Saturday, January 17, 2009

Take time to ponder


A friend gave me a wonderful little book entitled "Lists to Live by for Smart Living". It's the kind of book you can keep by your bed, or easy chair (or dare I say - the toilet!) Read a page here and a page there. It contains snippets of wisdom that are best read in bits and pieces to fully utilize them. Information overload tends to reduce it all to mind fog.

Page 70 and 71 talk about how to remember what you read. One line in particular struck me today - Ponder what you read. As one old sage said, "It is better to master 10 books than just read 1,000."

In this age of books and internet it is all too easy to gulp information like a dying man downs water in a desert. Glug, glug, glug. And then we're on to the next. Better to take time to let it seep into your mind, ponder on it, make connections. That's the best way to milk it for all the benefits the resource has for you.

Easy to say; much harder to do. We live in a fast paced world. The momentum often carries us along unless we take deliberate steps to slow down.

And I'm going to do just that...starting Monday.

1 comment:

netablogs said...

Let me know how it goes. How are you going to slow down?
I love that type of book. I am guilty of reading/scanning way too many books and then wondering if I really changed at all because of them! I keep telling myself to slow down and take notes (which I do at times) and ACT on what I read, so that the info seeps in! I just love reading personal growth books!!