Get a reading habit.
When you were younger, you used to read more. You found more hours in the day. You could lose yourself in a book for a whole afternoon at a time, and stay up until three in the morning turning pages.
When you were younger you had a more fertile imagination, stronger beliefs and more dreamy ideals.
Now you’ve got a few years under your belt and a host of other priorities. A lot of things are more important than “you-time” and you’re lucky if you read five books a year.
Your imagination is less fertile. Your beliefs are less important to you, and you gave up your ideals with your first mortgage repayment.
THE TWO ARE LINKED.
So remedy this.
Chunk down.
– pick up a small book and read twenty pages. Don’t do anything else. Don’t answer the phone, don’t do the washing up. Sit, quietly, on your own. You can be on the bus, or in the toilet at work, or even at home with your study door closed.
- don’t give yourself a time limit. If you read twenty pages and don’t want to read any more, stop. If you want to continue, carry on. Thirty pages good, forty pages better.
- repeat every day for a week. If the book’s any good, and you’ve done more than twenty pages in a stretch, you might just have finished it.
BOOM!
You are now on your way to a more creative, relaxed, imaginative, informed and educated you.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Apparently this is also very good to help you get to sleep before bed because it distracts your mind with another life/story, rather than you going over your worries, to do list, etc… Agree with the forcing yourself to read 20 pages though – reading two paras before getting tired and putting book down won’t really help!
I was thinking about reading a book tonight, but then I got distracted by a bunch of blog posts. In all seriousness, I agree. While most books don’t do for me what they claim to, I walk away from each one with fresh new ideas… even if they didn’t come directly from the book.
Thanks both for the comments. I spent two years reading nothing but business, pop-psychology and self-improvement books. When I switched back to fiction I discovered I’d forgotten the sheer joy at losing yourself in another world for an hour. Now, it’s fiction before bed and the non-fiction for the minutes grabbed during the day.