How to read every book you own

I'm going to ask you is me asking you to join me on a really dumb Adventure here and I'm pretty sure it will change the way you read it may change your life and if it does neither of those [Music] um you can like Bully me and like in the comments right okay cool the idea is this I sat down and I read every single book that I own well I got rid of first like 90 of them because I didn't want to read every single book that I own and then of the remaining ones I just read the first page but close enough right I'm gonna take you through that same process in this video about how that works like why it worked for me and like why I think it might be one of the most important things I've done to like really instantiate a reading habit for myself this isn't about building a habit of reading like a book a day or like 300 books a year or anything like that this is more like building a sustainable habit something that you're actually going to be able to stick with something that like if you forget to do it like brushing your teeth or taking a shower or needlessly arguing with people on the internet like there's gonna be some like internal voice that speaks out to you and it's like hey there's still something left to do today it's very easy to read when things are just kind of put in front of us like by algorithm or curator or feed that's like a kind of reading that we do and that we're really good at doing the kind of reading that I'm gonna encourage you to do and the Habit that we're going to build on this video is completely self-directed it's following our own whims our own interests and it's going to be with physical books if you have like a like eBook reader like that is like single purpose like an iPad is okay a Kindle or something like that is much better um that's the kind of thing we're going to be doing and we're going to be reading fiction we're going to be reading things that aren't necessarily written with any primary purpose in them other than to transport us into different places I find that we often buy books and think that we've acquired the knowledge inside of them but it's the process of reading itself like the time and energy that we put into reading that is actually going to provide a lot of the value by thinking that we've read something that we haven't actually read yet we're like actually robbing ourselves of a lot of the true value of reading I had a lot of books and you know there's value in being confronted with like all the books you haven't read yet and that you will never be able to read I think that's a humbling process there's also value in having a reference library don't get me wrong I'm not saying get rid of books just for the sake of getting rid of them or that you need to always read every book you have but with like physical belongings if you find that you just have like piles of books and they're not like properly organized and like you don't like how they are like aesthetically contributing to your life it is okay and I encourage you to get rid of them other people will make use of them and you can always like download the ones that you're getting rid of as like PDFs or epubs as part of a digital library if you know you know you actually get like a lot more use out of reference books that way I think because it become searchable and taggable um I probably won't get to read most of the books that I have remaining and that's kind of the point books that are singular and that could have changed your life if only you read them like I know that no matter how often or how much I read that's gonna happen and I don't think of that process as passive or as like akin to extracting Knowledge from a text and with them being thinking machines I think the implication is we should be careful and intentional about the kinds of thinking that we let into our lives I think that any book you pick up we'll have lessons for you like if you're a writer and you're picking up a book that's just like really bad and it's like the worst written prose you've ever read I think there's so much value in that because like your first impulse should be like if this can get published I knew that I can publish something similarly like if it's like a really great beautiful singular text that's like you can meet with the glimpses of beauty and like interconnectedness and like elaborate design and unfolding of the story like the in the like you're if you're reading proofs and just finding yourself like having to close the book every three pages because it's too much I think that's actually like one you can be you can definitely be jealous and Furious that such a beautiful thing exists and use that to power like your own like motivation and to see if you can get close to it but also like as a thinking machine I think what that reveals is that like whatever glimpses of genius and beauty that you're able to see within the text that's actually you that's actually something that you're creating that's happening entirely within your own mind so I think that if you can like observe that and see that and make that happen in your head if you're an artist you can also reproduce that and make that yourself well let's get into the fun part now which is the approach of reading that we're actually going to use how we're going to build this habit and getting all of our books together and reading all of them we know from research that self-discipline is a way better predictor and indicator for Success both like in life at grades than things like IQ and other measures of intelligence what we want to like figure out is how to cultivate self-discipline with a habit of reading I'm going to take you through like a very abbreviated guide on how I build habits um like getting much more in depth in this is like kind of out of scope for this video but I will cover more in a future video our brains are lazy and the best way possible I think we do something a lot we tend to Chuck it together into a single automatic routine this is what really lets us like drive to work almost unconsciously or what allows a gymnast to perform like a really complicated sequence you can leave habits as being made up of three key Parts there's a cue which is the trigger that will tell your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit you should be using there's a routine which is like the sequence itself physical or emotional this is like the part we usually associate with The Hobbit and then there's the reward the reward is what really helps your brain figure out if this particular like habit Loop is worth remembering in the future um once the loop is engaged like executive function is diminished our brains like turn off in a lot of ways and the amount of willpower that we need at this point to change the habit or to not engage the whole Loop is really high this makes habits like really hard to fend off unless we can apply willpower right at the queue or unless we're able to switch out the routine of the Habit completely so that's what we're going to do for reading our cue is going to be getting into bad we're going to need this to be like as easy as possible so we want like a light next to the bad like it can be a clamp light you can have an e-reader that hopefully can only read books iPads are great but there's like too much other stuff that can go wrong right when we're trying to build a hobbit so like to really try to keep it simple our routine is going to be for reading for 20 minutes a day the golden rule of habit change is that if we keep the Q and the reward the same that we can just kind of slot in a new routine to take place of the old routine so for most of us we're going to be replacing time on our phone before bad using my phone before bed was largely a social activity for me it was a way to like make plans with people to like see what my friends were up to to like text and just like feel kind of immersed in the social World a little bit before sleeping what I found helpful was just talking to friends about the book that I'm reading the function of that is like now when I read before bad it is like in some ways a social activity it is the thing that's going to enable a social behavior in the future you can experiment like experiment with like different cues different rewards even the routine you can try tweaking a little bit I find it like really helpful to keep a chart of how many days in a row that I've kept a hobbit the habits tend to become much more durable over time as they're repeated but they do more than just become durable you make yourself accessible to a certain way of thinking and then that way just comes more easily and naturally overnight I find that like my dreams are like a lot more creative and weird um and that like in the morning I often have like pretty deep insights that were delivered to me unconsciously while I was sleeping you may be familiar like both Benjamin Franklin Ernest Hemingway like many writers and great thinkers kind of a similar habit and like daily routine that they all had was like finishing their day on either unfinished work or on a great question I think reading before bed serves something similar it cues our unconsciousness to continue working on something while we sleep it accuse us in the morning to pick up kind of where we left off so like rather than focusing a lot on like morning routines at first where like willpower is really hard to muster because like you're half asleep it's actually a lot more beneficial to focus on the evening routine where you still have like a little bit of willpower to spawn I think it's important to visualize and like really sit with what it would feel like if this habit was successful for you like really imagine like a year from now two years five years from now what your life would be like if every day before bed you were reading for like 20 minutes 30 minutes that if when you looked at the books on your shelf you had read many of them like what experiences that would lend you what kinds of thinking that would have given you studies show that when we really like visualize and allow ourselves to set and Associate positive outcomes with a habit we're trying to build they're much more likely to happen we're now going to grab every single book that we own and put them all on the floor so books aren't exactly on the floor I decided to use a table because it was too difficult to get all of my books on the floor in a company spa and my table could only hold so many so I'm just going through like 100 or so books right now as soon as we start reading a book we really learn quite quickly that we haven't done anything at all with this book yet as you go through all this you're gonna finish at some point right this is the time where it's selecting a book time if you already picked one out while you're looking at these that's what happened to me Moby Dick I found myself on page four and I was like okay yeah I guess this is the book that I'm going to be reading here to you when you're like reading the first Pages or maybe you've already read all the books you have or like maybe you're about to get on a plane and you don't have your books with you that's totally fine I really just encourage you to read a book that first has like no obvious use like whatsoever to your job or academic Pursuit be like the cover do you want to be someone who like reads Foucault um and if you're in doubt just read the first book that you picked up and if you forget which book that was read the last you're learning to trust in yourself and you're learning to trust that like it's okay to like deliberately take on this task and to decide for you what's important and not to listen to anyone else when you have habits you can decide which book you're going to read before you're actually going to sit down and read it and then later on when it's time to read a book you've already done that like there's no postponing it there's no second guessing it you've spent that willpower when it was easy to spend it it's not disrespectful to Mark books the book belongs to you and I think you should write your name and date on the front cover that's what I'm doing here this really sets your intention to read the book it makes it easier to write notes later on and in like 30 years someone else picks it up maybe they're gonna do the same there's also your chance to write like a very basic intention it can be anything you want and I'm going to write it on a slip of paper which is going to be my bookmark as you read this intention is going to be like a partial lens that you can use to extract more from the book and to like really solidify and make it obvious but you're doing your own reading at this side like you're customizing your reading I'm going to explain how to use this intention for how to highlight and connect ideas lastly I'm not going to leave you with all of your books on the floor we can categorize them I really could talk for hours about Like Home Library taxonomies I'm going to encourage you to use like color last name subject matter really whatever it feels to you as long as it's like some coherent system that you understand now you have a book and intention and a habit being sketched out we can really get into how to customize the reading experience itself and explore some of the issues that come up most frequently the first one we're going to talk about is like the order and how you should read things or the the way of reading you should approach there's no wrong way or like wrong order to read you probably don't want to be like me and like try to start reading Dante only to realize like you actually have to read La Vita Nova and then like you actually can't read lovely to Nova because you haven't read like these other six Greek books but then there's like a translation that's like coming out this year that you want to read so you can read them all in the same translation so you have to wait like another six months for that it's a really bad process I enjoy it to an extent and you may enjoy it too and it's okay to do I like I'm not telling you how or how not to read but if you find yourself doing this a lot and not actually reading the books maybe just try like picking up Dante and reading and allowing yourself to like read them in a new order or in whatever order you can actually accomplish I'm not saying it's wrong to be ambitious and I also want to show read in on new ways one of the ways that I've been reading lately is by reading every 10th page of a book so like me you've already read page one on every single book right so on this book you'll start on page 10. maybe not the the first book you're going to read but like after you get The Hobbit down you can start a book on page 10 and then page 20 and you're going to read every 10th page until you finish and then you're going to start over kids have this magical ability to like read absolutely everything in front of them they don't accumulate bookshelves full of Dante that they haven't read yet because they're worried about the wrong order they like embrace the fun they Embrace like the singular adventure of it they'll read one day a book about dinosaurs and the next day a book about like Shackleton like kids will go all over the place with their reading and like I think there's something in that that can help us when we try to reapproach reading that reading should be fun that reading should be an adventure or that reading should be something that we don't like think that we're gonna do the wrong way and if you like find yourself researching Dante more than actually reading Dante let that be a cue for a new habit let the routine be the researching and what you're going to do is try to keep the cue and the reward the Sam so find what the cue is for when you start this like process of researching and then you're going to slot in that habit of reading again like anytime you see yourself researching if you're not already like existing within a robust habit of reading that is the cue to just pick up a book and just start with that just just read it lastly let someone know that you're reading the book um if you don't have anyone that you can tell you can just leave a comment and I'll respond and I can be that like person for you the social commitment works and I think you're going to find that reaching out to someone isn't just going to let you build your habit it may also help pass on the habit of reading to another person single book that you come across could change your life forever you don't know which one it's going to be it's like Picasso paintings is a painting number 20 436 that's going to be the Masterpiece that everyone remembers before which book is going to be the book that completely flipped your life in the best possible way you don't know you just have to read them all just have to keep reading and reading and reading and hunting for it and trying to find it that's what's missing what's missing is like not kicking the ass but I think this video needs like a little bit of a kick in the ass and it's like I don't feel comfortable being the kick in the ass person with myself on a camera [Music] there's a lack of confidence there and I think I have to like own the lack of confidence it's like do you take like 15 takes until they like you nail it and over massage the thing or you just like I don't know how to express this yet but you have to and you just need to be open to that book because it will find you and when it finds you it will punch you in the gut and you will think you're living in a Milan kandara novel for 15 years end of video

Channel: Christopher Budnick

Views: 87,883

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Id: Z6qbeU6lVFk

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 09 2023