In a gymnasium, one often sees lax, listless people, who, instead of pursuing a systematic course of training to develop all the muscles of the body, flit aimlessly from one thing to another, exercising with pulley-weights for a minute or two, taking up dumb-bells and throwing them down, swinging once or twice on parallel bars, and so frittering away time and strength. Far better it would be for such people to stay away from a gymnasium altogether, for their lack of purpose and continuity makes them lose rather than gain muscular energy. A man or woman who would gather strength from gymnastic exercise must set about it systematically and with a will. He must put mind and energy into the work, or else continue to have flabby muscles and an undeveloped body.
Julia Ward Howe
The physical gymnasium differs only in kind from the mental one. Thoroughness and system are as necessary in one as in the other. It is not the tasters of books—not those who sip here and there, who take up one book after another, turn the leaves listlessly and hurry to the end,—who strengthen and develop the mind by reading.
To get the most from your reading you must read with a purpose. To sit down and pick up a book listlessly, with no aim except to pass away time, is demoralizing. It is much as if an employer were to hire a boy, and tell him he could start when he pleased in the morning, work when he felt like it, rest when he wanted to, and quit when he got tired!
Never go to a book you wish to read for a purpose, if you can possibly avoid it, with a tired, jaded mentality. If you do, you will get the same in kind from it. Go to it fresh, vigorous, and with active, never passive, faculties. This practise is a splendid and effective cure for mind-wandering, which afflicts so many people, and which is encouraged by the multiplicity of and facility of obtaining reading matter at the present day.
What can give greater satisfaction than reading with a purpose, and that consciousness of a broadening mind that follows it, and growth, of expansion, of enriching the life, the consciousness that we are pushing ignorance, bigotry, and whatever clouds the mind and hampers progress a little further away from us?
The kind of reading that counts, that makes mental fiber and stamina is that upon which the mind is concentrated; approaching a book with all one's soul intent upon its contents.
How few people ever learn to concentrate their attention. Most of us waste a vast amount of precious time dawdling and idling. We sit or stand over our work without thinking. Our minds are blank much of the time.