Reading is, sometimes, useless

I love reading because it's what got me here.

At 13 years old I was spending most of my time playing video games, watching movies and having no idea what to do with my life. At 14 I met a person who kept telling me to read and later in life I actually started doing it.

That got me interested in making money, in working online and learning all kind of skills that could help me make progress in several areas. Now I'm here, trying to make a living out of what I know and trying to learn a lot more.

However, reading is not always a life changer. Spending a lot of time each day consuming content, reading all kind of articles or books doesn't guarantee you an amazing life, a lot of money or fulfillment.

But if that's the case, then why is reading that important? Should we read at all?

The answer is yes, you should read, but that's not where you should stop. Reading for the sake of doing it and consuming content in order to get more and more information won't get you anywhere. Knowing things is useless unless you actually know how to apply what you know.

For example, you could know a lot about Steemit and how it works, how to become successful and how to make a lot of money, how to take advantage of the price of Steem and how to get rich by trading and making the right decisions.

All that is useless if you're not applying that knowledge to your advantage. If you know how to use this website and the trading system to make a lot of money, then start doing it and make a living out of what you know.

This applies to anything. I've met several people in the past telling me how they spent a lot of time reading but they never got anything out of it. They just wasted their time.

That's when I asked them "Well, what did you read and how did you use the knowledge you got?"

Few of them managed to give me fairly decent answers. Most of them spent time reading books that didn't offer them anything but fun, which is okay if that's what you're after - fun. The rest of them managed to read articles about how to make money, how to build sources of income and how to be better people.

As you can expect however, none of them actually tried to put in practice what they learned. Yes, they had some information about how money could be made, but no one tried to use that information to do something.

They just expected life to be good with them because they read. That's not how it works.

Reading can be a huge waste of time if you don't plan on doing anything with what you get out of consuming all that content. You can read 100 books and be as dumb as someone who never touched a book before.

That's why, before buying dozens of books that are supposed to help you make progress and before judging them all for not changing your life, make sure you're willing to actually take action and use the information you get in a way that will actually help you get something out of all that time spent reading.