i think i read twitter too fast, and maybe everything else too. i read like i'm scanning for "information" as opposed to really letting myself feel the impact. when someone writes good shit on here i've started rereading it slowly, sometimes out loud
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i know lots of ~"gifted" people who developed a habit of reading fast as a kid and now i'm wondering if it was / is a kind of dissociation mechanism 🤔
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otoh there are plenty of tweets you probably shouldn't let into your soul. so reading quickly to scan for good tweets and slowing down for the good tweets seems pretty sensible overall
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i was really quite serious when i said “follow ppl whose tweets u want inside u” twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/st…
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my style was diving into a math book and as soon as it gave me a single new idea chewing on that idea and sometimes turning it into a blog post. very slow but good things happened
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There was a time when I'd read everything in front of me, before I learned to choose the stuff I liked. I think I learned that reading fast through the bad parts occasionally got me to parts that were good. And most books had good parts.
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I remember an "educational" comic book about science that was absolutely terrible, because even 8-year-olds know when someone's talking down to you, but the appendices(!), which were ~50 pages of solid text, was good stuff. I still read the appendices of every book I read.
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Reading poetry helped me reverse this tendency.
You only get the poem if you descend slowly into the meaning.
You cannot smell a flower on the side of the road from a speeding car.
