- Good morning, good life!
Welcome back to AmyTV, where we come together
to help you go after the life that you want.
When I was growing up I could not stop reading books.
I was so obsessed with series
like "The Baby-Sitters Club," "Nancy Drew,"
I would be up in my room, I would finish a whole book
before I would come up for air
and come downstairs for dinner.
And then, school.
Something just happens when you start going to school
and they want you to read more,
and they give you things to read all the time,
and you're like, "I don't really like this material,
"I'm not really into this."
And then you kinda go through that phase
where you fall out of love with reading,
'cause it feels like homework.
But with everyone saying you gotta pick up a book
on a regular basis to have a well-rounded life,
how do you get back into being an avid reader,
or start if you never were to begin with?
That's what I wanna talk to you about today,
how to read more books,
especially if it's not quite natural to you.
(upbeat music)
Listen, if you're watching this video
because you feel like you have to,
but you're still not quite on the page
of why you need to actually read more, I feel you.
When it comes to the benefit of reading
it's hard to see, what is the big deal?
Like, is life really depending on it?
Not only is reading on my list of daily habits
that have completely changed my life,
you probably saw that video recently,
there's research that shows reading on a regular basis
will extend your life.
Researchers from the Yale School of Public Health
dug into 12 years of data in 2016.
What they were focused on was information
from 3,600 men and women over the age of 50.
What they found is that the people who were reading books,
whether it was fiction, non-fiction, poetry, doesn't matter,
every day, for as little as 30 minutes a day
over a number of years,
were living an average of two years longer
than those people who didn't read at all.
There was also a really interesting tidbit
that the readers who would read more
than three hours per week,
which is just about 25 minutes a day,
were 23% less likely to die between 2001 and 2012
than their peers who were just reading
newspapers and magazines.
What does it all mean?
Your life could literally depend on it.
That's crazy.
I mean like, ah, if you're not a reader right now
you're probably bummed, I get it, I get it.
25 to 30 minutes of reading per day
is actually not as difficult as it sounds,
just like they say finding 25 to 30 minutes a day
to work out is not as hard as it sounds either.
So, I wanna help you find those minutes throughout the day,
they don't all have to be at one time.
We gotta make it easy so you can keep going
after the life you want for even longer.
Let's extend your years.
Before we dig in deeper to that,
you know what I gotta do right now,
and that's give some Twitter gratitude.
Today wanna give a lot of love to LivingCultureT1.
Living Culture Travel, thank you so much
for watching these videos.
I acknowledge you for your time and attention,
and most of all for that lovely retweet,
thank you so much for sharing my stuff with your peeps,
your friends, your community,
it just means the world to me.
If you would potentially like a shout out here,
all you gotta do is follow me on Twitter
and retweet my latest video when it comes out.
All right, we're gonna go rapidfire here,
I got a lot of tips, we gotta get a lot of reading in
in a short amount of time, and we're gonna make it easy.
First, just set a realistic goal.
If you're like, "I haven't read in years,"
then four books in one year,
one per quarter, would be huge.
My favorite place to set book goals is at goodreads.com.
If you go to Book Reads,
I will link to my profile to it in the description below.
I just am very casually on that social network
to keep track of everything that I read.
I like to read the reviews that people leave there,
and it's great.
It's fun, they do a reading challenge every year
and you can just say how many books you wanna read,
and check them off as you go,
and all you have to do is mark it as read,
it's a really great website.
Number two, don't make your life more difficult,
just get an Audible membership.
Just because you're not flipping pages
doesn't mean you're not absorbing content.
If you are a listener,
if you're a better listener as a learner,
then maybe reading is going to be really difficult for you
if you're out of practice.
If you like videos, if you like podcasts,
there's so many options for you.
Audible is a great one.
Blinkist is another one that we've talked about in the past.
I will link to them in the description.
But they're so, so simple for you to just flip on the audio,
absorb the content still,
but be actually reading a book,
because it's just being read to you.
If that gets you back interested in reading,
it helps you explore the stuff that you like, that is a win.
Number three, always carry a book with you,
whether it's in your handbag or just on your phone.
You can totally use the Kindle app
and you can have digital books on your phone all the time.
I prefer not to read on my phone,
I spend enough time looking at my phone.
I actually love carrying a book in my purse,
because if I'm sitting on the bus going to an appointment,
or I'm sitting even in the car
and ignoring Vin while he drives me somewhere, (laughs)
or if I'm on a plane, or if I'm waiting
for somebody to show up for an appointment,
I love having that instead of just
the chronic scrolling thing that we always do on our phone.
And just five minutes of somebody being late
to get to coffee with you
is five minutes of reading that you can fit into your day.
I literally read something once
that somebody saw Stephen King
standing in line at the movie theater reading a book,
waiting in line at the movie theater.
I mean, you can find the time.
Number four, schedule the time
and find those 30 minutes on your calendar
as self care time.
Maybe it's 10 minutes in the morning,
maybe it's 10 minutes to break up your afternoon,
maybe it's 10 minutes before bed.
Whatever it is for you, schedule it in.
You know how I feel about calendar blocking,
time batching, all that stuff.
Yeah, I have to schedule reading or I won't do it
because I fill my days up with lots of other things.
Number five, only read what is actually interesting to you.
Nobody's telling you what to read,
it's completely up to you.
If fiction gets you excited, then that's you.
It's not my preference anymore,
but I love non-fiction,
I love thinking about strategies and new ideas
and stuff that I wanna try.
So if it gets you excited, then read it.
Don't read something just because
everybody's telling you you should.
And number six, just skim it.
The lovely thing about books these days
is it's very competitive to get people to buy them
in the first place.
Authors know this, publishers know this,
and so the formatting of books is very important.
There's lots of headers, lots of bullet points,
lots of pictures these days.
So can you skim something?
Find the parts that matter the most to you
so you can just get the gist of the book.
I also heard once that Seth Godin reads
like 300 crazy, or maybe more, books per year,
but he doesn't actually read them all.
He is skimming them, he says you can really get
to the point of a book in the first little bit of it,
maybe in the first third of it.
So do you really need to finish it,
or can you get the point quickly and then be done with it?
And that's why I say number seven,
quit the book if you don't like it anymore,
or if you're done with it.
Just quit the book.
That's been one of the most empowering things
I've started incorporating into my life,
'cause I'm such a finisher,
like I have to finish things,
I have to finish the shampoo bottle,
and I have to finish the book.
But I've started to take that weight off of me
and say, "You know what, if I'm not liking it,
"if I got everything I need out of it
"and I'm not really interested,
"it's not keeping me engaged, move on to the next one,
"I've got a few to choose from."
And there are many on this shelf that I have not touched,
so, I'm working on that, that's a decluttering issue,
that's for another day.
Number eight, read multiple books at once.
Now if you don't read already this is gonna sound stupid,
but I actually think this works great for me.
I have a hard cover book that I'm reading all the time.
What I'm reading right now
is "Outer Order, Inner Calm," Gretchen Rubin's book.
I also have a daily reader that I'm reading.
I have a book right now called "The Daily Stoic,"
which is an entry for every single day,
so I'm not being forced to read it quickly,
I have one entry per day that I read,
and that book will last me for 365 days.
And then I have an audible book that I'm listening to.
So in the car I'm listening to a different book
than the book that I'm reading when I'm at home,
and I read my daily reader book before bed,
so I have three books all the time.
I know that sounds really ambitious and crazy,
but that's how I stay effective with reading more.
Next, I highly recommend that if you fall asleep reading
that you don't read in bed.
Like, that should just be the rule.
If you wanna read more and you fall asleep when you read,
don't read in bed, it's that simple.
So if you know you need that rule in your life,
even though you're like, "Oh,
"I feel like that's the only time I could fit it in
"because I don't really see it any other way right now,"
be real with yourself.
If you're gonna fall asleep, don't make it for that time.
My next piece of advice is do you have a vacation coming up?
Plan your read for vacation now.
Maybe you're not ready to dive in yet,
but you would love to have a book
to sit on the beach with when you go on vacation.
Plan that read now, or plan two of them,
be ambitious and say, "You know what?
"I think I'm gonna get through two books
"on my one week vacation."
It could totally work out that way,
and if your goal is four to five books in a year
and you knock out two on your vacation, there you go.
You really do wanna be reading
on a more regular basis than that,
but that's still better than nothing.
Next, I highly recommend
you ask your friends what they're reading.
We buy makeup, and skincare, and gadgets for the kitchen,
and clothes, and all kinds of stuff
because our friends recommend it to us.
Ask them what they're reading,
maybe that's gonna be something
that you'll take an interest to as well,
because you wanna have that common interest
with your friends.
Another good idea is to join a book club.
Now, this is, again, ambitious,
but if you're somebody who needs outside accountability
for reading, this is a great idea,
because you have a group of people who you meet with
who are saying, "Hey, did you read it?
"Hmm, did you read it?"
(laughs) And it's like, I gotta get my reading in
so that I actually can talk about the thing
that people are gonna be talking about.
We also have a digital version
of that book club around read, AmyTV Book Club,
and stay tuned because I'm gonna be announcing
the next book for us to read together
in my Community tab and on Instagram.
So if you don't have an Instagram,
you can find out on the Community tab
of this YouTube channel,
or it'll be on my Instagram.
It's a lot easier to follow on Instagram if you ask me,
but I'll put it in both of those places
in case you wanna read along with me.
My next tip is to just accessorize your reading experience.
Personally, I always need a pen and a highlighter
when I'm reading.
I've been using pen more than highlighter lately,
I don't know why, but I change my mind periodically,
and I have a little book mark
that holds my pen and highlighter on my book
and marks the spot for me,
so this makes the process a lot easier
if I'm grabbing the book to take with me somewhere
or just grabbing it to go sit in a chair,
I have my pen, my highlighter, and my book marked
exactly where it needs to be, it's one little cute package,
and it makes me feel a lot more effective when I'm reading.
My next tip is to stop thinking about it as reading
and start thinking about it as you becoming an expert.
Especially if you're reading non-fiction,
you're really working on your skills
and developing yourself with whatever it is
that you are reading about.
So what exactly are you building,
what are you learning about,
what are you becoming an expert in by way of a book
that happens to be delivering that information?
I don't like to say exercise,
I like to say I move my butt.
Maybe you don't wanna read,
maybe you wanna become an expert, that's fine.
And my final tip, and I kinda mentioned it earlier
but it's a big one, is instead of scrolling try reading.
Whenever you're in those chronic scrolling Instagram moments
or scrolling Twitter moments,
or just scrolling your own phone
'cause you have nothing else to do moments,
put the phone down for just a second
and pick up a book and see if it engages you
at a higher level than that arbitrary scrolling did.
You might get five minutes of reading in that way,
and you definitely made more out of your time.
All right, those are my tips for how you can read more,
let's talk about what we learned today in a tweetable.
"Seek the lofty by reading, hearing
"and seeing great work at some moment every day,"
Thornton Wilder.
All right, now I wanna hear from you,
what is the hardest part about making time
to read every day?
Leave that in the comments below, let's work on it together.
And just as a reminder, if you love habit building
and making a better morning for yourself,
and even some book recommendations,
I highly recommend you check out my new Shine Squad,
the details are in the description below,
they're on my Patreon page as well, patreon.com/amytv.
That's all for today, thank you so much for tuning in,
I appreciate it as always.
Make sure you subscribe for good vibes,
kiss the ones you love, (lips smack)
and go after the life you want.
Cheers.
(upbeat music)
(sneezes loudly)
Oh my God, that was very sudden.
Also, bonus points
'cause I've learned how to sneeze in my adulthood,
I don't hold it in anymore and try to explode my insides.