Caution! Reading will change your life (for the better)

I tend to read a lot, averaging at least one book per week. Remembering back, I think the reading started when I was a kid, during the war, being in a shelter (or the basement) was a regular thing. And for a 9-10 year old kid, books were the best thing to forget everything. My mother worked next to the library, and she brought me an average of 3 books each week. They were mostly child books, ranging from Erich Kästner to Karl May and his Winnetou. There were a lot of books by Croatian authors too, but I can’t remember them all now. After that school kicked in, then Real Life™ and somehow I stopped reading so much. At least stopped reading books. I was always following technical newsletters and blogs, but forgot that I should be reading real books along the way.Reading a book will change your life, even if you only read one book, end to end. Each one you add to the mental pile, your mind expands in that direction, and you are a wiser person. I’m not only talking about technical books here, on the contrary, I’ve found non-technical books to be more mind expanding than technical ones.I recently realized that, even I’ve been on this spree for the last 3 years, the greatest benefit of reading fiction, is using your imagination. No movie will ever give you an experience of reading a book. I don’t prefer audiobooks either because it’s too hard to pause and visualize the moment, the scene. The book that got me back in was Game of Thrones, and I’m a little bit sad that I watched the series before because my imagination was somewhat flawed by scenes from the series. From then on, I’ve read biographies, technical books, fiction, nonfiction, psychology, design, basically anything that was recommended by a credible enough source. Each one pushed me a little bit further forward.I’ve achieved more on a personal and business level in the last 3 years than I have in all of the previous years combined, and I believe that reading that much had to do a lot with it. Although we own a TV set, I rarely watch it (you have to watch Top Gear when you see it’s on). The best thing you can invest in is knowledge, keep reading, even if the book you read tends to be really bad, you can leave it half way, but don’t give up on reading. There are great books out there, and things you have never dreamed of can come true because you have to be able to imagine your end goal before you get to reach it.