i read a book a week for a year and it changed my life

Auto-captioned from the film, lightly cleaned. Elena's words, not edited prose.

hi hello how's it going it's elena so i decided to set a bit of a lofty goal for myself i stuck to my new year's resolution for once and i read a book a week for the last year 2020 when i had quite a bit more time on my hands i decided to try to get back into reading and i ended up reading about 30 books that year the following year in 2021 i was like let's try this let's go all in i read a book a week so i want to talk to you guys a little bit about the pros and the cons as well as how i actually stuck to doing it so frequently and tips for doing it for yourself at the very end i'll quickly tell you every book i read this year just in case you're curious i graduated from university three years ago i always want to push myself to be a lifelong learner to stay curious one of the best ways you can do that as adult outside of the academic system is through reading there is something very powerful about a book someone has taken hundreds of hours if not many many thousands of hours to research to write to edit to get it published and then to get it into your hands it's become my favorite way without a doubt to learn something new or to really dive into a topic i get asked frequently as well how i choose my books i am a good reads die hard i love setting my goal on goodreads so i can see my little progress bar slowly growing over time and my like percentage increasing as i like read more books and plug into the system if you're curious what i'm currently reading what i've read what i want to read it's all in goodreads you can follow me down below reading a book a week has kind of changed my life when i kind of started off this journey of wanting to fall back in love with reading i started with a ton of fictional books i'm somebody who usually does tasks to have a productive outcome i'm trying to unlearn that and so i always viewed reading as something that if i was going to do it i should read some book that was really going to shake things up maybe a self-help book or like a deeply philosophical text but because i had this mindset around it i just like wasn't actually getting myself to the point of doing it so i started off just reading a lot of really interesting diverse fictional stories that really reignited my love for just sitting down with the book and tearing through it and then slowly with time i kind of felt like i had rebuilt up a bit of this reading muscle and i felt like i was ready to move on to other things fictional books are still great i love sprinkling them in if you're just trying to start reading and getting back into it just read for fun read whatever the hell you want it doesn't have to be anything incredibly profound just get back into that rhythm of it that you know you may have not done since you were a kid so there was a lot of benefits of this for me i could feel my perspective greatly expanding it shook up the way i saw the world and related to others especially when i started reading more books on politics and history and minority experiences these authors are pulling on a lifetime of experiences experiences i'll never have or can ever really begin to understand without taking the time to really read about it we all are in our own limited thought patterns day by day and it takes bringing in something different to finally shake up that you know restricted concept that we have obviously i could read whatever i want so it's kind of like you get to almost create your own educational or entertainment experience the library or the bookstore gets to become your teacher and you get to create your own syllabus you can really dive deep into one topic and become a mini expert one of the benefits too is that over time i could really feel my focus and my attention span growing i mean via social media i feel like i often have the attention span of a goldfish sitting down and reading more and more over an elongated period of time really transformed my attention span it's self-care in a lot of ways too i gained so much mental clarity honestly really helped me with my mental health as well there's been so many times where i've caught myself scrolling on social media mindlessly feeling like about myself because i'm subconsciously comparing myself to somebody and anytime i put my phone down and open up a book i 100 of the time i've felt better after doing that all right before we go any further i want to take a quick break to thank our sponsors for today better help i figured on the topic of mental health this would be a perfect time to talk about better help they are essentially an online therapy platform what i love about better help is that you can sign up and they will basically assess your needs and match you with a therapist online it's really incredible professional therapy they have a huge range of therapists over 20 000 therapists so no matter whatever need you might want to highlight or if you just want help in general just to talk to somebody they've got you covered so the service is available worldwide which i think is incredible it can be hard to find a good therapist in your area in person and i also personally enjoy doing it out of the comfort of my own home in person therapy can also be really expensive and better help is less expensive than traditional in-person therapy and they have financial aid available which i think is great so you can click the link down below visit betterhelp.com that's help and join the over 2 million people in charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced therapist so i highly recommend you check it out i'm a huge huge fan of them thanks again to better help let's get back into the video i definitely throughout this experience became a lot more self-aware and introspective i just have a much more diverse array of opinions and now knowledge to pull from especially reading books on psychology or philosophy or self-help books i could feel myself recognizing unhealthy patterns or being able to call things that no longer serve me mentioned this earlier but i do think it's helpful to view reading as a bit of like a muscle we all have it to a certain extent because we all had to read in our education and maybe you barely developed it even then but it's there and it just takes time of keeping at it exercising the muscle for it to get stronger and to feel more natural it really does get easier with time i noticed i was starting to read more quickly just naturally you know i had a longer attention span and i was just absorbing the information more effectively and more easily i think a big thing for me as well is it made me a lot more confident in my own opinions or my own intellect or you know whatever you want to call it i have a tendency to self-doubt a lot or i don't want to speak up unless i'm really certain i have a well-formed opinion number one i'm like oh i actually have spent time to really read and learn about this maybe subject or topic or now i have these diverse experiences that i've been reading about that i can pull into a certain conversation and i felt just more confident in speaking up for the first time in a while which is honestly really powerful i get asked all the time how do i actually read this much how do i make time for it the biggest thing is to just start somewhere start with a book you're excited about or a story you're excited about like i said it doesn't have to be something super profound or something with a productive output especially from the beginning we all have so many distractions and obligations where it feels like we can't possibly have any free time to read i was the queen of saying this like oh i have too much work i'm enough free time one of my first tips is just to find things you can substitute i wasn't a massive tv or movie watcher before but i drastically cut how many hours i'd watch tv over the course of the year if you replace that little binge or you know your instagram scroll time with reading the books will start to really accumulate also think about how many times for the day you pull out your phone to distraction whether it's you're waiting in line or you're waiting for a friend of me go to coffee shop you just took that time to read a book instead you'll realize how many free minutes there are to start reading one of my next big tips is to get a kindle this really helped a lot more than i was expecting yes i would much prefer to read a physical copy of a book and i know so many people use that excuse all the time as well but getting a kindle has really helped me read a lot more part of it is the size i can stick it in a tiny purse it's super lightweight so i often will bring it with me you know if i'm going on the train to meet a friend and i can pull it out in the subway whereas a thicker book i'm not going to want to have to carry around with me all day so i'm less likely to bring it or if i'm traveling on a long trip but i'm already bringing limited suitcases or luggage i don't want to bring an extra book or two that's gonna like weigh me down or add to my suitcase weight i can download a book in minutes if i'm excited about it instead of having to order it online and wait a couple days i have to go to the bookstore you're just so much more inclined to bring it with me places also if you want to read more but you don't want to spend a lot of money on books because it can end up there's an incredible app called libby it's basically an app where you connect your local library card number which is really easy to get if you don't have one to this app and you can rent different books from your local library completely digitally and upload them to your kindle i've done this with so many of my books and i get to read them for free so you'll have them for two weeks or you can you know extend your hold you want to read more if you want to save money consider getting a kindle my next tip is to really limit distractions when i'm gonna sit down with a book i oftentimes just turn my phone on airplane mode and it helps so much and so i don't even see a text pop-up on my phone because that will kind of break my concentration this is when i get my best reading done i guess you could say like i can really get wrapped up in a story i really deeply absorb information more so than i would if i'm just reading here and there another thing i found to be really helpful is leave bad books behind even if you're 50 pages into a book you do not have to finish it i used to be such like a die hard when i was like i started this book i have to like push through and get there like no you don't just put it to the side find something you're going to be more excited to read another helpful tip is finding an accountability partner this could be friend this could be social media in my case i was posting on my instagram story every time i read another book i had a little highlight on my instagram page of all the books i've read with a little baby like analysis or book report i guess you could call it just a few sentences so by doing that and by stating i had a goal i had a lot more pressure to actually like push through and get there or find a friend or a book club that you can like read your book alongside i think having somebody to read alongside with for one it's more fun it'll keep you accountable and it's also really great to kind of be able to verbally process certain ideas and then you can gain more from what their experience with a certain book has been another thing i highly recommend is just mark those books up mark your kindle up highlight underline do what you gotta do i used to be so sacred with my books you can do this on a kindle you can sync all your notes from all your different books and this helps me retain things a lot better so a lot of times could just kind of like go in one ear and out the other so to actually really sit with it and digest it i love to mark it up especially with non-fiction maybe more educational content this is a very niche example i read a book called siri burning on the war in syria and i was talking to somebody having a little political conversation on the war in syria we were talking about the proxy wars that kind of led to the situation that's been going on there and i remember i was like oh there's these different proxy wars that were mentioned in this book and i underlined it i was like texting this person i went and i pulled the book off my shelf i scrolled through i found the section where i had underlined i took a photo and i sent it to my friend and we carried out a conversation from there so if i hadn't underlined it i never would have found that so feel free to mark your books up it helps would i recommend this to everybody honestly no let's talk about a few cons i would of course recommend setting a reading goal for yourself reading more frequently in general but it doesn't have to be a book a week for an entire year i think it limited me from picking bigger books longer books books that i were maybe you know addressing a more complex issue that would take more time to really like understand and digest so i would say adjust your reading goal as necessary the number of books can kind of be this like vanity metric i've heard it be compared to so like you know pick what's best for you especially depending on what you're excited to read maybe you want to read a bunch of like light-hearted fictional books it can be a lot easier to plow through those than if you're trying to read books on like physics or like philosophy or whatever so like you know adjust accordingly all right the time has come let me speedily read off all the books i read this year um okay trick mirror by gia toledino the seven husbands of evelyn hugo a henna artist beyond religion by dalai lama the vanishing half severance throne of glass easy jones and the six the underground railroad half of the yellow sun one we believed in mermaids visible women died about us in a world designed for men extremes to the ocean thread back to you green lights go tell it on the mountain maybe you should talk to someone a woman is no man even nickel boys searching for sunday leaving the world behind another soul wild glass attached dark places the white album are timeless now midnight library picture dorian grave outliers death of ivan ilyich by leo toystoy 1984 the prophet the song of achilles untamed intimations on earth for briefly gorgeous eat a peach letters to a young quote rain on fire shaw shaw's whistle is fast company to shake the sleeping self animal farm woman in power mad women's ball crying hmark troubling love the refugees by vietnam syria burning a short history of a catastrophe defining decade by meg j okay again if you want some recommendations you can check out my goodreads also don't forget to like comment subscribe it really helps me out i spent a year to make this video a lot of time reading i really appreciate it and i would love to hear some book recommendations as well so leave a little comment down below as usual thank you so much for watching until next time bye-bye