Entrepreneur and best-selling author Michael Simmons thinks a lot about reading and learning new ways. In an article he published online about intelligent reading, he presents the idea of fractal reading.
Fractals are essentially whole objects made up of smaller pieces that resemble the whole. Simmons defines them as “objects where the same patterns happen at different levels of scale.” Great, but what does that have to do with reading?
It means that you can read small pieces of something—a book, research paper, magazine, etc.—and get a good sense of what the larger piece will be like. So you could read a chapter of a book or an article summary and determine whether or not you want to read the entire thing.
This is great because there are so many things to read and so little time to do it in. Fractal reading helps us be more picky and make better decisions on what we spend our time reading. Here are a few fractals that you could read before digging into the larger piece:
Sure, this will take some time to do. But if it prevents you from wasting your time on a bad book, then you’ve saved time in the long run. And the benefit of reading a really good book is worth spending a little time on fractal research.