Sunday, August 16, 2015

Learning To Be Successful - What Are You Reading?

Jim Rohn wisely said, "Find out what poor people read and decide not to read it". One of my early author-mentors Charlie "Tremendous" Jones said, "You'll be the same tomorrow except for the books you read and the people you meet." 

This series of posts is about Learning to be Successful.  No one is born a success but everyone is born with the potential to succeed. Reading is one way of adding the knowledge and skills necessary for success . And oddly enough, you can learn to be poor just as easily as you can learn to be wealthy.

This principle extends way beyond financial wealth. Shift author Dean Del Sesto offers great wisdom on this subject:

"It's best when the pages of the books you read align to serve the pages of your life. Many people like to read, but the relevancy of what people read always confounds me. It seems there is rarely a correlation between what is going on in someone's life and what they are reading. So rather than reading material that impacts current circumstances, people often read to escape form current circumstances. Not that reading for entertainment should be frowned upon, but there are always things we need to be schooled up on, and it might be wise to consider reading on those things before escaping into some form of fiction - a novel idea, I know."

Susy and I read a little bit of fiction together every night at bedtime. I think this is great for our imagination and there is a lot of wisdom buried in great fiction. I learned a lot from studying Gandalf's  leadership style. Lord of the Rings is a great book about leadership and so is the sic-fi novel Ender's Game

That being said, most of my reading is designed to help me be more successful Spiritually, Vocationally, Maritally, Relationally, Physically and so forth. 

Del Sesto continues... "Case in point: I was once counseling someone whose marriage was in serious trouble. So I asked what he was reading these days, and he replied, 'A book about the end of the world.' I replied, 'It sounds like we should be less concerned about the end of the world and more concerned about the end of your marriage, don't you think?"....

Because most reading comes from the latest and greatest book trend or recommendation from a friend, relative or associate, 90 percent of the time what people are reading has nothing to do with what their struggle is in life.... rather than prioritizing these areas with focus and intentionality, we read unrelated content while the specific learning we need for growth sits on the shelf somewhere, and we end up reading what's current , not what's relevant."

Del Sesto concludes: "Pages don't always mean progress. Consider reading what is critical today."