If you that kind of person who seek to improve your personality, you may once stumbled upon an article or social media post that sounds like “10 Books That Will Change Your Life“. I was that kind of person who wants to improve every aspect in my life, career, soft skills, etc, and when I found that there are 10 books that could change my life, I would happy to read those.

Turns out after spending almost 6 months reading those books, nothing changed in my life and nothing happened. And I was at the point where I don’t want read any more books for a while, just want to take a break. But because I was a book worm since high-school the desire to read books always came back to me. So I bought another books even though I know my life wouldn’t change after I read it, but I just like reading a book.

Later I realized why I love reading a book is that I can understand how the author think, how the author solve the problem, how the author would react to certain situation. That’s what I love from reading book, that’s why I keep buying more books and read it. It’s like make a new friends, make a friend with the authors because they will tell you what they feel, what they think, etc. Also at this moment I realize that when reading a book I shouldn’t expect it would change my life, but I should expect I would get new information or new understanding after reading a book that later perhaps I can apply that information or new understanding to make my life better.

Change your expectation when you read a book. Don’t expect to become a master of marketing after reading some of Seth Godin’s books, but expect to get new information or new understanding about marketing from his experience, perspective, etc. This also a problem in educational system, where students expect to get higher rank in class to be able pass the class or graduate from school, that’s why some students would cheat during test because they expect a higher score/rank regardless they understand the subject or not.

So, yeah you should expect to understand first before go to the next step.