Writing is hard. But reading is even harder.

Most of us do little real reading, in the sense of following a text that tells us something real and challenging and doesn’t titillate our desire for entertainment.

Hard reading, however, can be easier if done in dedicated chunks of time and attention. One of the reasons so many never manage to get into the texts that are difficult but ultimately rewarding is because such reading is never easy and doubly difficult at the beginning of our reading. Those texts are usually not from our time and to simply absorb what they are saying requires us to breathe a different atmosphere than the one we’re accustomed to.

Following that fresh air, we have to follow the contours of arguments that have stood the test of time. By definition, those are usually not easy. But the very act of listening to a great thinker enables us to stretch our mental capacity and our abilities to reason.

Almost no variety of work rewards hard reading. Because of that, we have to do it on our own. But to get out of the 21st century air we breathe, to listen to a prophet speaking outside of our time will enable you to keep your head when a world is going nuts.

And if you can do this for even 15 minutes a day, your life, and the lives of those you serve will be amply rewarded over time. Carve out the time, turn off your phone, get alone, and start that reading you’ve always thought you should read.