- 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.
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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 tried 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.
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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 and 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,
or 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 absolute trash
but they're kind of fun, they're cool,
the different characters, they've got magical powers,
they fall in love it 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 classes.
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Point number four is also semi related to that.
And that is that it's okay to skim through books.
There was the 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, 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.
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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 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 nonfiction.
I think nonfiction, 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.
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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.
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And finally, point number eight
is a service called read wise, that's absolutely incredible.
Read wise 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, read wise, 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 read wise
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 read wise 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 read wise.
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 an audible so you can check those out.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you
in the next video bye bye.
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