My learnings from “A Book A Week” experiment in 2019

For starters, it was extremely hard but it helped me understand myself a little better. Here are the books I read last year.

I think it was on the evening of 30th December, 2018. I just finished the last book in the list of 30 books I committed to read as part of my 2018 Goodreads Challenge. I marked the book as complete on my Kindle and went to the Goodreads profile to see if / how they’re going to celebrate my achievement — have they introduced some personalised confetti-like experience to celebrate my accomplishment and make me feel good. I like indulging in these personal experiences, especially when it’s a lot of hard work and it’s unlikely that your loved ones are going to give a damn about it. 😄

Me: “Hey, I just finished reading 30 books this year!”

That friend: “Oh is it! I think that’s awesome. I’m sure you’d have learnt a lot reading those many books. I’m certainly taking inspiration from this and I’m going to commit to read Y books the coming year!”

Nah, it never happens. 😅

Anyway, Goodreads didn’t do anything special to celebrate my feat but it certainly gave me a nudge to commit to a grander more ambitious 2019 Reading Challenge. And I fell for it. Note to self: Never set your goals when you are on an absolute high. It’s a recipe for disaster and disappointment in 9/10 cases. Remember what Daniel Kahneman taught all of us about the limbic brain taking control to take impulsive decisions at times? This was clearly one of them. I decided to up my game to 50 books for 2019, argued with myself that it doesn’t have a good ring to it, and then decided on 52 books since that would be a book every week in the year and hell, why not?

How was it to read a book every week?

Well technically it didn’t happen like that. The reasons are simple to understand: Your 52 weeks are never homogenous time slots where you end up spending X hours towards reading a new book. In my case, I dealt with 10 days of bed rest because of a dengue fever, attended 3–5 weddings of friends and relatives (x 2 days each), encountered at least 4 instances of 3-day-sinusitis or under-the-weather streaks (I struggle to read those days) and also spent another 10 days in Bhutan (yes, we all imagine holding a hot cup of coffee in one hand with the book in the other hand overlooking a beautiful valley of apple orchards. No it doesn’t work like that most of the time) And second, no two books are the same, they are just as human as the authors who wrote them. Some of them need more time to understand and the others are easy on you.

Monthly (not weekly) planning: So it was never a book every week. But it was roughly 4–5 books every month. That gives you the flexibility to slot in books that are long reads along with shorter ones. For example — I would’ve taken 2 weeks each to complete The Tale of Two Cities and Don Quixote but they were mostly complemented by business related books that are generally 5–10 hours read (there are exceptions of course). So I ended up planning the books I’ll try to wrap up in a given month and most of the time I’d be catching up since I was almost always in a state of being 1 or 2 books behind the schedule. Remember the non-homogenous nature of weeks that we discussed? They will ensure that you are behind (unless of course you plan for extra books every month planning out a buffer for the unexpected that is yet to come).

Hard work: As someone who likes to read books, I’ve noticed that 20 books a year is fun. 30 books a year (my 2018 goal) was a bit of effort but still fun. But 52 books was hard work. For the first time in my life, I had a daily calendar event of 1 hour for reading. There was no way I could have finished my 52 books otherwise.

Daily reading slots in my calendar. Sh*t just got real. And I certainly took the Reading Time slot more seriously than the Gym slot. 😄

This became a challenge for me since I’ve been working on my startup Typito the whole year and wanted to be an absolute miser about time that I’m spending else where. Eventually, I think that equation worked out pretty well, more about it in the next section :).

What I learnt (about myself) doing the 52 book challenge?

Let me now dive into what I think I learnt by the end of the “ABAW” challenge — this is a culmination of the reflective thoughts that went through my head in the past 1 month (after completing the 52nd book on 30th December 2019) and could be helpful for others who wanted to venture into similar challenges.

1. Small recurring efforts lead to big goals: The ABAW challenge gave me the confidence that I could commit to an ambitious goal and deliver it. This was certainly an ambitious goal for me since there were many instances where I had to push myself, reprioritise my to-dos so as to accommodate for more reading time and it’s not easy . And when I was able to complete it, I realised that I am capable of putting incremental effort towards a long term goal and achieve it — which I think is an important skill. Keep in mind, the goal here was much more effort oriented and didn’t have any external players involved (eg. of outcome oriented goal with external players — scaling your startup’s revenue by 3X in a year with the help of a 10 member team) and hence it was easier that way. Nevertheless, an ambitious goal is an ambitious goal and it gave me the much needed personal confidence boost in my ability to run Typito and drive other efforts that I care about in my life by embracing a growth mindset.
2. Medium of learning: By this time in life, I’ve been fortunate to try different media of learning — be it reading articles, listening to podcasts, attending workshops and classes, learning from peers, reading books etc. And of all these, I realised the medium that I can relate with the most would be books. Let me share my version of why it is so. Podcasts and reading articles, in most cases, have helped me get a gist or summary of the topic being addressed and many times I’ve found it hard to retain my learning to the level I’d like to. Not to forget, podcasts leave me with the pain of having to go back (again and again) at points where I find it hard to interpret what the speaker says. Workshops are great, but again they don’t help me much if they are not interactive and even if they are interactive, there’s a limit on the time I could borrow for interaction during a workshop. Books, however, tell a different story for me (pun intended). They are scalable (like podcasts, articles) — sitting in Bangalore I can read and learn from some of the best professors of business and psychology like Clayton Christensen, Youngme Moon, Carol Dweck and also some of the best storytellers like Charles Dickens, Miguel de Cervantes and I can also delve into whatever topic I’d like. And unlike podcasts and articles (and more like peer learning and workshop experiences), I am able to satisfy my need for deeper learning or richer perspective using books and I think it’s a function of the effort the good writers have put into explaining a concept / telling a story and the time I spend going through them line by line. I don’t miss the lack of interaction in books because I feel the good authors always try to account for the need to teach better in books (remember, it’s their piece of art and they better do a good job there 😄) . So in a way, it’s the best of both worlds of learning for me. This was a great revelation for me since I now know very clearly where to invest more time and resources (including money) to augment my goal to become a better learner.

Want to read books? Don’t Panic!

If you are convinced about the value in reading more books than you are doing now, don’t get overwhelmed by the ABAW experiment. It was achievable for me since I’ve already built my comfort reading many books. But you can always start somewhere.

• If you haven’t read any books in the last year, start with a goal of 6 books a year. That would be 1 book every 2 months.
• If you have read 6 books last year, make it 12. That would be a book every month.
• If you did a book a month last year, make it 24. That would be 2 books a month.

And so on! It’s not going to be easy but the value and experience you’ll derive from experimenting with this format of learning would remain life long with you.

And if you’ve already figured out that you are not a books person, but you rather like learning from reading articles, watching documentaries and movies, listening to podcasts etc, do not fret! First of all, it’s admirable that you’ve figured out the medium of learning that you are comfortable with. Just ensure that you double down on your format of learning with time. 😃

We can do much better in this world with people who have richer perspectives, who have deeper understanding of concepts and who can empathise with others — reading books and engaging in other formats of learning can help us get there!

This story was originally published here.