The Importance of Reading Broadly
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Let’s not pull any punches here – my name is Steven Clark, this is my prolific weblog… and I am an information addict. At any one time I am in the middle of reading (from end-to-end) at least three books, there are at least six books in this house which I intend to get to someday, and I have a large list of books that I absolutely must buy on Amazon the moment I can scrape together the ready cash.
At the moment I am a full time student in the second year of a Master of Business Administration (Journalism and Media Studies) degree. I have a Bachelor of Computing university degree. Nine years ago I had never turned a computer on in my life.
I read blog posts in my RSS reader every single day and those blog posts link off to other organisation’s websites where relevant cross-pollinated ideas have permeated across the World Wide Web. My digital reading regime usually incorporates at least 90 minutes over a given day – blog posts, recommended magazine / news articles / design critique / technical wherewithal; my analogue reading covers another hour on working weekdays and sometimes all day on weekends (or days when I’m not directly visiting the University for classes).
Supplemental to this list of reading are the video and audio podcasts that abound on the web. If you want to be smarter and more in tune with the world just start with WNYC’s RadioLab, the DO Lectures (some great 2008 speakers), the TED (ideas worth spreading) Conference, NPR Science Friday, Tank Riot, Math for Primates, Tack Sharp and the Moth Podcast. If you’re a web developer you probably have a few others under your belt but I won’t string out the non-techies in this post. So if you’re cruising to work… play a previously downloaded podcast and enjoy the ride.
My point is that rather than pumping iron or driving the car to the sounds of some zone-out band… I love to pump iron or drive the car listening to interesting information. Lots of broadly interesting information about whales, the universe, how the brain works, contemporary science experiments, technology, philosophy and as many novel and new ideas that I can rattle around in my brain. From memory I think it was Robert Sapolsky who wrote in his book Monkeyluv: and other essays on our lives as animals that it was a book where each essay was the result of an obsession to understand something… he would drive his wife crazy with each obsession then one day just move onto another question to be answered.
