How To Be A Reader?
Another question on Quora that provoke self-reflection
Recently, I have encountered many questions on Quora that asking how to cultivate the reading habit.
It made me think about my journey in reading.
When I was younger, I enjoyed reading novels, but reading became a necessity than a leisure activity as I grew older.
For the past ten years or so, I haven’t read any fiction. I have read a bunch of self-help books and a lot of other related to the teaching profession. My friends will comment on my monthly reading list as “heavy topics”.
So, how did I become an avid reader?
I took the advice from Charles Duhigg and Stephen Guise and came up with a plan to cultivate a reading habit:
- Start small. First, set a goal to just read for five minutes or read one page daily. You might laugh at it now, but it was the best way to “cheat” on ourselves. For action that has yet our brain“recognised” as a habit, we reject doing it even when we recognise the benefit of the action. So starting small could blind the system, and we could do it without feeling the friction.
- Repeat for as long as it takes to make it habitual. No magic number here. Some said 21-days, and others might need 90-days. I took 14-days as a baseline, which means I need to repeat the action daily for 14 consecutive days. If I missed one day, I would repeat the whole process.
- Record and celebrate the little milestone. The record could serve two purposes. First is a pragmatic one where it allows me to know my progress (the day of the challenge), another one is to motivate me (two more days to complete the 14-days challenge? Hurray!).
I feel the need to reiterate that 14-days is my magic number, it might not work on you, but you could always try and see how long it takes to turn an action into a habit. Usually, I will get used to the action after the challenge and could increase the difficulty of the action. That’s how I moved from reading for 5 minutes to 21 minutes daily.
Try it and see if this 3-steps habit-building plan could help you. Let me know the result if you have tried it!
