One habit that has changed my life: Reading

Before explaining why reading should be a habit to incorporate in your daily routine, I would like to briefly introduce what habits are.
Habits can be thought of as behaviors that we adopt allowing us to carry on our essential activities. For simplicity purposes, I have categorized two types of habits, unconscious habits and instigating habits. The unconscious habits are the ones executed without us even noticing or thinking about it like brushing our teeth or tying our shoes, while instigating habits are recurrent habits that some time ago we decided to incorporate as part of our routine based on the enjoyment that we feel before, during or after doing them.

These instigating habits that we have purposely decided to incorporate into our life can be subjectively categorized as good habits or bad habits, which is the reason for writing this article, to express the benefits of a habit that has changed my life, the habit of reading!

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

— Joseph Addison

Previous to adopting this habit, I had only read a couple of books, mostly because I wanted to improve a second language vocabulary rather than by looking for another bonus reward. Reading awesome fictional books such as Lord of the Rings and the thrilling novels of Gillyan Flynn — Gone Girl, Sharp Objects, Dark Places — stimulated my imagination, but didn’t make me feel the urge of opening a new book after finishing one. Until a good friend of mine gifted me a book, which was not about hobbits on the quest for a ring or a detective back into her hometown trying to find the leads of a serial killer. This gifted book, Tools of Titans, is rather a compilation of the main habits and beliefs of successful people at the top of their game.

Tools of Titans made me realize I had some good habits already incorporated in my routine such as exercising multiple times per week, learning skills during my spare time, eating healthy, while at the same time it made me aware I had many bad habits making me waste multiple hours per week like spending too much time on social networks, binge-watching Netflix and worrying on irrelevant things. This was a wake-up call where I realized I had plenty of room to replace those bad habits with the good habits I was learning while reading this book.

And guess what was the habit I continuously noticed that was recommended by these leaders and top performers? Yes, it was reading. Making me conclude that reading as a habit couldn’t be just a coincidence between these top performers and their success, nevertheless, the deal breaker for me was the emotional mix felt when I finished this great book and the immediate desire to keep learning useful and interesting things through more books. Therefore, one thing was clear for me: I was soon going to be buying many books, what I didn’t know is that 2019 was going to become the year I self-educated myself the most. I was able to read 20 books, which for some fast readers this might be an average number but for a person like me that didn’t have this habit feels amazing. After reading one book after another my curiosity seemed to get bigger and bigger, waking up in me an eagerness to keep learning more about multiple topics I had always found exciting but due to the misconception that reading could be boring I had been reluctant of reading about these topics.

One year after incorporating this extraordinary habit, the benefits have only been getting better, which was the tipping point of why I felt the need to share the benefits reading has brought into my life. The benefits are multiple, some of them are not explained below such as memory improvement, improved focus and concentration, improved writing skills, etc. However, the ones that have been more remarkable and evident for me are:

• Motivation: This has been by far the main benefit that reading has provided me. Reading books that intend to positively guide your personal development through inspirational stories and lay down techniques that will help you to make better choices are key benefits to boost motivation making you believe you can be more, which will be of great help while attempting to achieve your goals.
• Imagination and Knowledge: Books expand your mind, teaching you new information and making you gain new perspectives on how to perceive the world, therefore, making you more creative and innovative.
  It has been demonstrated that reading helps practice imagination by letting the words describe an image while the reader imagines the picture in the mind. This practice strengthens the mind and it acts a muscle
• Vocabulary expansion: The more you read, the more you will gain vocabulary that will make their way through into your daily expressions. Being well-spoken and articulated has shown to be beneficial in any profession.
• Better sleep and stress reducer: Stress tend to build throughout the day, therefore, reading before going to bed will help on clearing your thoughts and putting your mind and body at ease without letting you think on your tomorrow’s to-do list that will only add up more stress into your life.
• Improving a second language: As mentioned before, this was the only goal I had when I started reading fictional books easy to digest. As a non-native speaker is important getting exposure to new words used in context, which will improve your speaking and writing fluency.

So, now that I have mentioned the benefits of how reading has had a positive repercussion in my life, you might be wondering during what time of the day I read.

— For some of you that commute to work on a bus or subway I would recommend to take advantage of this time to read instead of wandering on social media, I consider morning the best time to read because of the freshness and clearness the mind’s state is without being mixed up yet with dozens of things that might carry on later during the day.
— Even though it might seem to be difficult for those who work, from my perspective, 30 minutes is more than enough to have lunch, meaning that you can take advantage the remaining part of the lunchtime to read instead of talking more about work with your colleagues, which you will end up doing anyway as soon as your lunchtime is over.
— We sometimes have shitty days where we feel our jolting mind cluttered with thoughts that might make sleeping difficult. Nevertheless, reading at night has allowed me somehow to distract and clear my mind, enjoying the last minutes of the day until my eyes get tired and my body ready for a night full of sleep.

Regardless of the time you decide to dedicate to read, the benefits it will provide are numerous and fascinating, and even better, they will grow exponentially. Thus, the more you read, the wiser you will become, expanding continuously your knowledge, which will be of great use in your emotional, social and professional goals.
So, in order to start, I encourage you to think about any topic that fascinates you, find a book about it, and read it. If you feel you don’t have time to invest in reading, I would recommend you to think thoroughly about how is your daily routine composed and what are the benefits and values those other tasks are providing to your life.

I find difficult to put into words the enjoyment I feel when I find myself immersed in a book while learning and creating images in my mind of the story being read, regardless if I am standing in the middle of a chaotic subway station or on the comfiness of my bed. I hope to have awakened your curiosity about the many positive things reading can bring to you and include it as part of your life from now to embrace this habit as a cultural practice in the most meaningful contexts life can offer.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

— Dr. Seuss

P.S: If you don’t know with which book to start, the collage below is a compilation of the books that I read during 2019. Since just the cover and the name of it don’t give the whole idea of what are they about, you can read below a short and sweet description of each one of them just in case any of them call your interest.

Tools of Titans: A compilation of the tactics, routines, and habits of world-class Performers, billionaires and icons. This book is divided in three sections: Healthy, Wisdom and Wealth.

Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity: The future of our species and how genetic-engineering is shaking the core foundations of our lives, sex, war, love, and death.

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: A book about how Artificial Intelligence will affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions: A book that refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways.
“When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we’re in control. We think we’re making smart, rational choices. But are we?”

Factfulness: A book that changed the way I see the world now. It explains the 10 reasons why we are wrong about the world and why things are better than we think.

Zero to one: This book emphasize why to avoid competition by doing the same things that already exist but instead focus on creating new things that help to build the future. Basically, how to go “from zero to one”

A Guide to the good life: The ancient art of Stoic joy: I would highly recommend this book since it presents all the principles of Stoicism, showing how this philosophy can guide us to a better and joyful life.

Algorithms to live by: The Computer Science of Human Decisions: A book about how computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems

So good they can’t ignore you: This book about why skills are more important than passion in the quest for the work we love.

Unfuck Yourself: A straight forward book that shows how to not look to the outside world for answers, but inside our self by taking full responsibility of our life, decisions, and the highs and the lows.

The undiscovered self: A book arguing that the future depends on our ability to resist society’s mass movements. Only by understanding our unconscious inner nature.

Machine Learning: Practical and high-level introduction to the main components and statistical concepts found in machine learning.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t: How companies transition from being good companies to great companies, and why most companies fail to make the transition.

Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives: Forty fictional tales speculating scenarios from the afterlives where each one of them will make you reflect about your actions in life.

The personal MBA: An introductory but great business book with the purpose to give a clear overview of the most important business concepts and essentials of sales, marketing, negotiation, engineering and strategy.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: A book that goes through all the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights the author has gained by developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies in Silicon Valley.

Rework: A business playbook for anyone who want do things on their own, showing that we actually need less than we think to succeed. It exposes that the key to succeed is through try and error and identifying what really work and what doesn’t.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: a fun comedy- science fiction book about an alien and a human for people who don’t mind random thoughts thrown while reading.

The diary of a young girl: The diary of Anne Frank, a girl that narrated the Second World War evacuation events imposed by the Nazis from her perspective while she was hiding for two years with her family.

Sharp Objects: This is a psychological thriller about a newspaper journalist who must return to her hometown to report on a series of brutal murders.