The one habit I'm trying to build this year.
So the promise I kept for 2021 is to read at least 2 books a month, inspired by the greatest Matt D’avella, he’s like virtual mentor for me and if you don’t know about him, I urge you to checkout his YouTube channel It’s February 3rd as i am writing this, and the book I started was Sapiens - A Brief History of Humanking by Yuval Noah Harari
I’m like 35 pages down, which surprisingly took me about an hour to finish and now it’s almost 1 am at night and my mind is hacking ways to distract me from reading, begging me to go to YouTube or just even to go sleep. So after a chapter ended, unconsciously I started reading a bookmark, now, If you have ever purchased a book from Amazon India, it comes with a bookmark like this
It’s ironical that one of the point mentioned is that the advantages of reading the book is to increase concentration and here I was distracting myself by reading that point, And there I noticed a QR code, took out a phone swiftly, scanned it, and, it landed me to gift section in amazon’s website, as I was browsing, in no time I was distracted from reading bookmark to shopping for stuff on amazon, amazing how frictionless technology has come, anyway coming to the point,as I was browsing, I happened to noticed a book with familiar name, and along with it, tons of memories from a day rushed inside me. The name of the book was Norse Mythology - Neil Grayman.
2nd February 2019, It wasn’t just any ordinary day, It was the day of my first ever interview. This story is not about the first interview experience, that we’ll discuss some other day. I felt very confident that day as I tend to be in these critical moments of life; sometimes, this confidence has brought me great success and sometimes not so much.
So on the bus ride to the interview place, few students started familiarising amongst themselves, and one of them brought up the topic of reading books and how he had read Greek Mythology, this and that mythology and many other books whose names I couldn’t remember because I heard those for the very first time., Right at that time, There’s was something unusual going in my brain, I realised how little do I read, You should know that at that point of time, I’ve only read couple of books outside the academics. I didn’t know what happen that day, but that overheard conversation generated a spark in me, to read more books, the pursuit for knowledge. So, yes, I instantly purchased around 5 books from amazon that day, gifted a couple of them to my dear cousin and then thought I’ll start reading these books like crazy, but.. That didn’t go as planned. I never read any of the books, but meanwhile, I kept on buying more books, I unwittingly engaged in tsundoku- a Japanese term used to describe a person who owns a lot of unread literature. I had 4+ unread books collecting dust on the shelf.
This changed when Matt uploaded a video recently about his new years resolution and the theory behind why 90% of resolution fails as we have no one that’s going to be held accountable, I was inspired in a fair amount by that video, and this is also one of the reason why I’m writing this, to hold you people accountable, though only few. As of now, I have managed to read 2 books in January and aiming to read 22 more in the coming months.
Lastly, if any of you guys want to take this challenge along with me, please do, I would be happy to be your accountability partner.