The secret of getting ahead is getting started
Mark Twain
Becoming a smarter person comes with a price and it is not a thousand-dollar iPhone, no. The crucial cost is time, which is easy to squander, as well as squandering our senses when we try to create a habit. What can we do to stay engaged during this endeavor?
I’ve already laid out the nitty-gritty of creating a reading habit from scratch using the RWWR strategy. Nevertheless, it is possible to fall behind or to lose motivation in the journey due to certain circumstances that can hinder us from developing a reading habit.
It’s like learning to ride a bicycle when you are a child. When you try to ride it for the first time, you will probably fall, but if you use the training wheels you will experience a pleasurable ride instead of going back home with scratches and pain.
As reading may be a new challenge, you take it step by step, with time and patience. We create the conditions to make this journey frictionless. Today we install the training wheels on the reading challenge.
This set of embarrassing mistakes I made during my journey will hopefully help keep you engaged in this wonderful thing called reading more frequently.
1. Putting Diamond Rings On Books
Opening a book doesn’t mean you kneeled, uttered vows and said yes on the altar. You do not have to finish a whole book once you open it. In other words, it’s ok to cheat, this is not a commitment.
We feel guilty if we leave something in progress, for some mysterious reason of our brain. When this condition meets a book that a friend or the internet suggested, the situation becomes a battle field of conflicts in your mind before you can decide to quit this book.
Every book is not for everyone. If the first ten pages of a new book don’t make you say “holy guacamole, this book is great!” then don’t effing read it.
Don’t waste your time, it’s not for you. There are plenty of books out there, keep dating.
2. Not Setting Goals
The lack of a system is one of the main reasons we drift off from cultivation of a habit. How can we mitigate this situation? One trick is to set up easy goals.
Regardless of your current frequency of reading, starting easy always helps to increment the steps towards patterns you detect in your reading. A few suggestions for you to get started:
- Five minutes a day.
- Ten minutes a day.
- Read during the home-work commute.
- Twenty minutes of reading before sleeping.
- Finish one book in thirty days.
As a personal insight, I started reading just five (5) minutes a day, that was my goal. I couldn’t afford to overstress for something new to me. As I started liking the topics I was reading, I gradually increased that daily reading time to thirty (30) minutes, up to what it is now which I don’t dare to share afraid of being called a bookworm.
3. Random Agenda
When we bestow the fate of our task to randomness, randomness becomes certainty. Meaning the most certain thing to happen is that you won’t do it.
I can tell you how great it feels to roam without an agenda. Believe it from the word of, maybe, the person most unlikely to plan a thing in his life, especially when traveling alone 🙅🏽♂️
This is not helpful, though. Habits don’t form well under random scenarios. Habits need consistency, cue, reward, and timing to become automatic activities.
If you want to make things happen, schedule them. Hack your brain to make it aware of the commitment, otherwise it will do whatever it wants, as exposed in this is why you don’t complete your to-do list.
4. Obsessing Over Numbers
When we see morons that boast about reading thirty books in one year using the RWWR strategy, it can feel discouraging for people who are starting from scratch.
I was also a beginner before becoming this moron. I felt motivated to achieve those numbers I read online, but my progress was darn slow. It took me almost two months to finish my first book. Then I find out that Elon Musk read two books per day. What the hell is that? What’s wrong with me? How do they do it?
Experience tells me it’s not impossible, yet it’s not an overnight change, it takes time. Those people who read one book per day have probably been reading since they were embryos. As a beginner, I also needed enough time to become a moron.
Do not obsess about the number of books to read. Focus on quality instead. Rather than reading a bunch of boring books it’s better to read one book you love one thousand times, at your own pace.
5. Leaving Soldiers Behind
Have you ever watched those war films where they typically say “we leave no soldier behind”? You should take the same approach when working on this challenge. We are part of a team, we can not leave a member of the team behind. The book is the lord commander of the unit, we shouldn’t stay away from it for even one second.
This one second is something you can take advantage of. I read in the trains, subways, ubers, bus, waiting rooms, any place that gives me at least ten minutes. They sum to the equation. At the end of the day, it’s about the compound effect.
A tool that helps me stay engaged is this gift a friend gave me a couple of years back when she found out that I was destroying my sight by reading through my mobile. She sent me a beautiful Kindle paperwhite. There is no place I don’t use it.
Speaking of places, I remember traveling in the Himalayas with friends. The road was through the mountains, a very steep three thousand feet high, very scary. When I looked down I could see other cars that had fallen, the tires, half the chassis buried in sand and stones.
While my friends were looking down, afraid of falling of course, I was reading a book. You can call me a freak now.
That’s all for today, folks. I hope you find this helpful. Thanks for reading – books, not my crap.