot quite say what people actually want. There are tons of research, and the next social media guru will educate you on how to become an influencer. Nevertheless, despite the fact that data gives us a holistic view (sorry, consulting jargon) of a matter under investigation, we generally tend to look at what we want to look at. Machine learning methods can detect latent patterns, but an average human will have a hard time making sense of them at first. It is difficult to see what is in the blind spot.
Books, in their turn, can help broaden one’s positional angle.
If only someone could have told me this 15 years ago. I had way more time to read then. How many broken relationships and awkward situations would have been spared. The overall output would have been greater.
But better late than never.
This year, I am setting up a goal of 36 books a year. It is an ambitious goal for me, given circumstances. This is over a book a week. Other people’s goals are way more demanding than mine, and I don’t cease to amaze how brilliant and disciplined people around me are. Everyone has just 24 hours a day - even Beyonce, they say.
Hopefully, by 2021 we all will read more and learn human a bit better.
x
