How to Read Long and Difficult Books.

There’s no need to be intimidated by old books, long books, or just plain hard to read books. It really is a skill to be learned in our Smartphone Age. 

Here’s how how you can !

1. Make a plan for yourself. 

Have a particular area of interest you want to explore? Is there a list out there that has really piqued your interest — Do you have a favorite author whose canon you’d like to explore in full? make your self a reading plan. 

2. Set a small amount of time or pages per day that you’ll read.

One of the keys in achieving that plan is giving yourself a micro-goal.

3. Engage/interact with the text. 

One of the things that helps keep me engaged, especially when reading a long and/or difficult book, is making myself interact with the text. Read with pencil/notebook at the ready, underlining interesting tidbits and writing one-sentence summaries of each chapter or important section. I. If you’re reading an e-version, underline and take notes in the same way. 

4. Get an edition that you like. 

This can make a surprisingly big difference in your reading experience. The weight of the book, the styling of the font and the design of the text, even the cover art — if a book is nice to look at and easy to hold, you’re more likely to pick it up. 

Ultimately, find what you like. Whether it’s a cheap used paperback, a new hardcover, or the ease of a Kindle edition, find the book version that you most enjoy reading. 

5. Have a dictionary/encyclopedia handy.

When it comes to long and difficult books, part of the struggle is just that they can make us feel dumb when we don’t know certain words or don’t have the contextual knowledge that would make it easier to understand. 

You’ll likely find it helpful to keep your phone at hand too; while you could invest in a hardbound dictionary, you’ll often need to access various resources to investigate various references (historical, cultural, etc.). Looking things up on your phone can invite the temptation to browse other apps, of course, but just fight past the Instagram itch. 

6. Just get through the hard parts. 

With every long and/or difficult book, there’s bound to be a part that disengages you and makes it hard to pick back up.just get through it, even if it means skimming or (heaven forbid!) skipping chunks if needed. 

Even if you don’t already know something, don’t worry about missing things. The first time you read a book, especially a long or difficult one, you’re going to inevitably miss things anyway. If it’s a novel, you’ll catch up to the plot quickly enough; if it’s non-fiction, you’ll survive missing a few facts — if they’re important enough, they’ll come back up. Trust me: It’s okay to skim things. 

7. Take advantage of the momentum! 

Part of why I’ve been able to read a lot of long books in, I knew that I could read the next hard book, whatever it might be.

With a little bit of daily diligence, intentional engagement with the text, and some strategic skimming and skipping if necessary, you can do the same. 

 A Better Person - Here I go again on my own.

When it comes to goals and resolutions, not all are created equal. Some take only a few minutes; others represent simple changes; all will positively transform lives and help one become a better human being.

Here We Go .. these are the ones I have been practising since the year.

1. Get a Real Alarm Clock

The first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night serve as the bookends of your day, setting a limit on what they’ll be able to “hold,” and sending a potent signal to yourself as to what you think is most important.

f the first and final thing you do every day is look at your phone, you’re creating a shallow, distracted foundation for what lies in between.

So keep your phone out of your room at night, use a regular “old school” alarm clock to wake up in the morning, and don’t touch your phone when you rise until after you’ve done something (prayer, meditation, push-ups) that represents the man you’re going to be that day.

2. Read One Book Every Week

The average book takes about five to seven hours to read. That means if you read just one hour a day or less, you can read one book every single week of the year.

Everyone’s got an hour a day to repurpose for reading: cut out one hour of Netflix at night; read a half hour at lunch and a half-hour in the evening;; read in the small snatches of spare moments that arise throughout your day.

Can you imagine how much better of a person you’ll be at the end of the year when you’ve read 52 books?

3. Drink Nothing But Water

What a colossal waste of calories caloric beverages is. They simply don’t taste that great (especially if we’re talking about soda) and have little to no nutritional value.

If you want a treat, at least consume something you can chew! Drinking nothing but water is the very easiest way to lose weight; people can often drop significant poundage and improve their all-around health profile just by making this move.

You could tackle this goal while still drinking diet soda and making occasional allowances for alcohol, but you’d be better off cutting out those too in favour of pure H2O.

4. Start a Strength Training Program

No matter if you’re currently sedentary or do cardio, and nothing but cardio, you could benefit from adding resistance training to your life. Strength training improves your overall health, helps you lose weight, boosts your testosterone, and makes you feel more virile in general.

5. Call Your the person that matters to you most but out of touch Once a Week

You know she’s dying to hear from you.

6. Give at Least One Compliment Every Day

People want to be noticed and needed; they crave affirmation and recognition almost as keenly as food and water.

you can fill this human need in less time than it takes to make Cup O’ Noodles. Train yourself to be more observant of how others excel in ways big and small, and call out these accomplishments in behaviour, performance, talent, style, and character.

Don’t forget to regularly complement your own family too — who we ironically are the most likely to take for granted!

7. Host a Dinner Party Once a Quarter

According to the authors of Brunch Is Hell, dinner parties can serve as the very cornerstone of a healthy modern society. Why? Because they promote life-giving relationships and civil conversation.

Throwing a dinner party offers numerous benefits to the individual host as well, including offering the chance to practice your cooking and social skills, adding the tang of anticipation to your life, and simply motivating you to finally clean up your house!

8. Take a Short Walk Every Day

There’s a reason philosopher from Aristotle to Nietzsche were committed walkers: taking a stroll clears the mind, helps you solve problems, and generates insights. According to explorer Erling Kagge, walking also slows downtime and makes your life feel more memorable. And of course, moving your body is good for your health. So take a short saunter every day, in every kind of weather.

9. Journal

Journaling may not be for everyone, but many folks do find it an effective way to cognitively and emotionally process all the stuff they’re going through.

Writing requires you to think logically and linearly, which makes it particularly helpful for putting things like depression and anger into perspective. Journal in a way that works for you:

Write about what happened that day; write about what you’re grateful for. Write spontaneously; write based on predetermined prompts

10. Plan Your Weekends

We often think of planning only in terms of one’s workaday life (the scheduling of which can indeed be beneficial), whereas we feel that leisure time should be wholly spontaneous.

But everyone’s life experience shows that good times typically don’t just happen; when left to chance, we end up surrendering our free time to inertia and don’t end up doing much at all.

So take a page from Ernest Hemingway and intentionally plan out your weekends, always having an idea of a few fun things you’d like to do as you head into them.

11. Turn Off Notifications on Your Phone

If you’re sick of being distracted by your phone but haven’t yet turned off its notifications, then you haven’t begun to fight. “Two-thirds of people with a smartphone never change their notification settings. That’s ridiculous. Can we really complain about technology addicting us if we haven’t taken 10 minutes to change the notifications settings?”

12. Fast for 24 Hours Once a Month

Fasting does great things for one’s health, including normalizing insulin levels, promoting the secretion of human growth hormone, and spurring cell regeneration. It’s also a powerful way to train the soul so that the spirit becomes stronger than the flesh. Research shows that fasting even once a month produces the aforementioned physical benefits, and anecdotal evidence suggests that a monthly fast is sufficient to incur robust spiritual benefits as well.

13. Exercise and/or Commute One Day a Week Without Music/Podcasts

It’s only in silence and solitude that we hear life’s most important “sounds” — our internal voice, creative inspiration, promptings towards a calling, solutions to dilemmas, things we need to do for or say to others. Yet we are usually so surrounded by noise that these critical messages never get through. To home in on these signals, carve out some weekly quiet time by exercising or commuting without music, podcasts, or any other human-created static.

14. Floss. For Real This Time.

Stave off gum disease. Make your dentist proud. Here’s how to finally make flossing a habit.

15. Start a New Hobby

In seeking to get control of our lives, we often try to cut out device-born distractions. This is good, but as digital minimalist Cal Newport points out, if you want to avoid being pulled back by their siren song, you can’t just empty your life of time-wasters — you have to fill it with worthy pursuits.

That’s where hobbies come in; find an activity that’s just as compelling, and way more satisfying, than twiddling on your phone.

16. Attend Community Get together Each Week

Even if your beliefs are uncertain and your faith isn’t firm, attending a religious service each week can greatly improve your life and relationships in numerous ways; even if you’re not sure you believe in an immortal soul, attendance can be good for it.

It offers one of the easiest ways to make friends, an opportunity for reflection, and a discipline-building ritual. It improves mental and physical health and furnishes opportunities to do service. At the very least, it provides an all-too-rare chance to engage in some group singing.

Well, we wrap up here and good luck.

 Coming to Terms with Smart Phones -

For many of us, our smartphones have come to feel like another appendage. We carry them wherever we go, fondle them during meals and conversations, and sleep with them next to our pillows. Wherever one is, so is the other.

However, unlike our typically unabashed appreciation for our physical limbs (arms and legs ftw!), our feelings about our smartphones tend to be quite a bit more mixed, if not downright negative.

We bemoan the ever-present desire to check and toggle their screens and the way they fragment our thoughts, prevent us from doing any deep work, and make it difficult to focus on the friends and loved ones around us.

his is likely especially true for those who are old enough to remember a time in which you went about your daily activities — to class, work, the gym, dinner — without this constant companion in tow; who are old enough to remember a state that didn’t feel deficient but wonderfully unencumbered and simple.

A time when boredom had to be faced nakedly, with only the inner resources of the mind, and a friend’s face was the most engaging thing in the room. A time before the itch.

There are things you can do to loosen your attachment to this technological appendage, which include deleting or blocking certain apps on your phone, and which we detail here. I can say from experience that these methods are extremely effective in reducing your phone’s attraction and thus how often you check it.

But installing apps to block other apps can seem a bit like a hair-of-the-dog kind of cure, and relying on external blockers doesn’t fundamentally change your relationship with your phone.

To modify that relationship, it’s helpful to develop some concrete habits — a set of more embodied behaviours — that tangibly shift the place of your phone away from the centre of your life.

Here are some tested ways you could try.

1. Don’t check your phone first thing in the morning.

It’s been said that how you start something is how you’ll finish it, and nothing could be truer when it comes to what you do immediately upon rising.

If you check your phone first thing in the morning, you are absolutely, positively setting yourself up for a day of distraction.

For many people, their phone’s alarm wakes them up in the morning, and the very first thing they do when they open their eyes is to unlock its screen.

You become dependent on the glow of this artificial sunrise — and the way it switches on the drip-drip-drip of dopamine release — to feel aroused and get going.

But in giving your brain that hit as its very first reward of the morning, you prime it to look for more of the same throughout the day.

If you want to set yourself up for a day of focus instead of distraction, then try to keep yourself from looking at your phone for at least 15 minutes — the longer the better — after you get up.

Even better if you kickstart the day with the very opposite of smartphone surfing — an activity that actually requires concentration — like prayer or meditation.

In keeping this habit, it’s obviously hugely helpful to not keep your phone by your bed, or even in your room, so, as we’ll mention below, don’t go to sleep with it at night. Instead, you’ll need to get yourself a regular “old school” alarm clock. There are plenty that offers noises beyond the annoying beep-beep-beep you may associate with these devices, even some which simulate a sunrise, silently waking you with a bright glow of light, but without an attendant urge to immediately check Instagram and your Whatsapp.

This habit makes a huge difference in how your day goes, so if you implement nothing else from this article, DON’T CHECK YOUR PHONE FIRST THING IN THE MORNING!

2. Don’t take your phone in the car/on errands.

Here’s what happens when you take your phone with you on the go: you check it at red lights in the car; you check it while standing in line at the grocery store; you may even check it while you’re driving, even though you know this is horrendously dangerous.

Even if you leave the phone in the car while you do some activity, like, say, going for a run, you’ll check it right before you start and right after you return — bookending that mind-clearing experience, whose effects could have started sooner and lingered longer, with a dive into noise and distraction.

So just leave your phone at home when you’re out and about (or if you’re driving to work where you’ll need your phone, put it in your briefcase in the backseat or in your glove compartment).

I know this may sound extreme — don’t people need to be able to get ahold of you? But as someone who came of age pre-cellphones, people used to be completely, utterly fine without being reachable 24/7.

When’s the last time you really, truly got a message while you were doing an errand or working out that had to really, truly be answered right then and there? Unless you’re in some kind of high-pressure job, it happens very, very infrequently.

Instead, you typically check your messages and emails while out . . . and then wait until later to answer them! If you’re honest with yourself, the need you feel to take your phone everywhere isn’t about staying in touch with others, but the itch to remain in contact with the stimuli they send you.

Of course, I realize that people use their phones to play music/podcasts in the car and while working out, so this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule; rather, it’s an encouragement to treat as many of your little trips as possible like pockets of a tech detox, where you can recalibrate your itch for your device and better keep it under control.

3. Leave your phone in your pocket during meals/conversations.

Studies show that even the visible presence of a phone that’s turned off inhibits people’s conversations; subconsciously worried they’ll be interrupted by the device, folks stick to shallower topics.

So don’t put your phone on the table during a meal, nor hold it in your hand when talking to other people, even if you don’t actively check it. Keep it tucked away in your pocket or a bag, and be completely present and focused on those around you.

4. Keep your phone hidden away when you’re working/reading/watching television.

In a study done on diets and food intake, researchers found that participants ate more candy when it was placed in a clear jar on their desks, but less when candy was stored in an opaque jar, and even less still when the opaque jar was placed six feet away from them.

The result makes simple intuitive sense: the more directly something is in your line of sight, and the more easily accessible it is, the more you’ll think about it, and the more you think about it, the greater the temptation becomes, and the greater the temptation becomes, the greater the chance you’ll eventually give in to it (it’s hard to say no over and over again).

As with candy, so with smartphones. Even if your phone is turned off, if it’s sitting insight on your desk, your brain will be thinking about its desire to check it. Even if you’re not conscious of this desire, it will still be niggling in your mind, continuously colliding with your impulse control, and back and forth the two forces will fight. Eventually, your willpower will be worn down, and you’ll give up; even if you do manage to hold out for a while, the battle raging between check/don’t-check will invisibly suck up your mental bandwidth and weaken your focus.

To eliminate the Pavlovian prompts that will induce you to check your phone, keep it completely hidden when you’re working, reading, or watching television — when it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. If all you can do at the moment is hide your phone behind your laptop, even that helps. But the farther away it is, the better: if you can put it across the room or on the other side of the house, do it; your mind kind of files it away as “unavailable,” doesn’t want to bother with the energy required to retrieve it, and stops thinking much about it so you can concentrate on other things.

I find that when I put my phone in a different part of the house, it even helps to go a step further and put it inside a drawer; that may sound silly, but it seems to prompt the brain to deep-six the idea of checking it even more.

5. Don’t keep your phone by your bed.

71% of Smartphone users (that number rises to 90% among 18-29-year-olds) sleep with their phones in or near their beds. You’ve probably heard how bad this habit is for your sleep, what with the emittance of all that blue light and the potential urge to check a notification that arrives in the middle of the night. But it’s also terrible for fostering a dependent relationship with your phone; it is strange to ponder that a glowing screen is the last thing millions of people see before they close their eyes at night. That which we bring into our bedrooms and beds are the things most intimate to us — do you want your phone to be one of those things? To cuddle up to those cold circuits as a security blanket?

Instead of training your brain to think of your phone as an appendage that even nestles down between your sheets, let your relationship with it end at the threshold of your bedroom door; leave it to charge in the kitchen or living room, and instead take a good paperbound book into bed with you to close out the day.

Then, when you wake up in the morning, your phone won’t be there when you roll over, and you can begin the day without it, naked, but NOt AFRAID

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