Reading Every Day for an Hour

My most recent #BeBetterGoal was to read an hour a day, every day, for 30 days.

A lot of you reading this probably read a lot more than that and have been for years. Throughout my life I’ve noticed that the smartest, most successful and impressive people I’ve met (from children to seniors) have been the most well read. I’m sure most of you (especially parents) are aware of the endless science that shows the correlation between reading and intelligence. Not only “crystallised intelligence” (book smarts) but also “fluid intelligence” (problem solving, pattern recognition) & “emotional intelligence”. Beyond that, reading has countless benefits to our health and wellbeing. Most of us are cognizant of this. And yet some people, like me, have let life and excuses get in the way of reading real books on a regular basis. Perhaps reading so much random content online and on social media makes us feel as though we don’t need to. But that’s definitely not the case!

I enjoyed guilty pleasure reading as a kid sporadically but reading (books) was not really a big part of my life as a kid/teen. My parents weren’t readers and I had a high level of fluid intelligence, which allowed me to skip my assigned reading in school and just utilize cliff notes or context clues to ace my exams. When I look back I often wonder how successful I may have been had I been pushed to read. I’ve met some voracious pre-teen readers who run circles around me in the “crystallised” intelligence department (as perhaps you can see by my choppy writing skills).

I read for pleasure starting in my 20s and went through various phases where I read everything an author wrote. Vonnegut was my favorite followed by guilty pleasure reading – the type of series you’d pick up in an airport gift shop (James Patterson, Stephen King). I did a TON of research online on topics that interested me (For example, I have over 55 detailed Evernotes on “Kale” alone). Over time between grad school and career changes I found myself reading real books less and less.

So I started this simple 30-day challenge to get me back into the gear of reading regularly. I am SO glad I did!

I started by finishing a book I received on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited bestseller list. I’m not going to mention it here because it simply stunk. I found myself speed reading to get to the end and see what happened. I realized it wasn’t the first “clunker” I got from Kindle Unlimited. Don’t get me wrong, the service is great if you are a voracious reader and want to save money on books overall. For me, I realized most of the books I wanted to read were not available in Unlimited. So I bought a couple outright and thought to myself, isn’t there some way to save money on good books? DING DONG The Library! DUH. I signed up for a local library card. Didn’t even have to leave my couch. I got an instant digital confirmation of my library card number and could use it on this cool app called Libby to literally “take out” or “put on hold” the same books I had just paid mega bucks for! They have TONS of books, ebooks and audiobooks. They can even send some ebooks to your kindle. How cool is that?!

Prior to starting the challenge, I read a couple garden-centric books by Michael Pollan. I found him to be mesmerizing. When reading non-fiction I find myself wanting to read a few books on the same topic to get a selection of differing perspectives. Through some pretty intense life experiences I learned early on the importance of Disconfirming Evidence and how prevalent Confirmation Bias is in our thinking – as well as the thinking of just about any author we read. I appreciated that Pollan seemed to truly deep dive into his subject matter with the rigor of an investigative journalist who took the time to distill, compare and simplify the most compelling research on his topics. It didn’t surprise me he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine.

I read 2.2 of Pollan’s food-centric books during my challenge: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food & Cooked (in that order on purpose). These books were literally life-changing and I’ve now committed to diet devoid of processed foods that follows Pollan’s food motto: “Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not too Much“. To summarize these works would be doing them a disservice. Do yourself a favor and read them – at least the first two. It will change the way you look at food, farming, agriculture, industrialization, health and the environment.

In addition, I read a bunch of local gardening books which might interest those who live in Central Florida. We’re blessed to have the rare weather system that allows us to garden a variety of fruits, vegetables and plants year round. So I’m trying hard to turn this olive thumb into a green one! My favorite Florida gardening book is this one from Robert Bowden. I’ve had the pleasure of taking one of his classes at the gorgeous Leu Gardens near me and he’s well known as “the expert” in Central-Florida gardening.

Anyway — because we are readers, we don’t have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next — and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis — at any time of night or day.

Kurt Vonnegut