“Do you know about this author? I think you would like him”
“I am aware of him, yes, but I never really actually sat down to read him”
With access to so many interesting authors, it’s difficult to choose which ones I want to devote more attention to and which ones I want to keep only in the fringes of my radar.
And many of them, in some of their productions, could unlock something life-changing in my way of seeing the word. They could lead me to the first stepping stone towards entirely new and brilliant paths, that I would have never come across hadn’t I read them.
Others could barely be considered authors, but their behaviour, the intriguing way in which they move through the world and which their actions reflect, their image and their aura inspire ideas in us that create a similar kind of mindset change.
Is there some way of devising a more intentional mode of choosing to whom we are exposed in our explorations of the world of content? I would say that there is at least a ratio between precise, goal-oriented planning and a productive preparation for serendipity. Again: goal-oriented consuming vs. serendipity-prepared consuming.
But let’s go back to the initial quote. The second interlocutor doesn’t have the time to read him because she knows that she needs to devote a good deal of her limited time to developing her ideas instead of consuming others.
I think that when we read there is a limited quota of how much information we can incorporate so it sticks with us. The rest pours out of the metaphorical overfilled bucket of our minds. A great problem with this situation is that we don’t obtain such a big return from all the time and effort that we spend consuming this content. Granted, some part of it will remain somewhere in our subconscious in some way or another (as Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”). Still, with such an endless selection of content sources that we can select from, finding an ideal return on investment from reading can be difficult. Of course this is not to diminish the pleasurable and enriching experience that reading is regardless of how much time we spend on a good book. What I mean with this ideal ROI is how better it could be if we thought out of the box for a bit.
To confront this problem we can look again at goal-oriented consuming and serendipity-prepared consuming. With a goal-oriented consuming, we scan the content with carefully pre-orchestrated intentionality and decisively swoop down on all those parts that serve our purposes while skimming on the rest. This is the researcher way. We enter the book with a mission and if we know what we are doing, we leave it knowing whether it was of help or not and how it did help us.
On the other hand, with a serendipity-prepared consuming, we are more thorough in our reading of the text, keeping an eye for all of its hidden treasures that we couldn’t have possibly anticipated had we entered the content with a precise mission. To be prepared for serendipity means to know how to listen to our intuition when we find something that sparks our interest and then knowing how to bookmark it and capture it somehow for later use. It also means to know how to follow the leads that interesting parts of a text can reveal to us. It can be a new idea, a historical process we didn’t know about, a theory, a phenomenon, anything really. Lastly, it can also mean to know how to develop the valuable ideas that the content itself inspires in us.
I would like a reading experience where reading time estimations are subverted in a way that we flip the ratio of consumption and application of ideas, tipping the scales towards the latter. In this sense, we venture into a new, long text by an author that we had on our radar but never properly read because we didn’t have the time. Then, the text provider generously warns us that while it would take us 1 hour to read the whole thing, we can redistribute our information-interaction style by reducing our reading time to a 30% of the original one and increasing our application time enough to fill the gap that is left. To put it easily, we would use this hour differently, with 20 minutes for reading and 40 minutes for application.
Now, the interesting part here would be how as a text provider (or the author himself) one could make this second option where application prevails over consumption more attractive on an ROI standpoint. What could one offer to make up for the loss of coming across possible gems in the text with more reading time, or maybe using this 1 hour reading time to finish the text faster and move on to another one, skipping the vital application phase?
It’s not an easy question to answer, but accepting that there is a problem and finding a way to formulate the question is a start.
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