I taught myself to spell "Autodidacticism" but don't know what it means

Good intentions make a really good road surface - sort of springy underfoot, so you don't feel like you are going to hurt yourself if you trip. I have a whole bunch of perceived problems that I have always had good intentions to overcome. For example, I have become increasingly obsessed with the idea that:

a) I am using my brain to its full potential and I am, therefore, a half-wit at best,

b) I am only using a small fraction of my brain’s potential and need to discover a way to actualise my full potential,

or

c) Someone has swapped out my brain for a thick piece of raw steak and I am having to use that to think with – which might explain a lot.

Anyway I look at it I feel that things aren’t all that I could’ve hoped for in the cerebral department. I’m increasingly of the opinion that modern life – and particularly corporate life – actually rewires the neural paths in your brain in such a way as to make creative thinking far more challenging and, ultimately, impossible. I can feel the darkness creeping in.

Last year I came up with the idea that one of my problems is the fact that I just hadn’t read enough or widely enough. I can trace the reason for this back to my family, my education, my innate laziness and stubborn refusal to listen to the sagacity of others. At school, very early on, I had struggled with reading and writing and this created a sort of negative reinforcement loop that meant I was never regarded as much more than average and I avoided situations that would require me to read or write. What no one told me then is that reading and writing are the core way by which we communicate. Sure we speak to one another, but it is only when you sit down and write, write to be understood and to understand, that we really hone our communicative powers. So shunning these areas is always going to lead to problems. Problems wider and deeper than school grades.

So anyway, I decide that I had some catching up to do but I still have this problem of being a slow reader. I was never going to be able to broaden my reading substantially with my reading speed even if I ignored the enormous amounts of dross that fills bookshops these days posing as literature. I came up with a plan to address this and support my good intention to become better read. I bought a Teach-Yourself book on speed reading – it had great anecdotes of people who could read whole pages at a glance – just what I needed.

The trouble is, I am such a slow reader I still haven’t finished the book.