Reading is one of the passions I wish I was more naturally inclined towards. I always wanted to read more books and I always enjoyed the experience, but somehow I just couldn’t be one of those avid readers who would go through 3-4 books a month.
Over the years, throughout my academic and professional life, I tried to build the habit of reading numerous times unsuccessfully. It's not that I don’t like reading, I read several blogs, news articles and magazine articles daily but somehow the same passion was elusive when picking up a book. There was always something — not enough time due to work, family, something more exciting happening, a new Playstation game I want to play with my friends online … always something that prevented me from developing a habit for reading.
After years of repeated trying and failing, last year I think I managed to strike gold when it comes to developing this habit. Don’t get me wrong, it is nowhere close to the aspirational 4 books a month level that I wish it was … more like 1 book a month, but it's a start and (I hope) a sustainable one.
I know there will be others out there who would be in my situation wanting to read more. So, I thought I would share my approach and experiences in this post in the hope that something here will resonate with you.
Below are some things I did/learnt that helped me achieve this goal:
1. Knowing why I want it?
Let me get this out of the way: it is OK to not like reading. Before I tried building the habit again this time, I did consider this as a possibility. That, maybe I just don’t enjoy reading as much I would like to. Maybe I liked it, but my motivation was not high enough to develop it as a regular habit. It took that undue pressure away of forcing myself to like reading books. Instead, I treated it as any other hobby.
Let’s look at what is motivation for a minute. Based on an excellent and highly recommended book by Nick Winter called [The Motivation Hacker], motivation can be represented by the following equation:
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In the equation above, Motivation is what we are looking for, i.e. motivation to read. Expectancy is the perception/confidence of success. Value is the perceived benefit/reward of the success. Impulsiveness is the ease of distraction away from the task, high ease or impulsiveness means less motivation and Delay is the perception of how far away the reward is. The farther away I feel the reward is the less motivated I would feel.
Based on this equation, to maximise the motivation to read, I had to consider the possibility that I didn’t like reading. So, my expectancy was low. So, I only had Value, Impulsiveness and Delay as levers to enhance my motivation.
Value, I knew was high. I enjoy learning and I knew if I could do it I would have a rewarding experience. The moment I realised that, I knew why I wanted to read more in the first place. Books, fiction and non-fiction, are powerhouses of knowledge for a curious fellow like me and I wanted to learn more about a lot of things.
Now, when embarking on a similar journey (or building any hobby or habit), taking a moment to reflect on why saves me a huge heap of time and energy down the line.
2. Being truthful with myself with what I wanted to read
In the past whenever I tried to build the habit of reading, I looked up what some influential people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and the likes, were reading and recommending in their reading lists on LinkedIn or Goodreads etc. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure those books are amazing, but some of them are just not for me. Did I have a perception that by reading what the smartest people in the world read would make me smart too? Maybe. Is that the right way to go about developing reading as a habit? Definitely NOT.
Forcing myself to read something that was not to my tastes was a big barrier. Looking back, it appears so obvious to me but then again, hindsight is always 20:20. I am a cheerful person and forcing myself to read something like Man’s Search For Meaning, a beautiful book by the way ([Amazon link]), was not the right way to go. I enjoy science fiction classics, technology and personal development books. Accepting what I liked and actually enjoyed reading rather than what Bill Gates recommended removed a major barrier to my reading.
3. Really making peace with the view that It is OK not to finish a book
You have heard this one before a zillion times just like I had. But did I really put it to practice? Almost never. It didn't feel right committing to a book and not finishing and that led to discouragement. Going back to the blog analogy, if I found a blog article and it isn’t my cup of tea, I wouldn’t force myself to finish reading it then why was I treating books differently? Part of this is about respecting my own time. Numerous important things lay claim to my time in life … family, work, friends, movies, playing music, gaming etc. If I am forcing myself to finish a book which I am not interested in, I am not being respectful of my time, the time that I could spend doing things that really are important to me. That is not fair for me nor for others I share my time with. I think my subconscious mind understood it and prevented me building that habit.
Now I am ruthless about what I read. If the first chapter or 2 aren’t doing it for me, I would look up the table of contents of the book, see if there are specific chapters I am still interested in and go from there (More on this below). The key is, if it isn’t catching my attention, I leave it and move on.
4. You don’t have to read a book in page/chapter order
OK, so this is probably only applicable to non-fiction books especially to personal development/skill learning type of books. I would go through the foreword and maybe the first couple of pages of the first chapter to get a feel for the book. I would then go through the table of contents. Usually, non-fiction books are organised by well defined chapters around specific concepts. I would jump around the book as my interest peaks. For some books, I would only read the bits that I am interested in and leave the rest of it (see point 3 above) and often times after jumping around a couple of times, I would get hooked and then read the rest of the book more or less in order.
This might not be for everyone but it really works well for me. I realise I can read a lot more books while taking away the key things that I really want to learn from the books. This really ratchets up the rewarding part of reading for me, i.e. the value variable in the motivation equation.
5. Getting a Kindle
OK, this might be a little controversial butfor me a Kindle was a key catalyst to that step change I was looking for. I am certain that I am the minority here but after the years of training my eyes and behaviours to consume content digitally, I find paper books … inconvenient. I have to have both hands free (to hold the book and turn the page). I like to read in places and times of the day when the lighting isn’t ideal. Plus shelf space is at a premium in my house, so I cannot store all those magnificent books that I want to read.
Yes, there are ways around all these issues but I just can’t get over the versatility and one hand friendly use of it while carrying practically all the books that I would want to read over the next 10 years in it all the time. Plus you can pick up for cheap ([here]) so if it isn’t for you then you can always sell it on eBay or Facebook for a good price.
At the end of it, whether it is buying a Kindle, going to a library or just old-fashioned buying books … I experimented and just picked something that worked for me.
6. Making time … even if it is just 10-minutes
This and the next point combined were a game changer for me. As I mentioned before there are many things competing for my time. I just don’t get the peaceful “reading time” like you see in magazines and movies with a person reading in a high back lounge chair with a steaming cup of coffee. Initially, I kept waiting for an opportunity like that to sit down and read and, before I knew it, the whole day went by and It didn't happen.
That’s when I realised that I won’t get that ideal opportunity. For my lifestyle I will just have to make do with bits of time I get at various points in the day to dedicate to reading. After a little trial and error, I eventually settled on a 20-minute slot I get to myself every day after work between gym and dinner.
Somedays this slot is only 10 mins long, other days it is 30 mins long, but it is there, consistently (with a few exceptions), part of a routine. Making time to make a routine made developing the habit easier.
7. It is OK to take time finishing a book. This is a marathon not a sprint
This links closely to the point above. Everyone reads at a certain rate. Some can read a page a minute, others 10 pages a minute. I am one of the former and if on a day I only get 10 minutes, I can only read 10 pages. So, reading something like [Dune] with close to 700 pages will take me almost 2 months of daily reading. This is OK.
I read for pleasure and if the story is compelling and book intriguing, I really don’t care how long it takes for me to read it. Setting arbitrary targets how long I’ve been reading a book or how many books I should read in a year puts undue pressure which achieved the opposite of developing the habit.
8. Getting a habit tracker
I am an organised kind of person … I like process, I like order and I like to have lists. Now, this may not be for everyone but I did like to have reading as a goal on a habit tracker and creating streaks. I don’t use it any more, but I would like to think that it did contribute to that motivation equation above by giving me a sense of victory on a small daily milestone.
It may not be for everyone but there a plethora of habit tracker apps for free. I just picked one and ran with it.
9. Reading more than one book at a time
This was a revelation for me. Again, blame it on years of conditioning of reading on a screen, but reading one book for days on end continuously just was not compatible with my mindset. Treating books like I would a news article or a blog or just any other website was key to fit reading into my daily life.
Now I usually have a fiction and non-fiction book on the go at the same time. I find the balance easier to maintain. I treat the fiction book mentally like a TV show where each chapter is akin to an episode. If I get engrossed, I watch more than one episode at a time, the same with a book. On the non-fiction side, I aim to read from chapter to chapter. Usually non-fiction book chapters are organised around a topic, so a similar mindset to fiction books suffices.
So I try picking up more than one book (I would not recommend more than 3 max) at a time, preferably ones with good contrasting subjects which helps to keep the variety.
10. Making notes
As much as I wish I had eidetic memory like you see on the Sherlock Holmes TV show, I don’t unfortunately. I often used to forget most of the books except for the very few key messages. This was especially true of personal development books. Referring back to the motivation equation, this drastically reduces the “value” variable for the amount of time I would spend reading a book.
Making short notes on the book after a reading session helped me with this and helped me out in the longer term as well as I had access to the key information whenever I needed it without having to worry about remembering every aspect of the book I read.
11. Trying out a part of what I read (however small) in real life
This one is about making what you read more tangible. Just to be clear I am not talking about enacting a murder mystery or anything like that, but this point is meant more for self-help/personal development books.
A number of such books have their key messages distilled as examples and things that an individual could practice to develop them. When I was reading a book on statistics, I took some time to work the problems and examples on a piece of paper to really ingrain the lessons in the book. This provides tangibility to the concepts. Referring back (yet again!) to the motivation equation, it enhances the “value” variable greatly. I tried similar approaches for other books like ones on public speaking to take the concepts and put them into practice.
12. Accepting that it was OK to miss out on reading for a day or so
I like reading as a leisure and pleasure activity. It’s good to have goals around it but pressuring myself to hold on to self-imposed rules in the past made reading seem more like a chore. The way I looked at it, I wouldn’t die if I didn’t eat for a day … the same applies for my habit(s). If I didn’t do it for a day, it won’t just disappear. This was a big realisation, so I aimed to read every day, but on the days I couldn’t well, I didn’t give it a second thought. I just picked it back up the following day.
I apply this to all aspects of life, I keep my goals ambitious and don’t abandon them just because they were that tiny bit more ambitious than I could manage that day.
13. Recognising that I was trying to build a habit and made changes to my approach as I went along
Finally, there was a lot of trial and error along the road to building this habit for me. I didn’t start out with a plan on day one and followed it to the letter. I went with a goal, experimented a lot to figure out what worked for me and what didn’t (shared some learnings with you above). Read and picked up a few tricks from YouTube videos and articles online and refined my approach as I went along. Finding what works for me ensured that the habit was sustainable.
So this is my story on how I managed to build that elusive habit of reading books. I may still not be the hardcore reader that I aspire to be, but I think I am on the right path. The things I mentioned here are some things that worked for me, I hope some of them will work for you too.