How to love reading books?
Without a doubt, reading is the most essential habit that everyone needs to do to basically live better life.
Just search for “the benefits of reading” on Google, and you will get hundreds, or even thousands of articles laying out all the gains that you can get from this simple habit.
Most people, including myself, we have troubles to just pick up a book and read.
It kinda became a hard thing to do, especially since the arriving of many distractions like: videos games, social media, and movies.
But, it doesn’t have to be an excuse to not read, and as they say: leaders are readers.
I know that not everyone wants to become a leader of a company, or even a nation, but you can start with leading yourself in a better direction,and reading helps a lot!
Now, let’s get into the 3 habits that I used personaly to make reading as consistent habit despite many challenges that I met down the road.on, and that’s what people need today.
How To Love Reading?
Tip #1: Start With Your Own Problems
We all hear this saying: if you want to read, start with something that you are interested in.
What if you use your own personal problems to build reading as a habit! Also pain could be used as a motivator to make a change.
In fact, pain is more favorable than pleasure especially in siutations when you want to make something happen in your life, because nobody wants to be in a painful place.
You can use that as a fuel to learn about something you want to fix, or you want to improve, by reading books or articles.
And bit by bit, in your journey of reading anything could potentially fix your life’s problems, reading will become less exhausting and more enjoyable.
By the way, that’s how I built the habit of reading. I wasn’t happy with my life, I had a lot of psychological flaws, so I started reading about psychology, and self-help, so I can find a fix to those problems.
It wasn’t an overnight thing. I was committed to do everything I could to improve my life, and find practical knowledge to deal better with my flaws.
I’m still doing this today. It’s a never ending process. There isn’t a ceiling to it.
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Tip #2: Start With Small Commitment
We all know the act of reading is a bit strenuous to do. It takes mental effort and a lot of will to pick up a book and read.
But it doesn’t have to be an excuse.
You see, most of us lack a strategy, and a plan to get started with something especially if it’s hard, and not pleasurable.
What I recommend in most of my posts, is to start very small that you can’t say no.
Actually what’s happening is this: your conscious is batteling with your unconscious, and we all know this battle is already lost because of the super powerful subconscious.
I think the best thing you can do to hack your subconscious, is by doing little each day.
Instead of trying to force yourself to read 16 pages right of the bat, start with one page a day. Only that!
Stick with it for at least 15 days.
What you’re doing, you’re grooving new neurological connections that are responsable for the act of reading, and slowly increase the number of pages as reading become less effortful.
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Tip #3: Make It Satisfying
What gets rewarded gets repeated. It’s the 4th law of behavior change that James Clear laid out in his book atomic habits.
One of the things that he talked about in this chapter, is this idea that our brain love immediate reward, and building a habit like reading is in the “delayed reward” category.
So, how can we fix this mismatch between immediate and delayed reward?
The solution that James Clear brought up is called temptation bundling.
It simply means, doing something you hate or you don’t want to do while doing something you love.
When it comes to reading, my temptation bundling was this: Everytime I go to a coffee a shop (the thing I love), I bring with me a book to read (the thing that is difficult).
Over time, I associated drinking coffee with reading book.
So, every time, I want to drink a cup of coffee, the first thing that comes into my mind is reading a book.
To learn more about temptation bundling, you can check out this post, where james Clear go a bit in-depth to grasp its whole notion, and favorably put into action.
This post was about how to love reading.
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