I read for 300 Consecutive Days in This Year. Here’s what I Learned.

Reading time 7-8 mins

As a child, I enjoyed reading books.

It was a hobby that I developed when my father regularly purchased books (Comics, Amar Chitra Katha, etc.) for my sisters and I when we were in school. Unfortunately, as I grew up, other things took a priority in my life and my reading stopped.

A few years ago, however, I purchased a Kindle device and I gradually warmed up to reading again. And later with the COVID-19 pandemic induced lockdowns, my reading dramatically accelerated!

Thankfully, I could continue with my reading habit even after the lockdown restrictions got relaxed, and my mornings are now incomplete without reading at least a few pages as I enjoy my freshly brewed BLV Fine Blend Coffee.

Just earlier this month (on 8^th November 2021), to my pleasant surprise, I realized that I completed a streak of 300 uninterrupted days of reading on my Kindle (Yes, Kindle tracks the days and weeks you read through “Reading Insights” in its app – you can disable it if you want). 

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WHAT HAVE I GAINED BY READING BOOKS?

In today’s blog, I’ve tried to capture how reading has helped me in life. The learning is not specifically from the past 300 days alone, but from my overall reading journey of the past 2-3 years.

1. Reading books has made me wiser and has evolved me as a person.

I think this one is intuitive. We have a limited set of life experience ourselves that revolves only around the circumstances that we face in our own lives. Unfortunately, that experience is not always wide or deep to teach us everything. Reading biographies about other people, on the other hand, helps us to learn what other people experienced in their own lifetime, and we can gain a lot of insight from it.

Malorie Blackman has said “Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.”

For instance, reading about Holocaust survivors such as Viktor Frankl, or Edith Eger, or Eddie Jaku, and their life lessons, or reading about the ancient Stoics, and the philosophy they followed; emotionally transported me to their state of being and helped me to grow. I realize that I have so much to be grateful for in this life.

Eddie Jaku, the Holocaust survivor, calls himself the “Happiest Man Alive”. His story is truly inspirational. Most people would get traumatized for life if they had to go through such a horrid experience. However, Eddie Jaku used the same experience to transform his life. He shared his story with many people in Australia (where he immigrated after World War 2) and that helped him to heal.

We have so much more to be grateful for today in our own life. Yet we seldom are. We tend to quickly overreact even to the smallest of inconveniences. Just think about the last time you were upset only because the Wi-Fi was down!

I was one of them. As I reflect, I realize that gradually I have changed. I have become more resilient and am also more receptive to other people’s views.

In today’s fast paced, digital, and social media driven life, our life has become more complicated and distracted. We have 24 x 7 news airing on TV (mostly spreading negativity). Social Media infinity loop apps on our phones & eyeball catching web series on Netflix and other OTT platforms keep us awake late into the night. Too many things to do, leaving us with no time for active learning.

It is my personal view that most of our problems today are not real, but invented. Perhaps a clash of egos? Or not being able to get along with the people in our lives? As I’ve said previously, situations just are. It is we who put colour in them to make them either pleasurable or painful. The choice is always with us.

To summarize, although I do not recollect everything that I read, I know for sure that it is only because of the books that I have read that I have gotten wiser than I was just a few years ago.

2. Reading has offered me actionable strategies to improve my life.

I am a big fan of self-development. So far, I have devoured books on topics such as:

• Habits formation (Atomic Habits, The Power of Habits, 7 Habits, High Performance Habits);
• Human behaviour (Predictably Irrational, Think Again, Thinking Fast and Slow, Triggers);
• Productivity (Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, The One Thing);
• Leadership (Extreme Ownership, What Got you Here won’t get you there); and
• Happiness (The Happiness Advantage).

While I certainly have not been able to (yet) apply all the principles and strategies listed in these books, I am gradually trying to chip away all the inefficiencies from my current self, so that I become a better version of myself, one day at a time. After all, excellence is a journey, and not a destination.

Had it not been for the insights gained by reading all these books, I would not have known that such strategies exist at all, leave alone try to work on them.

3. Reading has given me the courage & the motivation to start this blog! No kidding.

If you have read my previous blogs, you must have noticed that almost everything I’ve written so far is based on what I have myself previously read. There will hardly be anything that is original (except perhaps for the experiences from my personal life that I have shared).

As I read books and gained insights from them (the Aha! moments), I was desirous to share those with as many people as I could. However, although I was excited to share these fascinating stories, I had questions.

Should I start a blog just to share what I read elsewhere? Is it worth it?

Isn’t it already written which people can just access and read themselves?

Why spend so much time to start a new blog (to add to the million others getting posted on the internet every day) when whatever I had to say has already been said by others?

But then I found the answer in Austin Kleon’s wonderful book Trilogy – (a) Steal Like an Artist, (b) Show Your Work, and (c) Keep Going.

In these books, the author writes that every great work of art is based on something already in existence. The key is that we should start by imitating our heroes. Along the way, we will find our own unique style, so we can eventually finish our work by emulating our heroes.

The author also explains that every great artist was an amateur at some point in time. It was only with practice at their craft that they could eventually get any success.

Those books gave me the courage, and the necessary motivation to write. And this blog is the outcome!

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While all of this sounds great, you may still say: “hey Vinay, wait a minute! I can barely find time to read what you write in the Saturday Stories & that too once a week. There is no way I can read more”. Which brings me to the next part of the story:

HOW YOU CAN BUILD A READING HABIT

First of all, you need to keep in mind that you do not have the time in life to do all the things you want. You have to prioritize your time. So, if you expect to finish all the tasks at hand, and then sit down sometime in future relaxing on a beach & sipping a martini while reading the book you always wanted to read, then that is a delusion.

Instead, you need to build a habit to read books despite all the noise surrounding you. That is the only way. Here are some strategies that you could consider:

1) Start Small: You want reading to be fun, and not a burden. So, start small. Just commit to reading one page every day before you go to bed. Simply keeping the phone away will help. Reading can thus replace your pre-sleep screen time. And it is not mandatory that you need to finish a particular book once you start. If you don’t like it, simply keep it away, and start with a new book. Remember, we want the reading process to be fun, and not a burden.

2) Utilize the time cracks: There is a lot of time that we spend each day simply in commute, or waiting for people to arrive, etc. One trick that helped me to read more books, was that I made it a habit to carry a book with me (either a physical or an e-Book). That way, in these 5-minute time chunks, I was able to catch up with a few pages of reading. A colleague of mine always says “penny penny makes many”. Same applies even for time saved. These small chunks of time add up. This is how we can find time when otherwise our day offers us none! As per Tim Urban, author of the famous blog Wait-But-Why, reading just a little bit consistently every day can, over time, make a difference between a person who reads just fifty books in a life-time as opposed to someone who reads a thousand.

3) Book Clubs/ accountability partners: Another great way to ensure that you stick to your habit of reading books is to join a book club, or team up with a friend where each person encourages the other to read. I am part of a WhatsApp group where people announce a book they plan to read in that month, and then update the group on their progress. Such practice can encourage us to follow through with our reading.

4) Other mediums: In today’s world, it is not necessary that you only need to read books. You can also listen to audio books, or listen to podcasts, watch insightful Ted Talks, read book summaries (e.g. Blinkist) etc. which can also help to broaden your knowledge.

I have stumbled across an amazing video on YouTube aptly titled “How To Read More Books”. You can watch it here.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

It is often said that all readers may not necessarily be leaders, but all leaders are definitely readers. If you are not reading as much as you’d like to read right now, just try to follow the strategies mentioned above.

Remember, “Reading is important. If you know how to read, then the whole world opens up to you.” – Barack Obama

If you want to go through the list of books I have read in this past 300 days, please click here.

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Oh! and by the way, on 12th November, I unfortunately missed reading for a full 24 hours (and my reading streak ended at 303 days!) Today, on 20th November, I’m on Day 8 of my new streak.