You’re reading this article.

Congratulations! You just completed the first step to becoming a better reader.

Reading is an incredibly powerful tool for improving your life, and it might be one of the easiest skills you can master. By reading, you can experience things that are outside of your normal reality–whether it’s traveling back in time with fiction or learning about different cultures with nonfiction. Once you get started and realize how much reading helps you grow as a person, there’s no going back: You’ll become addicted to picking up a book whenever possible because of how deeply it affects your life on so many levels…

Inspiration:

Inspiration comes from all sorts of places. Sometimes reading is where yours will come from.

Knowledge:

Reading can teach you just about anything, which makes it an invaluable resource for gaining knowledge and insight into the world around you.

Stress relief:

Reading is a great way to take your mind off work or personal problems. It takes you to another place where only the words on the page exist instead of whatever might be bothering you at that moment.

Makes you more empathetic:

By reading fiction, especially works written from other perspectives, you learn how people think differently. This allows you to understand what drives people to do what they do—so when someone does something that annoys or upsets you, try to read through their eyes and see if their point of view makes more sense.

Increases your intelligence:

Intelligence is abstract, but if you’re reading this article, it’s safe to say that you’re pretty intelligent (and I’m not just saying that because you made it through my writing). Reading increases your ability to focus on tons of information at once, which means you also increase your ability to retain it. Plus, learning new vocabulary expands brain functions and memory by forcing neurons in your brain to work harder.

Makes you a better writer:

By reading fiction or nonfiction written by talented writers, you absorb their style into unconscious competence, making it easier for you to learn how they create sentences and structure them.

Improves your logic:

Rea ding makes you “think” more logically!

Increases your creativity:

By reading the works of other creative writers, you can pick up on their techniques and learn how to use them yourself. For example, Ernest Hemingway creatively wrote six words—”For sale: baby shoes, never worn”—to make it an incredibly powerful piece of writing. That kind of creative wording is definitely what we want for our writing–we wouldn’t want to write similar sentences even though they’d be grammatically correct. They wouldn’t evoke the same emotional response or impact as Hemway’s little six-word masterpiece does.

Boosts your verbal communication:

Reading is great for writing, but it also has a big impact on how you speak. By reading more, you’ll notice an improvement in your vocabulary and ability to articulate thoughts.

Increases your brainpower:

Reading engages multiple parts of the brain. Some studies have suggested that this kind of mental stimulation reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s by 70%. Read or watch a book together with a child or grandchild to keep their brains stimulated too, so they retain knowledge throughout life!

Why not start now? Pick up a book from your shelf and get after it! Turn off T.V., put down the newspaper, and go read because life is short, and so are you!