Naja Faysal | 360' Brand Communications, Digital Advertising, Marketing & eMarketing Consultant

When it comes to reading, its hard to find commonalities between people. Some people love reading, some don’t. Some people read occasionally, some read daily. Some people read novels, others hate novels. Some read quietly, some produce funny noises. Some read quickly others read slowly. Some read for five minutes others read for hours. Some read of a screen others need to touch and feel a real book.

If you are convinced of the importance of reading, below are simple tips that can tremendously help you boost your reading habits:

1. Select the book carefully
   Spend some time in the library before buying a book. Read the title, cover, back cover, table of contents, introduction… try to know what is this book about before buying. Remember, buying a book means committing to reading it, NOT displaying it on the bookshelves. Make this as a rule of thumb.
2. Read one book at a time
   Once you started a book, don’t stop until you finish it. Don’t even consider flipping through other book, if you are already engaging with one. If you read two, three books at the same time, you most probably won’t finish any. It takes some discipline but its worth it.
3. Write down when do you start and when do you finish
   Before starting to read a book, write down on the book or your diary the date, hour and any memorable note you wish (on the airplane going to malaysia) and when you finish reading the book, do the same thing. Try to calculate how long does it take you to finish and what was your daily average. Feel free to play with the numbers, its always fun to keep record and count your scores.
4. Determine your perfect reading time
   Make it a habit to dedicated an hour of your day to reading. Choose any hour the you feel comfortable with and isolate yourself to enjoy a calm peaceful reading hour. To me, it fits me perfectly to wake up one hour earlier and start my day with a cup of coffee and one hour of reading.
5. Keep it with you all the time
   Once you choose a book, don’t leave it at home or at work or anywhere. Leave it with you all the time. Make it like your wallet, purse or cell phone. Your book is your friend. A lot of situations, you will find yourself waiting in a cue. At the bank, airlines, airport, government institutions, doctors appointments…etc. If you have your book with you, you approach waiting in a different temper yet keeping yourself calm and enjoying it at the same time. People will look at you differently and will appreciate the fact that you are an educated and intellectual person.
6. Make a shelf for the “unread” and another for the “read”
   In your book shelves, create a shelf for the books you have already completed and the books you want to read. Try your best to keep the two shelves balanced, or the “read” shelf is more full. This will make you feel good about yourself and will make your target smaller and smaller with time, thus more achievable.
7. One page at a time
   How do you climb Everest? One step at a time. Mount Everest may same a long and hard journey. If you think about how many miles you are going to walk and how hard it is, you may quit easily. The only way to climb it is one step at a time. Books are pretty much the same thing. You select a book that you like – “But God! its too thick!” you may say. No, don’t think how thick it is or how long is it going to take you to finish it. Start with it, one page at a time. It done before even you notice. Trust me.
8. Love your books and talk about them
   Start loving your books and discuss them with your friends. If your friends aren’t interested, you may want to start consider finding friends who are. You can also share and discuss your books with your online friends or join a common interest group. There are a lot of readers social networks portals, I personally use goodreads.com. Be proud and enjoy the pleasure of being part of the intellectual community of readers. You may also want to take photos of your book shelves and appreciate the artistic value of the books handing around with all the different colors and patterns.

Discipline is a mandate…

We all have great aspiration on who do we want to become. The good news is that whatever your aspiration might be and however big your dreams are, it can be achieved. The human history has proven that our usage of mental & physical power can be utilized to achieve the impossible and that is only by the principle of “discipline”.

I couldn’t find any success of any kind without discipline. Whether in sports, business, leadership, science or astronomy, discipline is always at the center, it is the magic formula. You may notice it in your day to day activities. There are stuff that you do everyday that have paid off in fruitful results. If you practice any type of sports or if you just commit to yourself to hard working, you are in the arms of discipline.

I’d love to mention a quote created by Charlie “TREMENDOUS” Jones, when he says ”You are the Books you Read and the People you Meet”. I am not saying here that you don’t get information and knowledge from other sources in your life, of course you do, but the influence of reading is far greater and powerful than any other source. Let me explain why: You may watch TV, movies, listen to Radio, browse the internet, talk to people, go out and experience things. These are all vital sources of information that shapes your personality. The main problem of all mentioned, which is in fact the same reason why they are so successful, is that they treat the human brain from the outside not from the core. It has a similar effect of a chocolate bar to treat depression. The human brain memorizes and understands every piece of information or data in terms of pictures, sounds, smells & taste. Thats why we have five sensational organs in operation. So the reason why all these new media are so successful and addictive at one point is that they treat the brain in the level of which it can store & conceive data. This is all good, but, if this becomes our only way we store information in our brain, then the brain gets lazy in creating these imagery or sounds. Let me explain this more. Inside our brains there are millions of agents, you can call them powerful computers, who process the data coming from the senses and convert it into images, sounds, smells, and tastes. So, if we tend to give our brain the data in the same format of these senses, these agents have no more work to do. Its like almost every organ of our body. With time, these agents who are receiving data in the same format they store, become useless and their ability of creating images will be decreased dramatically, its when we loose our sense of creativity.

There is a fun exercise about the power of creating pictures, which is still being used on some TV programs. The exercise is meant to bring a bunch of people, put them in a room with drawing & painting tools, then getting a narrator to tell them what they should draw. Eventually, no painting would be similar, why, because no brain can convert data in the same exact imagery. And you ask why most advertising work we produce is copycats?

So, the reason why I am telling you all this is to demonstrate to you that creativity is a muscle that needs to be trained, and since creativity brings amazing stuff to your life that you can’t afford loosing. Luckily, we all can improve our creativity by the habit of reading. It is proven that reading is an active stimulant to the brain agents I was telling you about earlier. Our brain is always laboring to store all data coming through our senses, voluntary or involuntary. Meaning that whether you decide or you don’t, the data coming is being stored in the brain. Recalling the data however is a totally different process, but you should be assured that all incoming data is finding a place in your brain.

So what reading does, is basically keeping a space for the creative agents to convert information and words into images, sounds and activities. Thus keeping us more creative beings.