Part 5: Career Guidance – CULTIVATE THE READING HABIT

Cultivate the reading habit. You don’t have to be a book worm. Just read in your spare time or when you are forced to waste time waiting for a bus, train etc.

Don’t like non-fiction? No issues. Read fiction. But read the right kind of fiction. There are novels that can teach you a lot about many things.

You can learn about many professions by reading Arthur Hailey’s best sellers like The Final Diagnosis (medical profession)
In High Places (politics) Hotel (hospitality industry) Airport (aviation industry) Wheels (automobiles),The Moneychangers (banking) Overload (power generation & transmission) The Evening News (print media) & Detective (police). You won’t be bored because these are thrillers that you can’t put down.

The century trilogy by Ken Follet will give you an unbiased view of world history from the second to the eighth decade of 20th century.

Just a few passages in Dickens’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ will give you a feel of how it was before, during and after the French revolution.

Two books by Leon Uris, ‘Mila 18’ & ‘Exodus’ will make you understand Jewish mindset and make you realise how Israel is able to survive in a  hostile neighborhood. Books by Pearl S Buck give you a very good introduction to China. And all these books are fast paced. You’ll enjoy reading them.

This is just a sample. The list in endless. Get hooked and reap the benefits.

You can learn about many interesting topics like Arab-Israel conflict, English and French history, Russia, China, Japan etc just by reading novels.

Just Google for novels based on a particular issue and you will get the names of the novels dealing with that topic. And if the novel is more than 50 years old, it is out of copyright and freely downloadable PDF versions will be found on the net.

For free e-books, try gutenberg.org which has more than 60 thousand free e-books. Much more than any of your local libraries.

Learn the art of intellectual enjoyment. Pleasure derived at the intellectual level is much, much more satisfying and lasting than sensual pleasures and adds value without harmful side effects.

Most people indulge in drinking, smoking, snorting etc for want of a better alternative. Get hooked at the intellectual level. You’ll never need these cheap and harmful substitutes.

Don’t waste your time playing games on your laptop or smartphone. They are nothing but mental narcotics. Go out and play in the open. That’s wholly satisfying and keeps you healthy.

Cultivate hobbies like solving crosswords. Not simple crosswords. They can be solved in a jiffy using a thesaurus. Try cracking cryptic crosswords. That is real mental gymnastics.

And it will help you improve your general knowledge. There will be clues you won’t be able to solve because you haven’t heard that word before.

Next day, when the answers are published in the newspaper, you will naturally look up the word in google or wikipedia and gain a lot of information in the process.

Crosswords also improve your anagram solving capability which will help you in competitive exams. Anagrams are two or more words having the same letters arranged differently.  Like Animal and Manila.

Like I said earlier, being curious about everything around us is the best way to gain knowledge. What is this? Why is it like this? How does it work? You all had this attitude as children. You used to drive your parents up the wall trying to dismantle stuff.

Unfortunately, your schools destroyed that curiosity. They forced you to curb your curiosity by loading you with useless stuff.

Don’t lose that curiosity. Foster it. It is the best way to gain and retain knowledge.

Remember, you have the advantage of Google and Wikipedia unlike our generation. We spent countless hours in public and college libraries to gather information that’s available to you at your fingertips.

We have talked enough about knowledge. We’ll talk about how to face interviews next.

Raja P Areyada

Retired Banker. Expertise in International Finance, Payment systems, Treasury automation, Trading platform development & deployment, Information security, Risk Management, Financial Inclusion, IT software development.

Wide array of interests including Philosophy, Quantum Mechanics, Macro Economics and Parapsychology.