Change it: “I want to read more”

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. All month long, we’re talking resolutions, and how to make them better. How do we take those vague ideas of resolutions and make them into things that’ll actually be attainable, that’ll actually be useful and beneficial to us in our future? If you haven’t been around for the rest of the series, I strongly encourage that you go back and read my last two posts—they’ve been incredibly helpful, even for me!

This week, I’m taking a resolution that I’ve also made, time and time again, and very rarely manage to succeed in. I should know better than to make it into a huge goal every year, because I know how little time I have. And we’ll discuss that too, in just a minute. But I also know a lot of other people who make this resolution, and I know many of them won’t succeed. Mostly because they didn’t set a goal, or remotely decide on how much of this they wanted to do, in the year ahead.

Change it: “I want to read more”

Like I said, I love this resolution. I’ve made this resolution, time and time again. It’s a good one. I love when people decide that they want to read more books, that they want to spend some time in a book rather than focusing their eyes on the television screen. I love it. I’m so glad, if this is one of the resolutions you made for yourself, this year.

But there’s also a major problem with this resolution, and a very big reason why many people fail with it, when they make this resolution.

• How much do you want to read?
• What do you want to read?
• What counts as reading?

Nobody ever thinks about those, when they start out with this resolution. They just think to themselves that it’ll be great if they can read more, in the coming year. They think to themselves that it’ll be amazing, if they’re getting a lot more out of life because they’ve got their noses in a book more often. But when they don’t qualify reading, when they don’t say what they mean by reading, it’ll eventually fall into “well I read a blog post today… I guess that counts?”

I know, because I’ve done it too. No judging from me.

So what I want you to do, if you’ve made this resolution and now realize that there’s something a bit off with it, is to qualify what you mean by reading. What do you want to read more of? Medical journals? Novels? Short stories? Historical books? Language studies? Whatever the answer, you need to take some time and qualify that. You need to know what it is that you want to read more of, in the new year.

Once you know that, you can quantify it—which is the other part where a lot of people fall short. Now that you know what you want to read, you need to decide how much. And for a lot of us, this is based on just how much time we have, outside of all the other things we need to do on any given day. For some of us, that means we won’t be able to read every day, but that we can set aside a couple hours a week, to reading. And that’s okay. But you need to know that, before you really set your resolution.

Why? Because if you don’t, you’re setting yourself up to fail, and to not really read any more this year than you did last year. We can fix that, right now.

“I want to read more.” Good! I do, too. But let’s change that, to, “I will read two novels, every month, in 2020.”

[love]

{Rani Divine}