17th
Making Most Important Books More Versatile
Have you ever been inspired by a book you’ve read? Read something where you thought to yourself, ‘Wow, this is amazing. I should try this,”…and then finished reading the book and stored it away in your bookcase, never to be opened again?According to Donald Latumahina of LifeOptimizer.org, it’s easy to read a book, but much harder to actually apply the information in it. He aptly states that you cannot get full benefit from a book until you put it into practice. These books need to be read and reread until we have internalized the principles of them and applied them in our daily life.
Donald says to make a list of all the books which application of can improve your life. However, if the book provides action ideas or ways to improve it is most likely a personal development book.
Have you ever been inspired by a book that wasn’t specifically a personal development book? Maybe it was a great bit of poetry, maybe it was a short blurb in a recipe book, or maybe a touching dialogue between two characters in your favorite book.
Just because the book you may be reading wasn’t in the personal development section of the bookstore or the reference section in your library doesn’t mean it can’t inspire you to achieve your goals in some way.
For example, I’m currently reading Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person by Hugh Prather. I must have marked at least 12 of the first 20 pages because I was so struck by what he’d written. It reminds me to live in the moment and not follow others’ ideas of who I should be, but my own.
I was very moved by several of Prather’s ideas, but in today’s world we are so bombarded with information that unless something we read is extremely remarkable then many of us will forget it soon afterwards. Making this one of my Most Important Books for a period of time will let me re-read just the most inspiring and thought-provoking parts of it. Of course, to make this method work best, I’ll need to take notes or at least mark pages the first time I read it.
I actually read a lot more fiction than non-fiction, usually in the form of historical novels. This particular passage stood out to me as I was reading it:
He felt a breeze come over him at the sight, and breathed deep, his body relaxing…Ah, he thought, and the realization stole over him that this was a Place…He thought of such places in a way that had no words, only recognizing once when he came to it. He might have called it holy, save that the feel of such a place had nothing to do with church or saint. It was simply a place he belonged to be, and that was sufficient.
This passage just reminds me how important nature is, and how some places out there are special. It inspires me to spend time outside in order to find such a place myself. Noting this place in a book and reading it often can remind me to find time to fulfill one of my goals to stay in touch with nature.
I love the idea of Most Important Books, so much so that I even made a bookmark for them. Applying the MIB concept to everything you read (if it’s important enough) makes MIBs an even more versatile tool for your personal development toolkit.