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You’re Already Winning: The Secret Power of Reading
You’re one step ahead. Simply by reading this article, you’ve already caught up to more than half the people in the country. But if you’re thinking, good for me if I read more, at least I’m more likely to be one of those successful types… hold on, you haven’t heard the half of it!
Let’s reveal exactly how flipping pages or scrolling screens make such a big difference. And with some statistics, facts and psychological theory I’ll prove to you just how much you’re ahead of the curve.
The Reading Rarity
One of the simplest and profound pleasures. Reading is relatively infrequent in practice. Nearly a quarter of American adults (23 per cent, according to a Pew Research Center report) don’t read a single book in its entirety, or at all, in a year.
A somewhat more recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) puts the figure at about 43 per cent for literature (novels, short stories, poetry, plays) reading for pleasure. Their surveys have been conducted every other year since 1982, and serves as the closest thing to national reading and writing habits we have.
The Intelligence Indicator
Reading is not only a passion, it could well be a marker of higher intelligence. Researchers at the…