How to Read with Purpose and Achieve MORE

What's going on? Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Let's get into today's topic. Today I'm going to be discussing how to read How to read. Sounds like a funny topic. We all know how to read, but I want to specifically dive into how to best extract the data, the points of improvement, the opportunities from what it is you're in fact reading and/or listening to. See, I think there's really kind of two types of reading out there. There's reading, of course, for enjoyment, as many of us do, and there is reading for learning. Now, in the perfect world, we're enjoying all that we're learning, but it doesn't always work that way. So there's reading for enjoyment, there's reading for learning, and sometimes they overlap. When I read to enjoy a book, to enjoy something, I'm likely reading the entire book, or if it's an article and I'm reading it for pure enjoyment, I'm reading that entire article. I'm doing it just because it brings excitement or energy or fun to my world. I try to pick up something every single day that brings enjoyment to me in terms of an article or a book or even, even a podcast. We'll use, we'll use listening and reading a little interchangeably today. What I want to focus more on though is when I read to learn. Right, so we just talked about reading for enjoyment, but we're going to spend more time on reading to learn. See, when I read to learn, I think of it more as a research project versus reading. So I'm, I'm doing research to learn a specific thing. Now I focus here because in all that we talk around— I'll talk about around No Days Off We talk about taking steps every single day to improve, and a lot of times the steps that you're going to take to improve the different aspects of your life are going to involve reading a book or reading an article or studying something to make you better. So when I read to learn, it is a research project. It is true focus on getting better at something. Now, quick side note. Everything I'm reading to learn, I'm likely going to have a physical copy of it in my hands as well. So I will have a physical copy of the book, I'll have a physical copy of the article, either I printed it out or it's a magazine or whatever it may be, but I want a physical copy because if I'm going to do research, if I'm making this a research project, I want something tangible that I can write on, highlight, do some other things with we'll talk about here in a moment. So reading to learn is a research project. Believe it or not, I actually don't set out to read the entire book or even read the entire article. That's not the endgame. And I want to make sure I point that out because I think we all, and I'm certainly guilty of this, we all have this, this, this sickness where we figure if we start a book, we want to accomplish completing that book. And the truth is, if you're reading something for learning purposes and you're not learning and you're not enjoying and you're not excited, we shouldn't be forcing ourselves to finish that book just to say we finished it, just to close it and say, "Okay, cool, I could say I finished." That's a waste of time. And time is finite. There's better ways to be spending our time. So I never set out to read the entire book. If I do, that's great. And the truth is, most things I do read to the end but I read it because I'm still learning or I'm into it. If I don't find something good, I'm putting it down. So not that you needed permission from me, but if you're reading things right now that you're just doing it because you want to check off the box that you completed it, knock it off. It's a waste of your time. So in all these books, when I'm reading to learn, I'm taking notes in all books. I'm flagging pages, I'm highlighting, I'm taking pictures. And the end game for me in reading to learn, the end game is to eventually figure out a new way of thinking or, and/or build a specific model that's different than what I was doing the day before. So anything I'm reading for to learn, and I'm reading with a purpose and it's a research project, the objective is to design a new model or look at things in a different way, a new way of thinking and I'm going to create a new machine around that. So, for example, right now I'm reading a book called Primal Endurance. And Primal Endurance is probably not a book for all of our listeners, but it is a book on endurance athletics, competing as an endurance athlete, and specifically the training, the exercise, and, and, and food, the diet. So I'm reading this book, Primal Endurance, and it's challenging a lot of what it is I believe I know around competing in endurance events. And as a result of this book, and I'm only about halfway through it, but I've started creating a new model for me around my food, my diet, and around my exercise program. Now, once I have this model drawn out, And by the end of the book, again, I'm extracting information from this book and I'm drawing out a model to create a new way that I'm going to operate. This is what reading for learning is all about. Once I draw out this model, number 1, I put this model into action and I personally test it to see if, you know, what I think is going to happen actually happens. In this particular case, do I feel the way I'm supposed to feel? Are my times improving in the way that they should? Is my body composition changing in the way that it should? Do I have different energy? I'm physically putting this model in, in action to see if it's working. And then number 2, I'm going to keep looking at other health books around this subject. I'm going to listen to health-related podcasts. I'm going to pick up any article or read anything I can. I'm going to talk to people that I consider experts in this area. And I'm going to either prove, like, continue to prove out my model, or I'm going to hear a lot of feedback that disproves what I, what I decided to put in action. Whatever the case may be, I am really testing what it is I'm learning. I've tested it both in my personal experience, but then testing what I've learned from this one book against other books, other podcasts, and other experts to see if it in fact ties out and challenges maybe a lot of my new assumptions. Bottom line and in conclusion for today, are you reading with a purpose? When you're reading to get better for the no days off assignment of the day that you're giving yourself, are you reading those things and are you actually putting them to work? Are you putting them into action? Too often we read things, we get all excited around them, and then we forget or we shelf the book and never come back to it. I'm certainly guilty of that a lot of time. I do it a lot. I've done it a lot. And this year, I've really committed to myself that I'm gonna pull back, pull out a lot of the old books that I remember liking a lot, but I don't remember taking enough action around them. I'm pulling out those books and I'm going right back through those books and reading again and building a model around those things. So, what are you reading right now that you need to build a model around? Or what have you read recently that maybe you haven't taken as much action around as you wish you would? Could you go back to those things, extract those action items, build a model around those action items, and put them to work? What can you do a little differently with respect to your reading to get more meaning, to get more action, to become more purposeful around all that you're learning? That's all we have for today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy all that we're talking about here, please, please, please, share on, on your social or wherever you see fit, and let's increase the number of individuals getting behind this No Days Off movement. Thank you so much. Every day bringing a new opportunity to get better. Let's get after it.