The most important skill that you should develop to improve your life
Tags: career, development, selfimprovement, productivity
Published: 2020-04-26 14:59:22

---
title: The most important skill that you should develop to improve your life
published: true
description: 
tags: career, development, self-improvement, productivity
cover_image: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2020/02/09/06/51/snow-4832106_960_720.jpg
---
> How can you improve all your aspects of your life but simply improving one skill?

I was reluctant to believe that back in 2005. I thought that it requires a massive amount of effort to be a better human being and to perform better as a professional.

Of course, I do believe that great things in life do require to put into work a significant amount of hours of deliberate practice.

So, the question is, how can I become a better self by focusing the effort on just one skill?

After several months of researching, I came across the conclusion that in order to improve you need broader and deeper skills, that are usually acquired through reading!

> `Then, how can one optimize its reading skills?`

I have read over the past 5 years more than 100 books related to psychology, self-development, personal growth, brain hacks, consciousness, and more.

But then I suddenly stumble upon a bigger challenge, how can I absorb that knowledge in less time? So I can apply it immediately!

Then the answer was that I needed to learn how to read a book adequately.

> `Reading is living.`

So you as I want to optimize your time, I came up with a curated list of steps on how to read a book properly so you gain time and comprehension of the topic.

1. **Read a summary**, instead of investing 7+ hours to read a full book, read a summary (or create a Dev.to post) about it, you will notice that more than 60% of the key points are mentioned there.

2. **Skim Reading**, the first minutes that you are with that book in front, read the table of contents, big titles, and some random sections, you can get the sense of what is the book about and decide whether or not you want to carry on with the reading.

3. **Have a purpose**, who has a why to read can bear almost any how.
    
4. **Recall last chapter**, have you find yourself trying to remember what you just read a day ago and having no success? Having an active exercise of recalling what you are currently reading it's a proven method for storing that information in your long-term memory (or create a Dev.to post).

5. **Question and challenge**, think about the facts and ideas that the author is describing, do they relate, or contradict? Try to challenge and question, don't take anything for granted just because is written in a book (or a Dev.to post).

6. **Take notes**, when you read you take input for your brain, but to really understand and remember you need to produce an output of that knowledge, the easiest method, take notes (or create a Dev.to post)


###Conclusion

You already started to improve your life by reading this post. Keep reading and improve your life learning how to read a book more efficiently.

I look forward to reading your book summaries (or at least your Dev.to posts).

Let's get social: [My LinkedIn Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrespedes12/)