Truly Understand

I am a person with various weaknesses. One of the weaknesses that bothers me the most is my slow reading speed. I read aloud just as fast as I do silently. I have tried various speed-reading techniques, but my reading comprehension always plummets. But at least I enjoy reading. Because I am a slow reader, inefficient books are my nemesis. The worst is when books actually have something to say to me, but their length makes them impenetrable for me. I have struggled through several long books.

When I read a long book with valuable content like "Maps of Meaning," it is interesting, but I feel anger rising within me about the author's inefficiency with my time. This feeling is, of course, amplified by my reading speed. But a strength I have developed through my weakness is summarizing. I can summarize any text, booklet, or book in one sentence. I love compact, inspiring statements, especially when they are new to me and not a repetition of what I already know. This ability to reduce a 1,000-page book to one sentence comes naturally to me. I am aware that I leave out a lot, but I retain the spark of inspiration I found in the work.

Another weakness of mine is memorization or even retaining information. My memory apparently works differently from that of my acquaintances. I read a lot and forget almost everything. My fellow students would ask me about specific knowledge in subjects, but I never knew it. I could neither recite a theorem nor memorize a proof. But I could make a guess. Say, "It must behave this way or that. At least I think so." These are feelings of mine, but they are usually true. I absorb information as something that goes deeper into my personal substance and bring it out when I have a problem. But because it is so deep within me, I can no longer say where I know it from.

These two weaknesses now allow me to connect ideas in new and creative ways. I can quickly form and test hypotheses. I can reduce complex statements to one sentence. I can draw from an unconscious ocean of associative knowledge and connect topics. For me, all information is much closer together than for others. And when I compare this with my fellow humans, I hardly understand how one can think differently. There are people who read books and can reproduce the content but have not incorporated it into their lives. I cannot understand that. That is foreign to me. Either a book changes me as a person, or I know nothing about it anymore.

Hence my somewhat biased hypothesis: "Only when a book has deeply penetrated your soul and changed you as a person, and you live your life differently from then on, have you understood its content." Everything else can be done by Google for you.