Dear Lieman,
In your last mail you asked me about reading. And you quite skeptical about reading, finding a lot of books let you read do not provide any valuable information to you and you felt that you have wasted too much time on it.
Well, I would like to say - that's part of our life. Everybody will makes mistakes, this include everything, not only reading. Did Edison create the bulb just because of an experiment? No, more than 10 times, 100 times, 1000 times; if he felt that it is useless to create bulb because he failed then all the people in the world will never enjoy our time during the night.
Reading is very important, and I mean it. But you have to be careful while you read your books and you have to know what kind of knowledge and/or purpose you're looking for. For instance, if you looking for know how to draw a beautiful picture or how to draw a comic then you have to find a book teach you how to do that. You'll never find a book to teach you how to fish a fish. If you want to know how to cook you'll know you'll not find a book to teach you how to become a carpenter. If you want to study for mathematics you'll not look for a book about arts.
There are some authors in this world we have to be careful. The reason they publish their books is, purely, because of money. They have not spent too much time on their material and maybe not intended to hurt anyone because of that. We, as a reader, need to have a mindset when we read the books - a critical mindset. We have to think the points provided by the author logically? Useful? Can withstand the test of time? Or he writes that because someone asked him to do?
How to have a critical mindset? You might ask. Well, there is not exact answer but I can only provide some guidance. Firstly, read - read a lot of books. You might find quite funny as to judge a book we have to read a lot of books. But that's true! How do we able to know how to go to the destination we want? Can we able to reach just within one time? Unless there is someone guiding us, if not we definitely have to make some mistakes before we know how we able to reach there.
Secondly, life experience. We'll see a lot of people or have met a lot of situations in our whole life. That's something no one can take away from us. These will give us some sense to look the world differently; to look at the people we work/stay/play and/or others together differently; to know how to a better way differently. What have written on the book maybe, because of different cultures, different countries and/or others, it'll come out different results. We, of course, know better than those ,who live in different country, what kind of culture we've and how it affects us.
Thirdly, listen - listen to the elders/seniors/parents. These people met more people than we do, read more books than we do, have more life experience than we do. If they become our mentor, tell us a lot of experience and explain why and how. We'll, learn faster than anyone do around us.
There is not exact way to improve our critical mindset - the best way I can find is learn through others - either true or false - the most economic way to learn.
I hope I have provided some picture for you.
Good luck and happy reading!
Yours sincerely,
Michael