Three Distinct Benefits of Reading

image by tanya antre

I read a lot, and I sometimes struggle to find ways to articulate how useful it is, and how much it’s improved my life. After…well…reading more on the topic, I think I’ve settled on three distinct benefits.

Reading updates your mental models. Reading doesn’t just give you a series of facts that you can later recall. It’s also teaching you about the world the same way that experience does. Except with reading you’re getting multiple lifetimes of experience. That experience teaches your mental models of how the world works and subconsciously shapes your decision-making. It basically makes you smarter in a way that you cannot put your finger on because it’s baked into how you see the world.
Reading gives you new perspectives. Reading can give you a completely different understanding, at a conscious and emotional level, of how an event took place, or of the difficulties of an individual or group. These conscious ties to history or people give you a different way of understanding those things, and that additional perspective can give you tremendous advantage.
Reading is euphoric. Not only does reading provide you conscious and subconscious advantages at the intellectual and emotional perspective levels, but it can also serve as one of—if not your primary—means of entertainment. There are more worlds available in books than anywhere else, and becoming an avid reader opens those worlds for you to explore. Once you are practiced at reading, which won’t take long, you can be at peace and having the best time of your life, completely alone in the quiet.


Summary


Extraordinary enjoyment can come from exploring other worlds, all of which can be had, by yourself, in the peace of solitude.
Perspective changes give you conscious emotional connections to things that allow you to see situations from different angles.
Mental model updates subconsciously shape and improve your intelligence by baking in lifetimes of experience into your own judgement.

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