Books – Fuel for mind and soul

I’ll start with a simple question: How does the habit of reading help us? And when I say the habit of reading, I mean that daily or at least weekly habit of reading books or articles. I also think that in some cases, this question is not enough discussed especially for the youngest of us in Romania, especially in elementary school and high school, when the personality of the future adult is in full development.

To be honest, as a child, I did not excel in this regard. Like most people who do not practice this habit, in my childhood I always thought “I don’t have time” to read and in the end it was a “boring activity”. In addition, I had the excuse of the performance athlete: “I have to train, isn’t it enough that I have to go to school?”.

But, for me, the bell rang, after I got to college and started participating in various events for students, where the speakers presented themselves in front of us, as successful people in various fields, who in a 30-minute speech used at least 15 quotes from 15 different books.

And here comes the first lesson I learned in this direction: It’s never too late. I am sure that an undesirable effect of our educational system in Romania, at least of the one my generation has benefited from, is the low numbers in books read by kids. In conclusion, there are great chances that you have not yet understood the benefit of this activity, but it is not too late, you can understand it from now on. As I did, starting with my first year of college, experiencing the frustration of not reading, I started reading.

Now let’s get back to the main question, how does it help? I would say first of all that the answer here depends very much on the period of life you are going through. For example, I think that the high school period is an excellent time for classical literature, because in the process of growing up it helps us to better understand various human typologies, what values ​​mean, what morality is. I don’t say it from experience, I say it as a result of discussions I’ve had with people who are smarter than me. I skipped this stage but I plan to get it back very soon. However, friends of mine who did not skip this stage benefited greatly in the following years from a broader understanding of the things around them. I also knew the rules of the game of handball very well, it helped, but not as much.

Then, during college, intellectual curiosity reaches a new level, and one of the most effective ways to gain knowledge is obviously reading. For me, the first and most effective will be practice, or throwing my head forward. It may be a skill that has been maintained for years as an athlete, but over time I realized that throwing my head forward in a certain place indicated by information and knowledge gained, is even more effective.

For me, during college, surprisingly, automotive engineering was not my main interest. I was rather fascinated by entrepreneurship and leadership. I found the topics much more interesting, because they were extremely inaccessible to me at the time. There are also areas where the rules change, where there are contexts, nuances, concepts quite foreign to the engineering I was learning at least. And that’s how I started in the 1^st year of college, sitting in the dormitory in Regie, to understand what P&L is, what ROI means, what those investments are and much more. To summarize the answer to this question: during college, reading opens your mind, takes you out of the educational pattern and shows you how complex the world is and how many choices you actually have available.

Then, after college, reading helped me get better at work. If you are like me and you want to understand a field from its birth to the distant future, by reading you can approach this desideratum. By reading you can find those people you need to follow in order to better understand what you are doing. In short, in this phase, by reading you can become a better professional.

Furthermore, for me there were other benefits of reading, namely the discovery and deepening of the way the human mind works, the deep understanding of emotions and their causes, how social stereotypes work and so on. As they say, if you have a problem, you’re probably not the first and most likely someone has written a book on how to solve that problem.

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize one last benefit that reading brings us, returning to the emotion that triggered in me the desire to read, namely the frustration that someone is standing in front of me and knows not only things that he experienced alone but things that other people have experienced. Well, this benefit refers to the people around you when you read, it refers to the way you can communicate with someone who has a similar reading list with yours or maybe complementary with yours.

And when it comes to lists, starting in 2020, my discipline has decided to mark every title I read. If you need recommendations or are curious to see what I have read in recent years, I leave below the list of titles I went through between January 2020 and March 2022.

Titles available in English:

Titles available in Romanian: