5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting My Daily Reading Habit!
I have never been an avid reader in my life. Due to this, I have missed opportunities to enjoy the popular youth-fiction books like ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘Percy Jackson’ during my childhood. I always knew that reading had its advantages but laziness got the better of me every time I picked up a book. Every book I bought or borrowed, used to lay untouched on my bookshelf for years.
Now I always knew that reading had massive advantages and so, a couple of months ago I decided to start a daily reading habit. However, looking back. I wish I had done a few things differently. So, here are a few things I wish I knew before starting my daily reading habit:
1. Stick To The Schedule!
Keep an allotted time for your daily reading and never miss out. It is easy to delay the habit by telling yourself that you would complete it by the end of the day but that hardly happens. And once you break the chain, it’s tempting to do the same the next day. However, in the worst case, if you miss out once, make sure that you don’t miss again. As quoted in Atomic Habits- “Never Miss Twice”.
One might not feel like reading a book because they found it to be ‘uninteresting’. However, finding a single book uninteresting should not affect your entire reading habit. You can always switch to another book and keep on switching till you find something interesting.
The goal is not to read what you ‘don’t’ like but rather to set a daily reading habit.
I keep my reading slot in the morning during my morning cup of coffee. It’s easy to enjoy the book while sipping on your morning beverage. Moreover, I might never miss out on having my ‘morning beverage’ and hence would probably never miss out on reading. It is only after I read in the morning, that I feel like my day has started!
2. Keep A Balance Between Fiction And Non-Fiction
When I started the reading habit, I mainly stuck with non-fictional books as I thought they contained more important and useful information than other books. However, this was not the right approach at all due to the following reason:
- To set any habit, you need some incentive. Fictional books provide you with entertainment as an incentive and hence you might not associate reading with a burdening task.
- Secondly and most importantly, non-fictional books and especially self-help books are full of different ideas. Now the problem with reading such books back to back is that many times the authors of such books talk about contradictory/divergent ideas. If you keep on reading such books, you might not be able to implement the lessons learned in them, in real life.
3. Do Not Over-Read! (Especially Self-Help)
This learning is similar to the previous one, yet deserves to stand out as a different point. One of the principal reasons behind reading is to browse through different ideas, pick up the right ones and implement them in your daily life.
Now a book has an overflowing amount of lessons and ideas ready to be grasped by the reader. If you even read just for 30 mins, your mind would have already surfed over a lot of new ideas. However, what’s the use of so many ideas if we don’t ponder upon them at least for a while?
It is as important to reflect on the ideas and thoughts as it is to read them. So, don’t over-read! Find out your optimal reading time during which your brain can concentrate and absorb the learnings. It’s no use to keep on reading just for the sake of it. However, make sure that you increase this optimal time gradually to improve your reading skills. Currently, my optimal reading time is 30 mins, however, I do tend to read more during holidays.
4. Share Your Thoughts
One of the things which can motivate you to keep going on with your reading journey is to share your thoughts about the things that you read. Click a picture of any quote that you like and share it with multiple people or discuss how you implemented a certain idea present in a book with others. You might be surprised to find the number of people interesting in your thoughts and you might even inspire others to join the reading journey with you!
I used to continuously share my thoughts and ideas regarding the book that I was currently reading which not only helped me to brainstorm new ideas but also provided me with a sense of achievement. I could only able to complete a thick book like ‘Dune (Frank Herbert)’ as I used to keep discussing it with a friend and explaining how it was different from the ‘Dune’ movie released in 2021.
5. If You Are Confident Enough, Invest In An E-Reader
It would be my advice that once you develop a reading habit and you are confident enough that you would stick with it for the rest of your life, just go for an e-reader like Kindle. I have previously written a blog related to it which you can check out. You don’t need to be an avid reader to own a kindle!
Do let me know your thoughts in the comments and if you are just getting started with your reading journey- Best of Luck!
Happy Reading :)
