The #1 Mistake You Make That Destroys Your Reading Success

The biggest mistake you can make when reading a book is not establishing a clear purpose for reading the book in the first place. Having a purpose provides a sense of direction as you read the book. Reading without a purpose is aimless and inefficient.

For pleasure reading, the purpose is clear ahead of time: to enjoy the story.

For other types of reading, primarily involving non-fiction books, establishing your purpose before you start reading is a necessary step that the majority of people miss.

The Benefits of Having a Purpose to Your Reading

1. Long-term Retention - Normally, without a purpose, all of the information you receive becomes harder to recall as time passes. When you have a purpose established, your reading has a higher signal-to-noise ratio. If you know why you are reading this particular text, you can ignore what is not relevant to your purpose. Subsequently, you put greater emphasis on the relevant information which better establishes it in your long-term memory.

2. Enhanced Focus - Having a purpose makes you reading highly directive. Instead of spreading your attention out, it is focused like a laser beam. Reading starts to increasingly resemble a search function.

3. Active Reading - Reading is normally passive because you allow the information to come to you. The book is in charge. After establishing a purpose, reading becomes active because you are pursuing information for a specific end.

4. Finish Reading Faster - By ignoring the information in the book that is not relevant to your purpose for reading it, you can reduce the time it takes to finish a book. You read only as much as you need to while skimming the rest.

5. Read to the Right Depth - Traditional reading can often lead you to getting lost in the details. With an appropriately established purpose, you can choose to go only as deep as you need to. You can get the information you need and move along.

6. Make Reading More Fun - Due to the tortures of school, a lot of people find reading to be a chore. Being forced to write book reports killed the joy of reading for many people. The information you wre supposed to get was dictated to you. Now, with your own purpose for your reading, the control is put back in your hands. You decide why you are reading and that can put a lot of the fun back into it.

7. Read More - As reading becomes more fun, you will be inclined to do it more. And since you can finish books faster, you can get through more books in less time.

8. Read Less - When you find out that a book's content doesn't fulfill your purpose, you can quickly stop reading. This prevents wasted time. On the downside, you will occasionally miss out on information that may have been useful if you put the book down. Over the long run, however, you will save a lot of time which will more than make up for the few useful bits of information you miss out on.

9. Learn from Multiple Perspectives - If you have a specific topic you want to learn about, you can get a group of books on that topic and establish a common purpose. This allows you to get a broader view of the topic by getting the perspective of multiple authors.

How to Establish a Purpose

Establishing a purpose for your reading can feel weird when you are not used to doing it. Here are a few tips that might help you along:

1. Why? - Simply ask yourself why you are reading this book. What are you looking for? Do you need support facts for an essay or are you trying to learn a new skill? Get clear.

2. When Will You Need The Information - What are the circumstances under which the information will be used. Are you trying to gather information for research purposes, trying to write a presentation, or become acquainted with a foreign topic? Different circumstances will demand different purposes.

3. Scan the Book - Quickly go through the book to get an idea of what it is about. Read over the book jacket, table of contents and skim the body of the book. Get a feel for the book to clarify your purpose.

4. Specific Questions - Come up with a list of questions that you want answered. Use these questions as a guide to your reading.

5. How Can This Book Benefit Me? - After scanning a book to get a feel for it, ask yourself how the book might benefit you. Use the answer to help develop a purpose. If you can't figure out how the book might benefit you, maybe you shouldn't read it.

6. Write It Down - Write down what your purpose is and refer to it often when reading the book. I often like to state my purpose in one sentence.

Put the practice of establishing a purpose into place and you will soon find that your reading time becomes much more effective.