Elevate Your Thinking When You Join the Read the World Challenge
How can you elevate your thinking? How can you step into the minds of the greatest innovators and the most creative minds? The point of the Read the World Challenge is to read the right books, so that at the end of 52 weeks, you are a different person. And even if you read a book every other week, and you chose the right books, the process would still have a transforming effect on your life. You would not only elevate your thinking, but you would also elevate the level at which you perform your work as well. A popular quote attributed to Einstein says, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” When I unpack that quote, I think that we develop the best solutions to our problems when we elevate our thinking. To elevate our thinking, we have to have an intervention of some kind, business as usual doesn’t work. One intervention is elevating the types of books you read – reading a lot more challenging books – books to make you think. Those are the kinds of books that the most successful CEOs read.
Further Reading
C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success
Understanding Difficult to Read Books to Elevate Your Thinking
When an author writes a fiction book, how sure are you that you fully understand the message he or she is communicating? If the author is living, with technology advances, there is a chance that you can ask him or her, directly and indirectly, to get the answer to the question. But with the classics, that’s often not possible, unless the author communicated that information to others who have made it accessible. If the authors are no longer living, and they did not communicate the book's meaning to others, then you have to rely on scholars to help with interpretation, but can you always trust what they have to say? Many of the books that are considered classics today give your mind an intellectual workout. And you often have to reflect on the content for a while. There are times when you have to read the book more than once, so you can understand it. Although How to Read a Book
is not fiction, it’s more like a reference guide, so it’s difficult to absorb all the information after one read – at least that was the case for me.
Books to Help You Elevate Your Thinking
Reading these kinds of books will definitely elevate your thinking when you take the time to understand what the author means in the text. Over the years, I have purchased books such as Books that Changed the World: The 50 most influential books in human history; Who the Hell is Pansy O’Hara: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World’s Best-Loved Books; 501 Must-Read Books; The Big Read Book of Books; The Great Books: A Journey Through 2500 Years of the West’s Classic Literature; the Novel 100; and How to Read and Why. My thinking was that I wanted resources to use when deciding which books to read. The Read the World Challenge encompasses a wide variety of books, but I think that it is easy today to find reading lists for contemporary books, therefore, we could use the resources mentioned to help us decide which classic books we want to read during the 52 weeks. Each book that features must-read books, has a blurb about each of the books, so you will get a sense of what the book is about. Additionally, some of them are really good because they will help you to understand more difficult text. You cannot elevate your thinking if you do not understand the books you read. I would caution you though to keep an open mind, and do not simply accept what the author says – you must think for yourself. The books are a tool or resource for you to use, and not a crutch to prop yourself up.
- Books that Changed the World: The 50 most influential books in human history
- Who the Hell is Pansy O’Hara: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World’s Best-Loved Books
- 501 Must-Read Books
- The “Big Read”: The Book of Books (Big Read 2003)
- The Great Books: A Journey Through 2500 Years of the West’s Classic Literature
- Novel 100
- How to Read and Why
Other Ways to Elevate Your Thinking
Another way to elevate your thinking is to read biographies of great thinkers and innovators. While participating in the Read the World Challenge, read four biographies. I recommend biographies and not autobiographies because you tend to get a more honest picture when the person did not write the book about him or herself. Another way to approach this, although it is less detailed, is to choose one or two books that feature several great thinkers and innovators. Additionally, read a book on the greatest speeches of all time. I have some recommendations for you.
- 50 Brilliant Minds of the Last 100 Years
- Quantum Leaps: 100 Scientists Who Changed the World
- The Great Mathematicians: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Universe
- The Great Philosophers: The Lives and Ideas of History’s Greatest Thinkers
- Speeches that Changed the World
As a reminder, we are reading biographies in the eighth and the ninth month of the Read the World Challenge. Two other resources to assist you in learning about people, who changed the world are Biography.com and Chappell Great Lives Lecture Series.
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Reasons Why You Should Elevate Your Thinking
- Make sense of hard to understand information.
- Expand your mental capacity.
- Make connections and identify relationships between the books you read.
- Opportunity to expand your influence.
- Have a willingness to venture into the great unknown.
- Move to the next level of your career – this doesn’t necessarily mean getting a promotion, it could be a shift in mindset that will enable you to secure a promotion.
Get Started Here – I want to help you get started on your learning journey! Sign-up for the Read the World Challenge.
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