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Reading is Fundamental

I guess you could say that I'm a latent success story of RIF, Reading is Fundamental. I don't know where you grew up but down south where I did there was a program on the elementary school level to encourage kids to read more. It was called RIF. Each week the special BookMobile came around and there was a program to reinforce why we should all be reading more.

If any of my teachers are reading this, they can attest to the fact that academics just was not high in my list of priorities. It wasn't until I was out of school and in adulthood that I realized the value of reading. As I started advancing my carrier and finding the need to continue my education, books were the logical method for me to continue to upgrade my skill and knowledge. Their advantages are great! They are highly portable, can be read anywhere, relatively inexpensive (compared to formal education) and it's impossible to show up late or miss a reading.

About 10 years ago I was reading a book on setting your priorities in life. I don't even remember the name of the book anymore but what it taught me has had a profound effect on my life. The basic message of the book is that we all need to establish priorities and goals for the important areas in our lives. A message that is much the same as what Steven Covey is teaching. One of the areas that they talked about was knowledge and our continuing need to expand our knowledge. We need to do this for multiple reasons; to keep up in today's rapidly changing society, to enhance our value to our employers, and not the least to keep us from being insufferable bores when we have to talk to other people!

In this book they recommended that each one of us should be reading a magazine a week and a book a month. Well in my youthful enthusiasm, I said to myself that if this is the standard for "common" people then obviously my standard must be higher. So I set my standard to read a magazine a day and a book a week. I fairly quickly realized that the magazine a day would require me to subscribe to 31 different magazines and I found that there were not 31 magazines that I found of value to read. So this requirement dropped of to my current 6 or 8 magazines a month. The book standard though has stayed with me since that day!

My reading interests vary widely and I don't place a requirement on what type of book that I must read. I walk in to the book store with an open mind and ask my self what looks interesting.  Speaking of book stores, there are many options open to a reader for finding their supply of books. I haunt the top retailers, Barns and Noble and Borders, the out of the way used shops, on-line bookstores like Amazon.com, and even the public library. Books are available everywhere, there is no excuse for not reading!

To sum this up, I recommend to everyone that what ever are their interests, what ever is their reading level, go out, get a book, and start reading!

 

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Last modified: April 06, 1999