Momentum
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved to read. My father read a lot, my brother read a lot (still does), and my mom read to me every night for years. I don’t remember how old I was when my mother stopped reading to me, but remember thinking I was glad none of my friends knew she was still doing it.
I went through a phase in elementary school when I would come home from school and read a Hardy Boys book. Every day. Until I had read them all. When I was older, I filled my summers with as many Stephen King books as I could get through the magic of inter-library loan.
What eventually dampened my zeal for reading was… college.
As an English & Religious Studies double major, I was reading so many books … all the time. I’m not sure how many years it takes a professor to lose all sense of reality regarding how much a student can read while taking 3-4 other classes, but (almost) all of my professors either had no clue or didn’t care. They would assign far more reading than could ever been completed, and then tack on some “optional” or “suggested” reading as well.
There are two reasons for this.
The first is that many professors want to help you “build your library” meaning that they want you to have certain books at your disposal on your bookshelf. I heard this numerous times by the professors themselves. As much as I can understand the logic behind it, I wish more professors assigned a reasonable amount of material and delved more deeply into it.
The second reason is a guess, but I think it is an educated one (if you’ll pardon the expression): many professors think that if they set the bar very high then you will try harder and accomplish more. So if they assign 100 pages a week, maybe you’ll read 80, but if they assign 80, they’re afraid you’ll only read 60. They want to help get people into the habit of reading, and reading a lot.
If that was their theory, it completely backfired on me.
When I realized that there was no way I could read everything they assigned, I stopped reading altogether. I was never very good at “skimming” a book. If I read it, I wanted to really “get into it” but if I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t bother at all.
(Aside: I accomplished this by picking one of the earliest readings of the semester and be sure to contribute a lot to the class discussions. That left a lasting impression on a professor. Then I sat in the front of the class, attended every class, learned how to pay attention to what was discussed, and took a lot of notes.)
Graduate school made it worse.
By the time I finally graduated at age 25, I had stopped reading almost entirely. I read a few novels that summer, but never really regained my real passion for reading.
Not long after that I made a conscious decision to stop reading a book I had decided to read for pleasure. I remember putting a bookmark into it and thinking, “Yeah, I get it.” The bookmark was a lie. I knew I wasn’t going to open the book again.
Unfortunately, once I started throwing in the towel, it became easier and easier to quit a book, harder and harder to finish one. It was only a few years ago that I discovered Audible and “read” more books in one year than I had read in the previous five. It reminded me what I had once loved about reading: getting pulled into a story, picturing the scenes, or simply learning about completely new things.
Sometimes A Book is More than Just a Book
In the past year or two I realized what happened with books is symptomatic of a larger issue in my life: not finishing what I start.
I find it remarkably easy to begin projects, and find it hellishly difficult to complete them. As I wrote almost a year ago:
The first 80% of a project takes 100% of my energy and interest.
The last 20% of a project gets thrown into a box and pushed in the corner.
When I start something, I throw myself into it entirely, focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else… but once I stop, I might never start it again.
There are two pieces of this puzzle to figure out:
- Figure out what I really want to do, and do them.
- Figure out what I don’t really want to do, and don’t allow it to take time or energy that I should be spending on things in the first category.
Someone (I think it was Michele) asked if we had a word or motto for the new year. Mine was “Purposeful.” To me it goes directly towards the two points above, as well as our theme this week of “momentum”: if I make a purposeful decision about what I want to do—and, equally importantly, what not to do—it will help gain and not lose momentum.
Hopefully 2010 will be the year I switch back from being someone who starts many things to someone who completes many things.
This entry is part of the 52 Weeks Thing. Not sure what that is? Read more here.
