We live in a time when reading forms the basis of our civilization.

Think about this for a moment.

If you are a businessman, doctor, engineer, professor, scientist, teacher, student, lawyer, police officer, mayor, or administrator, the majority of your work begins in some type of reading.  It could be a quarterly report, a patient’s records, a site plan, a dissertation, curriculum, an essay, rap sheet, report, city council minutes, or other type of report.  The list is endless!  Reading is the basis and beginning of all these professions.

Some may wonder, “What if I choose a job as a cashier, custodian, burger-flipper, or gas station worker?”  Regardless, you still have to read.  McDonald’s, for example, has a manual that its employees read that explains the procedures of the restaurant and the way employees are to carefully perform their job.  A custodian has plans to read that inform him how to clean and organize the place where he works.  Reading is unavoidable.  This type of reading is necessary and important therefore it is the moral duty of parents and teachers to ensure that their children are able to read adequately, but the above mentioned type of reading frequently does not add to our personal growth as much as a second type of reading.

There is a second type of reading that is increasingly becoming neglected in society and that is reading for inspiration, inspiration that leads to growth, knowledge, and experience.  This is the type of reading that the people who founded all the fields above, (and who were extremely successful) engaged in, and this type of reading helped them think creatively to lead to beneficial innovation.  Such people include revolutionary scientists as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, and the Founding Fathers of the United States.  The list is enormous.

There are five benefits that we receive from this type of reading for inspiration:

1. Reading helps Imagination

Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”  These are the words of a man who is generally esteemed to have been the most intelligent scientist who ever lived, a man who devoted his life’s work to knowledge.  Did he really mean that imagination should be pursued and knowledge neglected?  Or did he mean imagination’s value is more than knowledge’s value?  He meant that imagination has more value than knowledge because knowledge only studies what actually is, but imagination beholds and dreams up what may be and can lead to new realities.  Examples of imaginations that became realities include photographs, phones, electric power, cars, and space shuttles.[1]

2. Reading leads you to Adventure

There is a popular quote misattributed to St. Augustine that goes, “The world is like a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”  The inverse is also true: Books are like the world, and he who reads little has not traveled the world.  Books take us to times long past when cultures, languages, ideas, and societies were different.  Reading books is exactly like traveling, except these countries can only be accessed by books.  By reading many books you will gain experience by seeing how other people thought, lived, learned, loved, grew, and died, and it will give you a greater depth into the human experience.

3. Reading broadens Experience

Hundreds of generations of people have come before you and have left behind their lives’ legacies, and you can benefit from them if you only read their works.

There is a saying that goes “Experience is not the best teacher; other people’s experiences is the best teacher.”  Our experience is limited only to where we have gone and what we have gone through, but other people have experienced different events and situations than us, and often they have learned from those experiences and written about how they solved problems whether they related to family, faith, friendship, education, or culture.

4. Reading builds Knowledge

Reading broadens knowledge.  Instead of having to go to a school or college or meet with an expert in a field to learn new and different subjects, you can access different subjects like philosophy, science, history, languages, math, psychology, and others by reading.  You can begin learning these fields and even build your knowledge deeply just by reading.  Abraham Lincoln taught himself the skills of a lawyer by reading books on the practice of law, and he became a successful lawyer.

5. Reading leads to Personal Growth

All the above benefits that come from reading for inspiration ultimately lead to personal growth.  When you read, you will learn how to think in order to solve problems such as balancing the bills, raising your children, analyzing situations, speaking to people, leading your life, being effective at your job, and practicing your faith. You will also learn to imagine, and then you will inspire others to take action, imitate your good habits, and grow.

What have you read recently that has inspired you?  When is the best time for you to read?

[1] In 1760, Charles-Francois Tiphaigne de la Roche, in his novel Giphantie, imagined how a permanent image could be captured from real life.  Nikola Tesla explained a vision of his in Serbia in which he saw an object next to the sun, and what he saw became the basis for the Alternating Current, Direct Current (AC/DC) engine of electricity.  Jules Verne imagined that one day humans would launch humans to the moon in From the Earth to the Moon (1865).