To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The natural laziness of the mind tempts one to eschew authors who demand a continuous ef ort of intelligence. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
—Aleister Crowley
The way you get information can affect your self-discipline. By getting your news from just one source and blindly believing it, you run the risk of mental laziness. After all, why think about what the provided news really means or whether it’s even true in the first place? It’s the job of the newspaper or news site, isn’t it?
Take advantage of the opportunity to improve your self-discipline by exposing yourself to other points of view and thinking for yourself. It takes work and questioning your beliefs is uncomfortable,which results in a great exercise for your self-discipline.
Another risk lies in defaulting to easy entertainment or avoiding difficult topics. While there’s nothing wrong in reading easy books to relax, you miss out if you stay away from more demanding and complex works.
Reading thought-provoking and/or long titles conditions your brain to eschew mental laziness.When a book provides an intellectual challenge and you keep going, you train yourself to stay with problems for as long as necessary to figure them out instead of giving up — and that’s a habit that will surely help you in other endeavors, too.
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