Is it worth it? What price is traditional reading?
Aug 28
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Long before I learned PhotoReading I discovered the price of slow reading.
The saddest fathers day card I ever saw was created by a young girl in the first grade. She was diagnosed with ADD. The card answered the question, what is the first thing you think of when you think about your dad. She wrote, “My daddy is always busy reading.”
It was true. I too observed that he spent a lot of time reading and I asked him about it. He pointed out that in his field there is new information every week. He had to keep up,
He had a stack of magazines relating to his industry that were a year old when I saw them. He had asked me to store them temporarily when he separated and moved into a small unit.
I asked why he didn’t throw them out. They filled a 1 metre cubed storage container. When I finally did throw them out they filled two wheelie bins. Why didn’t he throw them out? He hadn’t read them yet and he never did read them before I dumped them in the bin. 
To me that was insane. I thought there was no way in the world that he’s going to read all them ever if he didn’t have the time yet then will he have because it was accumulating out of control. There will still be more each week and yet he was busy reading the other stuff. His technical books were like phone books.
He couldn’t even know if he was missing important stuff. Material he needed right now in his career. That’s why he kept those magazines in pristine condition to read ASAP. The problem he wasn’t getting his reading done and he was stressed by the idea he might be missing something important if he didn’t read all those pages.
At the time I didn’t know about PhotoReading and I know now that potentially he could have flipped those pages and recognised which articles were important to him and which he could ignore and dismiss the publication out of his life and reduce the physical and emotional reading clutter. He missed the important ones waiting for time to read the magazine because he never did get around to reading them.
With his traditional reading skill he had to read and re-read over and over to understand the material. He told me that he speed reads and yet he seemed to need to re-read the information over and over. I’ve had to sit and wait while he read something and even then I wondered isn’t there more to ones time and life than reading?
For a university educated individual surely he was taught a better more effective way of reading than what we were taught in primary school?
I often wondered how we made it through high school. I know most in my class never did the assigned reading yet they still passed high school.
How important is it to read every single word consciously like my friend did. And at what price?
My friend was good at his job and career but he lost as a father because he was always too busy reading for his work. The marriage broke down because he wasn’t a part of it. His reading was.
I discovered a better way to read. I enjoy my life and time and am an avid reader and learner. I became a PhotoReading instructor because I wanted to help people like my friend have more choices about their reading. Not everything you read is important. Use PhotoReading to help you decide what is.
© Alex K Viefhaus
