“Once you learn to read you will be forever free.”
The only way to open a person’s mind is by teaching them how to read. Once you know how too, nothing can cage you and the world becomes a complex yet solvable problem. But if a person is forced to exist in this world without ever learning to read, he will have to live life never really being enough and the world will always be too much for him. This is because the only real weapon allows us to defend ourselves is the sharpness of our mind and our ability to adapt to change by learning from the example of our predecessors.
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Reading allows you to learn from the wisdom and experience of others because we’ve only gotten this far because we’ve read and understood the adventures and experiments of those that documented their knowledge for us. Only by reading can we stand on the shoulder of giants. And so, if a person can’t understand the medium they’ve documented their thoughts and discoveries in, he or she will never be able to contribute to the world and will never be able to grow as an individual either. It can simply be said that the person who spends his entire life without reading can never move forward and can never grow and evolve as a human being.
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To help you better understand why reading is essential for personal growth and how it contributes to making you a better person we’ve decided to list out a set of ways how reading contributes to your personal development.
8. It opens your mind:
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Reading allows you to hear stories and concepts from around the world, it is a gateway through which we can experience life as a citizen of the world. It helps you see things from the perspective of the writer and so it opens your minds to the possibilities. Making you more accepting and opening your mind to change. The experience of looking at life from someone else’s perspective has changed many lives and saved many as well.
7. It allows you to experience a hundred realities and humbles you:
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“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only once.”
The reader lives a very satisfying life, he is not just aware and intelligent, he is sensitive to change and is a better communicator than someone who has lived life ignorant of reading. This is because he has experienced both fictional and non-fictional existence through time spent reading. He has been a soldier and has experienced the confusion and anger a warrior’s faces, he knows what it means to be loved and the unloved. He has listened to the stories of hundreds of people, some real and some fictional and it has managed to humble him.
6. It helps you cross the line that separates the ordinary from the extraordinary:
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You can be born with amazing intellect yet amount to nothing because you don’t have the necessary skills you require to make it in the particular field you wish to be successful in. Reading and learning hand you tools and the experience you need to make it. It gives you an edge over other people because you don’t have to repeat the same mistakes people in the same field have made before, it gives you solutions and allows to come to the table with more information and hence increases your success rate. Turning you from ordinary to extraordinary.
5. It solves problems for you:
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I can bet you that almost every problem you face has a solution that’s been documented somewhere in the world. Reading is an extremely liberating experience, you can solve basically any problem if you can find the right literature on it and if you find a completely unique problem, you can read up on the previous attempts that have been made by people to solve it and get insight on that, so, if you want to lose weight, go read a few books and decide what works for you. Every problem has a solution, and its all documented, all you have to do is pick up and read it.
4. It makes you more cultured:
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Reading doesn’t just enhance your vocabulary, it teaches you the basics of how a good human being should behave, it makes you more cultured and turns you into a pretty intellectual person, even if all you do is read fiction novels! I’ve mentioned before how reading is a humbling experience, this humbling cultures us and teaches us communication as well.
3. It is a habit that never lets you be lonely:
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A book is a friend who will never betray you and who will always have a hell of a lot to teach you. Loving books means that you can be anywhere in the world and it will always provide you with peace and companionship. Books are an outlet and sometimes they are an escape from the circumstances of our life.
2. They teach you to dream:
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Books basically are dreams and thoughts and because of what they are, they allow you to dream and open your mind to hopes and possibilities, the kinds you hadn’t dared think of before you started reading. Books inspire people to become better versions of themselves, by letting you hear the stories and experiences of the people of the world.
1. They turn you into a humanitarian:
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Because reading is a humbling experience and it allows you to look at life in the unique perspective of another person, enough of it turns you into a humanitarian because you can now understand and feel the pain and suffering of others on another level. Because it has opened your mind, you will understand why fighting and hate simply destroys more lives.
Mark Twain has summed up the importance of reading in his through his very candor saying,
“A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.”