To be a better Employee: Read!

If you want to be a good employee and a better person this year, read!

Reading is important as it ties in to your resolution to learn. However, reading is also important as it is more involving. You can listen to seminars and be disengaged. You can watch Youtube videos and be otherwise occupied. However, when you read, you are actively engaged in making sense of the words, figures, graphs and pictures on the page.

Read the following:

“A green pen.”

Now while you have read the sentence the synapses in your brain have fired up to conjure up an image of a writing instrument that is green. The image may be different for different people depending on their perspective and experiences. Some may have imagined a clear ball point pen with green ink, others would have imagined a green bodied fountain pen. Some would have imagined the pen capped, others would have imagined it uncapped. In your imagination it may be resting on a desk or poised to write something on a piece of paper. Whatever the situation, three simple word made you imagine something which was not there.

Words have the power to construct images, to convey ideas, to propagate concepts. You can be travel to distant places and times far in the past or far into the future. You can learn from the experiences of others. You can find out things which you yourself would have difficulty discovering.

Or you may read up on business journals. Find out new concepts of sales, marketing or management. You could even dig up old company reports. Find out where your business was five or ten years ago. Discover how the landscape has changed, how business has changed. What business decisions were taken years ago that helped grow the business. Which business decisions did not pan out and needed to be scrapped. How can the lessons of yesteryear's help you plan for the future?

Reading up on it will engage your mind to assimilate data and stimulate your mind to process it in different ways. It will help you gain knowledge and learn from the experiences of others. It will stimulate your mind to find creative solutions to problems.

Therefore, to be a better employee this year, make sure you read.