Audiobookin'

Someone fairly recently asked me how I could stand to listen to audiobooks. They wanted to understand how I didn’t lose my place, discovering after a minute or two that my mind has been completely somewhere else and I haven’t been listening at all.

My knee-jerk response was to share that my mind wanders too, but fortunately I make heavy use of the 30 seconds back button. That’s certainly true, but I’ve thought a bit more about this since then, and I’ve discovered that I actually have a more nuanced view than that.

A part of me is just… well, lazy. I appreciate that I’m able to learn something new for a part of every day, but sometimes I am just going to learn about half of what I’m capable of learning. Maybe my goal isn’t to learn every detail of a historical event, but instead to understand its place in the larger scope of events, so I don’t really care that there was a King of England named Stephen.

Oh, who am I kidding? Stephen is such a silly name for an English king.

There’s a second way I like to listen to audiobooks. Every once in a while, I’ll listen to something so good or so compelling, or maybe so useful to me, that I’ll want to listen to it two times in a row. This pretty much liberates me to rip through it that first time, just kind of giving myself permission to get the executive overview. The second time through, I feel like I already know the story a little bit.

Either way, I’m proud of myself for embracing my laziness.

I’ve liberated my mind to explore things, without expectation that I’ll pick up every single detail upon first pass, and maybe even ever—and that’s okay. I don’t need to learn every detail to understand what I want to know.

On the other hand, it’s important not to do this every time. I like to focus on new material I’m really interested in so that I absorb both the big picture and the details, although I have to have already gotten the big picture first—hence that lazy first pass with so many subjects before a much deeper dive for focus once I know the story.

There’s something to be said for giving yourself permission not to pay attention to everything.

Do you listen to audiobooks, and if so, how do you treat them?