3 Ways to Build a Reading Habit

There's a lot of great benefits to reading books that we all know about. And there's a really great quote that illustrates this. R. martin, and he says that a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one. Break that down. Reading allows you to travel through time, have a conversation with the brightest minds of history, and adds a new lens for you to see the world through. That being said, we're all human, and you might have some barriers to reading. Maybe you don't have enough time.

You get bored when you're reading. The cost of buying books. I myself am a huge reader. I have a bunch of books behind me. These are mostly my fiction books. I have about 50 nonfiction ones back in my office at work. But it wasn't always that way for me. And that's why I want to give you all the three best ways to build your reading habit. Number one is to read what you love until you love to read. Pick whatever interests you. It almost doesn't matter what you read. Eventually you will read enough things that are led by your interests that it will dramatically improve your life.

It doesn't have to be this intimidating, dense nonfiction book. When I first started really getting into the hobby of reading, which was about late in college, I read random sports biographies because I was a big fan of that. This led me naturally to books about habits and personal development. And then I started reading fiction to be into a good, deep story, and it just kept building on itself. And with that, quit bad books too. Life is too short. If you don't like a book after the first 50 pages, the first few chapters, guess what?

You can move on, dish that book onto the next one. Because there's so many good books out there. If you remember from learning back in school when you were a kid about ancient Egyptian history, there was the Library of Alexandria, known to be one of the biggest and most, most expansive libraries ever. Well, now in our current day, we live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant. It's the desire to learn that is scarce.

So to help you build your habit of reading, pick what you love. The second way to build your reading habit is to make your goals small and manageable. Early on, maybe it's as small as one page a night before bed, and that eventually compounds into one whole chapter before bed. A helpful way to make your habit manageable is to Set these mini goals and use simple math. What I mean is, if you want to read 12 books a year, how many books a month is that? You guessed it, one book. And let's say that book itself is 300 pages long.

If you divide that page number by the number of days in that month, 300 by 30 over the course of the month, you could finish that book if you just read ten pages a day. To me, that sounds a lot more reasonable than the premise of, oh, I got to read 12 books a year, one book a month. Especially if you're just starting out in your habit. This premise of small and manageable goals is super helpful because you want to build a consistent habit of reading, not just sporadic here and there. But that being said, we're not trying to speed read just to get a bunch of books read, as you'll see in this third point.

Third and final point I have for you is that quality is more important than quantity. So the phrase more is better does not apply to reading. Don't get stuck in the number of books you read or buy into the urge to speed read through them. Reading a book isn't a race. In fact, the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed. Focus more on each book and savor it. If you're trying to learn something, highlight quotes, take notes in the margins, summarize each chapter. After you finish it, write some takeaways in the back of the book.

That way you can apply the knowledge you just learned. If you're reading fiction and just get lost in a story, fully enjoy it. You don't have to rush just to get to a certain number of books. Or compare yourself to your friend Dave who reads 50 a year. Good for him. I don't care. It's your journey and you need to get the quantity out of your mind and focus on the quality. All right, I lied. Fourth point. More so of a caveat is that this hobby of learning or immersing yourself in a good story isn't just limited to reading.

Maybe reading books isn't your thing. Well, you can get the same benefits from podcasts, TED talks, YouTube videos, blogs, articles, whatever it might be. But no matter what, there are a lot of great benefits to reading. So apply some of these tips if you're trying to read more and build that habit.