Transcription
Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. In this video, I'm gonna be sharing eight tips that I find helpful for reading more consistently.
So these days, I'm averaging about one or two books every week and this is alongside my full time job of being a doctor and my part time career of being a YouTuber and running a business on the side, all this stuff but the point is that I find the time to read in my routine. And I think over the last sort of eight years of reading a lot that's added so much value to my life. As usual, timestamps to all of these are gonna be in the video description and in a pinned comment, so you can skip around the video if you feel like it. But now let's get started.
(soft music)
So point number one is that you should get a Kindle. Like there is some evidence, I'll link it down below if I can find it, that says that people in America who use e-readers read about 40 or 50% more books per year than people who don't use e-readers. And the Kindle is amazing. I've been reading absolutely everything on Kindle since like 2008, so a very long time. Yeah, it just completely transforms the reading experience. That's all I'm gonna say on that front. I've made about three other videos where I talked about how amazing it is having a Kindle, so if you're not convinced so far, then please have a look at those videos. I'll link them down below but yeah, Kindle is absolutely game changing when it comes to reading more consistently and everyone that I have hammered this recommendation down the throat of has bought Kindle has said to me later on that, "Oh, I'm really glad I got the Kindle because now I read so much more." And it's just completely worth it. So yeah, 100% get a Kindle.
Point number two is kind of like a mindset shift. And I found that when I developed this mindset, it kind of changed the game for me much like getting a Kindle. And that was the mindset that it's okay not to finish a book. Previously, I had this view of like books being this sacred, prestigious object that if I was kind of reading a book, I would have to finish it before I move on to the next one, even if I found it boring. And there are so many people I've spoken to over the last few months when we like talk about reading and consistency and stuff, coz this is the sort of stuff I talk about who say that, "Oh, you know, I've been reading 'Sapiens' for the last 18 months and just haven't gotten around to finishing it. And yet, every time I sit down to read, I feel guilty that I haven't finished 'Sapiens', then I try reading it and then I get bored after half a page and I close it and then go to sleep." You know, the obvious solution there is to just close 'Sapiens', put it away or, you know, delete it from your Kindle library and just read something else. In a way, we're sort of treating books more like blog posts. If you were reading a blog post or, you know, on someone's blog, you wouldn't feel the sense of shame if you didn't get to the end of it. It's kind of like a book, like, you know, we should treat books much like we treat articles or blog posts on the internet, in my opinion. And when I internalized that mindset, I found it a lot easier to read more consistently.
(soft music)
Thirdly, another kind of related note, it's also okay not to read classics. So this is again, a thing that I used to have back in the day. This was ages ago where I used to think, "Oh, you know, if I'm reading, I should read something good rather than just reread 'Harry Potter'." But then I realized that actually, you know, who defines good? Who cares if the classics are classics because English literature students study them? I don't really care. I wanna read for enjoyment and I wanna read for, you know, to help my life get better. And so the advice I often give to people is that when you're a beginner in reading, ie you don't read very consistently, you know, the thing to start with is not something like Charles Dickens, even though it's a good book, or like Jane Eyre, you know, like these classics that people say are good but that, you know, are from a bygone era. The trick is to start with something simple like "Harry Potter" or, you know, some great fantasy or fiction book that's easy to read that makes you wanna turn the page because once you get into the habit of reading, then you can start exploring down the, exploring these avenues of these fancy ass English literature sort of books like Charles Dickens and Shakespeare and all that stuff. Recently, I've read The Psy-Changeling Series, which is a series of 16 books on the paranormal romance genre. And I absolutely love these. These are absolute trash but they're kind of fun, they're cool, they've got different characters, they've got magical powers, they fall in love, it's all that sort of jazz. I'm not thinking that, you know, I'm not feeling guilty when I'm reading this thinking that I'm reading trash. And I think because I've got this attitude of, "I don't care what I read as long as I like it, as long as it's good," then that actually makes me read much more consistently because it means that there isn't any of this baggage associated with having to struggle through reading classics.
(soft music)
Point number four is also semi-related to that. And that is that it's okay to skim through books. There was this thing I came across in a podcast, I'll link it down below, where the guy was talking about there being two modes of reading: number one, where you're reading for enjoyment, and number two, where you're reading for information or inspiration or that sort of stuff. And reading for enjoyment is more like reading fiction. So if I'm reading for enjoyment, then I won't really care about, you know, highlighting passages or taking notes or whatever, because I'm reading for enjoyment. I'm also okay with skipping bits of long bits of description. Like if I get the idea and if I'm really wrapped up in the story, I don't feel the need to read absolutely every word. And then when I'm reading non-fiction, I'm not really reading it for enjoyment, although some of them are quite good, but I'm more reading it for information or education or inspiration, stuff like that. And so, my tactics for reading that is a lot different. Like A, I am completely okay to skim stuff as well. B, I'll be looking for things to highlight on Kindle because the Kindle highlighting thing is amazing. C, I sometimes might even start by looking at the table of contents and just kind of scroll through and see which bits of the book catch my eye. If there are bits of the book that's boring, what I tend to do is just kind of flick a few pages, eyeball some of the words on subsequent pages, see if it's gonna get more interesting and if not, I'll just close the book and read something else. Like I'm treating these books exactly like I'm treating articles or blog posts. I'm not feeling guilty for skimming or for not finishing one.
(soft music)
Point number five, and this is probably the most important thing after the getting a Kindle bit, is that I find it really helpful to build reading into my daily routine. So my nighttime routine consists of me brushing my teeth, getting changed, or going naked depending on how I'm feeling on a particular day, getting into bed, telling Alexa to turn the lights to relax, which is like a nice like yellowy sort of... In fact, Alexa, turn on relax in the living room. You know, it gives this sort of setup. Let's go back. Alexa, turn on Ice and Fire in the living room. There we go, back to normal. So I put on relax, which is like a nice warm, I dim the lights to about 10% and I lie in bed, pick up my Kindle and I put my phone all the way across the room. I set the alarm for half past six in the morning and I put the phone across the room. Which means the only thing I can do when I'm in bed is either sleep or read on my Kindle. Through doing that for the last like five, six years, I just kind of read every single night before bed. And I read until I feel tired, I feel my eyes beginning to close and then I'm like, "Great, I'm falling asleep. I'm gonna close the Kindle, put it on the bedside table and I will fall asleep." That is just the way I've built reading into my nighttime routine and so it's pretty easy for me to finish, you know, one book a week because I'm reading for at least sort of 20 minutes, half an hour each day. And if it's a particularly, you know, gripping book, it'll keep me up until like 2:00, 3:00 in the morning and I'll be super glad that I did. And recently, I've read lots of books, "Bad Blood," "Shoe Dog," and "Third Door" in particular, that have kept me up way into the night because I've just enjoyed them so much.
Point number six is that there are loads of other occasions in which you can read even when you're not reading. And here I'm gonna give applaud to Audible, coz Audible is amazing. It's like the best audiobook platform ever. They are actually sponsoring this video. I just didn't know that when I filmed the video a few weeks ago. And I've been using them for the last like two years and it's just like one of the best £7.99 a month that I spend on anything, period. Because when I'm in the car or when I'm at the gym, I can be listening to audiobooks. And when it comes to audiobooks, I tend to listen to fiction rather than non-fiction. I think non-fiction, it's better to read on Kindle because then you can highlight stuff, you can skim a lot easier. Whereas fiction, you know, it's kind of going and the narrators are usually very good. At the moment, I'm listening to "The Wheel of Time" series by, I don't even know who it's by but it's pretty good and I'm about halfway through the first book and I just kind of put that on when I'm at the gym. If you don't have an Audible subscription, highly recommend follow the link audible.com/aliabdaal and I think it'll give like a 30-day free trial and a free audiobook and two free Audible Originals, some something like that. You should have a look. Yes, that is correct. You can go to audible.com/aliabdaal or you can text aliabdaal to 500-500. And with that code, you will get a free 30-day trial and you'll get one free audiobook of your choice along with two free Audible Originals, so you really might as well give it a shot. It is genuinely amazing. As you hopefully saw from my unadulterated opinion, when I didn't know this was a sponsored video, but yeah, audible.com/aliabdaal or text aliabdaal to 500-500. Yeah. Sign up to Audible, it's the best £7.99 a month that I spend.
(soft music)
Point number seven is that I think it's really helpful to have an account on Goodreads, which is also incidentally owned by Amazon, who again, not sponsoring this video, unfortunately. But Goodreads is really good because it's like the ultimate social network for books, kind of in that they've got a library of every single book ever published. If, for example, if you're reading a book on Kindle, it automatically can add it to your "currently reading" section on Goodreads. And then when you finish the book, it'll ask you to give a rating and that automatically goes to your Goodreads account. And so over time, you develop this library where you track every book you've ever read. And if you want, you can write a book review. You can read other people's book reviews. You can follow recommendations that other people have. And so when I first got a Goodreads account, I think it was like four or five years ago now, I spent a day just racking my brain and thinking back to every book I'd ever read and just adding it to my Goodreads, sort of, "I've read this book" library and I'm giving it a rating if I could remember what the book was about. And now I've got like 300 and something books in this library and it kind of becomes a game. Like when I wanna start a new book, I get excited that, "Yes, I'm adding it to my Goodreads library." And if I manage to finish the book, I feel excited that, "Yes, that's another book down." And it's just like a personal game we play with ourselves. But I found that that is another thing that's helped me read a lot more consistently. And if you guys are interested, I'll link my own Goodreads profile in the video description. You can follow my profile, you can add me as a friend, whatever that means. And you can see all the books that I've rated five-star, four-star, three-star, whatever, and maybe that might help you get some book recommendations if you're into that sort of thing.
(soft music)
And finally, point number eight is a service called Readwise, that's absolutely incredible. Readwise is a fantastic service because what they do is that they sync to your Amazon account and if you're like me, you read everything on Kindle and if you have a lot of highlights, what it does is that it sends you an email every day with five random highlights from random books that you've read. And so I find this to be an absolutely amazing way to resurface content that I had read in the past and I thought was legit enough to be highlighted. But before discovering Readwise, I didn't really have a way of actively going through my highlights. Like occasionally I'd browse the Kindle app and go through my highlights for a particular book if I was researching a blog post or an email newsletter but now every single day I just get an email from Readwise and I read stuff and I'm like, "Oh, that quote from 'Happy' by Darren Brown or that quote from 'Tools of Titans' by Tim Ferriss actually applies to the thing I'm thinking about at the moment." So that's a fantastic way of resurfacing the stuff that you've highlighted and reminding yourself of these life lessons that, you know, if you're like me and you've read everything on Kindle then you highlight everything on Kindle, it's immensely valuable. Another cool thing about Readwise is that you can sync all your highlights to Evernote. So I've started doing that recently and so if I'm making a video about productivity, I can just Ctrl + F productivity on Evernote and that will include within that search it would find me any quotes about productivity that I've highlighted in various books. And I think at the moment I have like 2000 highlights across hundreds of books on Kindle and therefore they're all synced to Readwise. And another great thing about Readwise is that if you read articles online via Instapaper, which is what I use, and you'll highlight stuff there, that also syncs to Evernote. So it's just kind of the ultimate way of building a second brain, whereby anything that you think is good enough to be highlighted is then searchable whenever you wanna find something and that is another thing that's helped me read more consistently because now I feel excited to highlight stuff. And whenever I come across a new passage, I think, "Yes, this goes in straight to my Readwise library, it's gonna go into Evernote and I'll be able to have this as a piece of wisdom that I can then call upon whenever I need it."
Those were my eight points on how to read more consistently. Main thing, get a Kindle and build it into your nighttime routine as you know, that's what I do, that's what I'd recommend. But also recognize that it's okay not to finish a book, it's okay to skim, and it's okay to not read the classics. You can just kind of read whatever you want coz reading is supposed to be fun. It's not supposed to be this chore, this thing that we only had to do in English lessons. So yeah, thanks for watching. I hope you found this video useful. If you did, I'll put a video over there or over there somewhere that will be a playlist of some of my recommended reading. So I've got a video called "Three Books That Changed My Life" and another video about "Three Recommended Fantasy Books" that I listened to on Audible, so you can check those out. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye bye.
(soft music)