Reading and learning

I have been for long wondering about the effectiveness of my reading. Why am I reading so much just to a little later find out that most of that has not really entered my mind? Well, if books, articles, newspapers, and so on are more than mere entertainment and a moment of pleasure, I would expect for them to form a sort of knowledge storage that would help me on every area of my life. But how to make that effective and efficient?

Something recently brought this up again and I believe I may be getting close to a final opinion.

I had a presentation to make on my New Product Development class about a scientific paper on Platform management and I decided to make a fine one. I had about two weeks, so I began to read all I could about the issue. I read two other articles, an entire book by the paper's author and made a scheme on power point to make sure all the idea was connected. At the day of my class, I got a bit nervous, but there was enough baggage on my mind to go around and do a good job. So it was, the teacher liked it and I (hopefully) will get a good grade.

What I didn't say is that actually there was a team presenting. I did all this job but the material used to present was built by parts. I used my scheme to build the part assigned to me and, when I saw my colleague's part, I was thrilled by how he had interpreted so well the principles guiding the platform idea. I was sure he had not read the book, nor the other articles, and I don't believe he's so much smarter than me. What allowed him to get to the same results by reading only about 20 pages when I had read more than two hundred?

To improve the effectiveness of my readings I had been making schemes, diagrams, and summaries (which drove me to join Henne on his blog http://leiturasinteligentes.blogspot.com/). However, this last experience made me add another powerful tool. After the presentation I went back to the paper and began to reread it to see if I could find where my colleague saw all the things I had taken so much to realize. I saw then that everything I needed was in that article, either scattered or superficially explained. Only one thing could explain it: reflecting time.

It may sound logical, but many people think that a person is more cult if he simply reads more. I have come to disagree with this idea a time ago (and I have even reached the point of reading two books a day for a whole year), and this last experience just proved it. I'll lay some points: the information era brought us access to thousands of books, but we simply can't read all of them. It is amazing how information is repeated in all conversations and writings. In fact, a teacher of mine used to say only God has actually created anything, we all imitate. And, after all, people today are not as wise as the people of the enlightenment age or even the Greek philosophers.

For this, I have decided that more than reading, I must let information be transformed into knowledge and I'll accomplish this through reflecting, discussing, and even sleeping. This all means simply one thing: time.