How to Digest Books Above Your ‘Level’ and Increase Your Intelligence?

In this era, where only a few people are discovered with the idea of reading books, people who try to read and understand books above their comprehensive level are considered the world’s wonders.

There were, are, and will be hundreds and thousands of writers with numerous books published. While some of these books may be written in simple English/ any other language, many will be written with extremely complicated jargon and lingo.

However, to be the best out of the crowd and to be able to lead it, you need to do something entirely out of the box. Remember what they used to say?

The more you read, the better you lead.

Does this also happen with you where the words written in the book start juggling around, everything appears hazy, and you can’t understand a single word? Every reader faces such a situation when they try to get a hold of books above their level.

There can be two possible outcomes of this situation. Whether the reader is an inside leader, the reader will do the most to grasp the book in this scenario. They will do anything to stand out in the crowd and increase their intelligence. The second possibility is the reader gives up just by seeing a few challenging words on the page. Both of the cases are utterly dependent upon the readers and the path they choose.

Reading Out of the Comfort Zone

It is quite understandable why some books are difficult to digest. Many people are only able to read books of their interest. This can be considered a comfort zone where people will only read books according to their interests.

To be a leader, one must keep the pace of reading almost everything they can grab, with the skill of critical thinking and coming up with solid conclusions of their own. It is a well-known strategy that one must study the enemy to defeat the enemy; even though you don’t like the enemy, you still have to read about them.

This is a metaphor where we should develop a habit of reading books that they might not like. Doing so can do wonders because it will open up thoughts and ideas that were previously unknown to the brain. Reading books that are not of our interest, believe it or not, can help open up our minds to another level that helps boost our confidence.

But how confident? Once you read out of your comfort zone, thinking changes, which will help us think differently and make our arguments more solid and valid. Next time, if anyone comes up to you with a topic, you will be able to speak about it, and it won’t look like you have no clue what’s going on. The best idea is to challenge yourself to read new books every day.

Read to Answer What and Why?

When you start reading, it is necessary first to understand why? What is the writer trying to apply, and most importantly, why? Because once you know the “Why” part, then the book’s main lesson and solid conclusion can quickly be drawn from your end.

To make things easier, the reader can quickly check out the review of the book from online sources. It will save a lot of time that could have been spent on confusing what’s happening on the first 50 pages, which is not a good strategy. Once you are pre-prepared on what’s going on in the book, it is easier to analyze critically.

Reading the review with the brief background quickly helps the reader navigate the entire book on what topics to read, from the table of content and what lessons are needed to be drawn from it.

For example, suppose you are doing your university thesis on organization politics. In that case, you should read related books and navigate through its table of content to find what you are precisely looking for to save time and get to the point. A brief online review would do the trick.

All these strategies help to understand the “Why” part, which supports drawing the desired conclusion. If this is not followed, the reader’s energy gets wasted trying to figure out what the writer intends. A prime reason why readers lose interest.

Patience

Impatience is one of the factors where some people are discouraged by reading books above their level. Most people are looking for facts straight away without reading the full text that requires understanding the context.

The attention span of humans has indeed become short, where brief text creates more impact nowadays. But you know what they say, “half knowledge is dangerous”, which is why the value of reading the entire script with in-depth insights is necessary.

Rome wasn’t created in a day, and neither will knowledge be gathered in minutes, which is why it is required to start reading without giving a second thought to keep you going.

On the other hand, the mindset of the reader also matters the most. Since books explain their reasoning with many tiny details, the reader needs to read with a perspective that every little detail is a reward to connect the dots for a lesson and a conclusion. This is why this requires patience, and reading with patience will always give the best outcome.

Tips To Digest Complicated Books

The human mind can absorb anything from everywhere. But there is a limitation when it comes to learning new things. When it comes to reading books of philosophy or something specific to scientific research, let’s take Stephen Hawking’s Theory Of Everything. It’s not going to be easy for a young teenager to learn something of that much depth. But there is a way to everything, even when it comes to learning.

Start Small

People start in a rush to finish the book, but they do not understand what they read. This is why it is recommendable to start step by step, and in each step, you should take your time to read a specific paragraph or page. Even if it takes an hour to complete a small part of a chapter, it should be read so that the entire context is understood and adds up to your knowledge.

Avail Alternative Help for Better Understanding

Remember when you were in your junior classes, and you wouldn’t understand the meaning of a word. Instead, you would search up the definition in the dictionary. When it comes to understanding the difficult knowledge of such books, you can always take help to get a better understanding of that content through taking external support from different books sharing the same relevance of the book you cannot understand.

Write To Learn More

Some people want to learn more to add more value to their brains. The best way of processing such information is to read the page or para, skim through it, make some notes and then reread it to add more notes in a paraphrasing format. In this way, you will be able to interpret the perspective of the writer and the way they wrote the book. Making your notes is the best way to put yourself in the writers and understand the book written from their POV.

Knowledge Is Power

The approach people take towards reading books is essential to gain knowledge. What knowledge and informative books can give, TV shows, games and magazines cannot provide that in-depth knowledge to the extent books give. This is why reading books should be promoted for the young as they allow themselves to grow more and recognize the way of the world from many perspectives. It is not easy reading, but reading through learning can become fun if you follow these steps.

To Have A Say

To have a say, everyone looks at the interests of others, sit alone and read books about it. This will open up horizons of thoughts and makes you aware of what’s going on in the world. Reading books above our level will not necessarily make us intelligent until and unless a proper reading strategy is adopted. Otherwise, we will just be reading a bunch of complicated words that go above our heads.