When I was going through my business apprenticeship Program, we were to read several books that were sent to us. They were “requirements” but not official requirements. They were simply a “you will do better in the program if you read these but you don’t have to” kind of thing.
I don’t remember how many pages the book was, though with the math I’m thinking, probably between 250-300 pages. Not a long book, but not nothing. Something revolutionary happened when they sent the book though. They didn’t say “read this book in the next two months.”
Instead, they divided it out and said, if you read 5 pages every day for the two months, you will finish the book (these weren’t the exact numbers, but it was this idea).
It blew my mind. It seems silly, but it really did. A 300-page book to me, someone who hardly reads is an extremely daunting task. In some ways, it almost seems insurmountable. But by putting it in the perspective of a daily goal, it hardly seemed like a challenge anymore.
Similarly, if you told me to write 200,000 words in the next two years, I would cry from the overwhelming task. Instead, if you told me to write something – anything every day for two years, it would be a difficult task, but not impossible. In fact, I’ve done that very thing and written over 320,000 words in two years’ time.
As I think toward 2021, reading is one of the things that I want to focus more on. Reading the Bible principally, but supplementing my Bible reading with other reading. I still don’t know what my goals will be, but most likely it will tie somehow into the daily writing on this blog. Potentially will be that I have to write about something I read every day, which then forces me to use this habit I already have of writing every day to help my new habit I want to form of reading every day.
We’ll see how it goes, but I’m looking forward to being able to be more constructive in my reading and read to attain, not to check it off a box.