I have been telling the young ones, that reading the things they consider important, needs to be engaged.

Engaged with the words.
Engaged with the flow.
With the author.
Her ideas.
The way she makes her case.
Or tells her story.
To wrestle with what is being said, or left unsaid.
To build a mental model with the ideas being presented.
To write it all down.
To wrestle with the work and draw your own conclusions. (which might not necessarily be what the author intends).

It’s heartening to see, that at least one of my chipmunks listens.
Priyanka Saggu has taken to really engaging with the work she reads.
She read Getting Past No when she was getting ready to launch her career and do interviews.
Now that she has gotten one, she’s onto reading Cal Newport’s, Deep Work to buttress her foundations and make the most of it.
I don’t know, if she will ever make her work public, like she did with Getting Past No, but this is just a glimpse into what goes into the mind of an engaged reader/learner.


courtesy Priyanka Saggu. (shared with permission)


While you don’t need to do this with everything you read, there is certainly a case to be made for intentional, engaged reading.

Here’s to the rest of you, reading with engagement and sharing your work.

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