How I Read A Book Every Day
Have you ever found yourself saying, 'I want to read more books' more often than you actually read? What do you think has changed in your life that led to this shift in your reading habits?
I used to be like that - reminiscing about my childhood or young adult years, spending hours each day reading chess books - and wondering...what changed?
Background
One can quickly point to the influence of social media - attention spans shortening and focusing on immediate gratification (picking up the most salient idea from a text in a very digestible and addictive format).
On another level, you may be in an environment where the people around you don't appreciate the learning and depth of engagement/analysis that comes with reading. Perhaps you are even criticised when attempting to go beyond the assumptions your family or friends take for granted.
What You'll Discover
In this post, you'll discover:
- What shifted for me in once again becoming an avid reader;
- How to find a clear purpose in reading;
- Simple and effective strategies for continually adopting a habit of reading.
Let's dive right in!
The Dissipation Of A Habit
About a week ago, I was in Vietnam, away from my library of books back at home.
My reading habits already started to decline in 2020, as I had only brought a small number of books to Vietnam, and was there for nearly two years during the COVID lockdowns. Furthermore, my wife's cynical attitude toward books at the time led to my own motivation for reading books to decrease.
Even when I returned to Sydney, I was reading much less, as instead of being surrounded by bookcases, most of the books were now in the garage. This environmental change disrupted the natural association of seeing a bookcase and grabbing a book to read.
A Personal Shift
In early April 2024, I felt frustrated by my lack of progress in poker solving tons of puzzles and watching various training videos.
So, I changed my approach, and focused instead on reading some of the poker books I had recently purchased (plus some old ones I had started, but not finished). However, the format of reading the PDF files in Adobe, on my old laptop, was a bit awkward, and I would start disengaging by the time I finished a chapter (perhaps due to all the scrolling up and down). Sometimes I was even disengaging during the reading, multitasking with playing games while reading (making my comprehension far lower than usual).
Making Technology Work For Me
The turning point was when I started to use the free Kindle app on my mobile. I don't use my mobile as much as most people (to avoid wasting time), but like to do something productive (like solving puzzles or reading) when I am travelling or walking.
A simple change in device also led to much faster reading speed and much greater comprehension (as I couldn't easily do something else on the mobile and still stay on the page with the e-book). I had a lot of free time on my hands while travelling from my wife's family home back to Sydney, and it suddenly became quite easy to read a full book on a bus trip or a flight.
My Trick For Not Buying Books You'll Never Read
A common issue expressed in the 'Chess Book Collectors' Facebook group (as you may expect by the name) is that members buy way more books than they actually read. (I also faced this challenge - I must have bought about 2500 chess books in my life, but only finished 750 of them, and read parts of another 1250 or so).
My solution to this is simple - buy one book, and you can't buy another book until you finished the previous one you bought.
Admittedly, I broke this rule yesterday, when I bought a 'Kindle Unlimited' subscription and downloaded some free books included in the subscription - but by this time, I'd already set up a clear habit of reading whenever I had some free time.
Tracking Your Progress
It helps a lot to track your progress with your goals - including, ambitious goals like reading a book a day - so that you can't fool yourself.
Looking at my library of 19 e-books in Kindle now, I've fully read 5 books, and have read parts of another 7 books in my library - leaving 7 more books that I haven't started yet. (In the last few days, I would read parts of several books rather than one full book, to not feel too overwhelmed with the task of reading a 300+ page book). Breaking our goals down into chunks is a great way to ensure that the tasks don't overwhelm us.
Focusing On Your Identity Rather Than The Habit
A great concept I learned earlier today from 'The Power Of Discipline' by Daniel Walter is that of adopting the identity of someone who follows a habit, rather than focusing on the habit (or not doing a habit).
An easy example is that when you say, 'I am a chess player', you absorb the identity of someone who plays chess, so it is very easy for you to log on Chess.com each day and play some games on the server.
A more complex example would be how you respond to being invited to a fast food restaurant. The person who responds 'I'm trying not to eat fast food' admits that they still haven't detached from their desire to eat fast food (and suppressing an urge tends to only make it stronger over time). Whereas the person who responds, 'I don't eat fast food' has clearly integrated healthy living as a part of who they are.
Of course, making a habit a part of our identity (where it is fully automatic to us) takes around 66 days, so we should show ourselves grace for those moments where we skip out of our desired routine.
Choosing The Right Books
Choose books that align with your reading speed and your interests. Choosing topics was quite easy for me given my wide range of interests (starting out with poker and branching out toward Stoic philosophy, mindset and then self-improvement and business for some variety).
However, I found that sometimes I would get into a quite long book (not realizing how long it was) and feel a bit overwhelmed by the scope (especially for quite involved topics). For this reason, you may prefer to focus on shorter books at first, both to develop a feeling of progress, and to help you improve your reading speed through practice of speed reading techniques, so that later on, you'll be able to read a 300-page book in a similar amount of time to what it takes you to read a 100-page book now (without substantial loss of comprehension).
Other Methods For Becoming An Avid Reader
Here are some other methods for becoming an avid reader - some of which I adopted unconsciously, and others which didn't occur to me before (but which are worthwhile to implement):
- Set A Daily Reading Time: This is something I could improve; I typically start reading quite early in the day, use 'dead time' in the afternoon to read some more, read while walking/travelling, and then read again in the evening to help myself sleep more easily. But there's definitely an argument for scheduling things more deliberately, especially when one is reading longer works that will take considerable time and effort to complete.
- Break It Down Into Smaller Parts: I mentioned this one before, but it bears repeating.
- Speed Reading Techniques: I glossed over this as it's a better topic for a separate post. For those interested in this topic, you may like to check out Tim Ferriss's speed-reading content.
- Minimize Distractions: Setting up a quiet environment, with minimal distractions, will make it far easier for you to comprehend what you are reading, and to stay focused during your reading. (One may like to apply some ideas from my previous post, on getting in the zone).
- Use Technology: I already shared how switching to Kindle E-Books greatly increased the amount I read each day.
- Keep A Reading Log: The Kindle E-Books do this for you. If you mostly read physical books, use bookmarks to keep track of where you were.
- Review Regularly: If we take some time to try and retrieve lessons that we learned from the material, we will remember it much better, and be far more likely to apply it effectively.
Conclusion
One reason I wrote about this topic is that I believe (much like Ivaylo Durmonski) that society is increasingly prioritizing immediate gratification and the simplification of ideas as much as possible, at the price of losing depth of meaning and understanding.
For chess players, diving deeply into a topic (rather than relying on a video to give us all the answers) can open up a lot of further questions and ideas, and affect the way that we learn and apply concepts in general.
Of course, there are limitations to diving very deeply into something with limited practical relevance, or that is only a band-aid solution to a greater, deeper problem - but that is a topic for another time.
Comment below - what were your main insights from this post?
