+1 Book: Motivation
Two times ago we talked a little about the “elite college students who can’t read books,” last time we talked about the importance of getting non-readers to read one book, and today we’re diving into MOTIVATION.
Getting people to read is hard. And getting people to jog is hard.
So…why don’t we take some things that apply to fitness motivation and apply them to reading?
Well, because we’re nerds and we hate jocks, and this is the natural order of things. They think they’re so cool with their square jaws and letterman jackets, which I assume are cool Tonight Show jackets that jocks somehow gain access to.
But perhaps the jocks have something right here and there. Besides their Jock Jams compact discs, which are, admittedly, pretty great.
Motivation Needs to Come First
If you haven’t read a book yet, and you’re an adult who is capable of reading, then my guess is that you’ve never been properly, fully motivated to read one.
I don’t mean you never had a bearded, bespectacled teacher that prompted you to stand on your desks and quote Walt Whitman. I don’t mean you never had a beautiful blonde woman teach your class, and it turns out she was a Marine, and you come to find mutual respect with a Coolio song in the background.
I’m not putting this on teachers or even the education system because that shit’s all super broken, and it’s not the fault of the Department of Education, per se, although I guess we may be about to prove that pretty definitively if that entire department goes away because a bunch of fools thought that “government efficiency” would somehow be humane and consider the long term effects of every child who goes through public school being stupider and stupider every year.
*sigh*
I’m putting this on, well, the world. Which is useless because if “the world” hasn’t forced you to read a book in the last year, I have my doubts about the world doing so this year, so what we’ll have to do is shrink it down and put it on you, the individual.
Let’s Talk Jogging!
Tons of people take up jogging on January 1st. Or maybe like the 2nd. 4th? Whatever the Monday is following New Year’s, once the hangover has subsided and it’s time to be the person you always knew you could be, which is someone who is a lot like you but with the addition of jogging.
And, as we all know, a lot of these joggers give up their resolutions pretty quickly.
We can talk all day about sticktoitiveness and bootstraps and so on, but my thinking is that most people give up jogging because jogging sucks at first. And by “at first,” I mean for like a couple months.
It’s hard, your body will rebel, it DOES NOT want to get up and move around that way after not doing that for years.
Which is why I think it’s important, with new joggers, to talk about motivation.
Why do you want to get fit? Why jogging as opposed to other activities?
If I could demonstrate to you that another activity would be more fat-burning than jogging, would you abandon jogging, or do you like jogging? If you could take a pill that had no effects other than making jogging not painful, would you take that pill?
The Other Reason We Suck at Jogging
Because we pick it up in January, look pretty much the same in the mirror three months later, and when it’s time to take that trip to Vegas, where you were planning to look super hot poolside, you can’t help but feel a little disappointed.
Unfortunately, despite jogging through three shitty winter months, you still look kinda, sorta, mostly the same, so you give up on the jogging, buy some kind of wrap, and just get drunk enough that you don’t give a shit.
This is a solid plan, by the way, no shade on my part.
If you pick up jogging for the express purpose of looking better in bathing garb, and if you aren’t seeing the pounds winging away and your body becoming super sexy for the pool (based on your standards, not mine, I don’t give a shit what you look like at the pool in Vegas because fuck pools, that shit is boring), it’s going to be difficult to motivate yourself.
So what if you could come up with something else?
The Other, Other Reason We Suck at Jogging
If you took up a fitness plan this January, good for you, and I’m about to ruin everything for you:
When it comes to being fit, you never really “get there.”
Because, see, fitness is a constant effort. You stop for one second, and father time suckerpunches you. You get a cold and go down for a couple weeks, and you might as well be a newborn kitten trying to bench press 300 lbs.
I’m not always the hugest fan of AI Art, but I DO like to see just what horrors it’ll have for me on any given day, such as A KITTEN WITH FINGERS. Not to mention this is missing a key element of the bench press, namely the bench, which is 50% of the name, you AI prick.
There’s not amount of jogging you can do and be DONE.
So when we start jogging and imagine a finish line, we embark on an endless journey of pain.
Okay, that’s super dramatic. But what I mean is, you’ll never really be done, so having a jogging goal with a very specific ending doesn’t always work so great. Because you’ll get there, cross that line, and basically be at the beginning again. A slightly different beginning, but a beginning nonetheless.
Books
I am good at sticking to exercise because when I don’t get time to myself, listening to some music or a podcast, out on the road, I’m a miserable bastard who takes it out on everyone. This effect is so immediate that my wife will say, “It’s hard when you can’t run, isn’t it?”
So, for me, it doesn’t matter if I look good in bikini briefs (I do not, I assume, I’ve never attempted to even put them on for fear of the result awakening an ancient evil. It’s that bad in here, by which I mean “In the flesh prison I’m stuck inside of.”). The mood regulation makes jogging worth it, even if I still look like shit.
Here’s my theory: If you had a motivator that was more process, less outcomes-based, if you had a motivator that you were experiencing all along the process, incrementally, you might be able to push through those initial months of hell and stick to jogging.
If I was coaching someone, I would really encourage them to consider other motivations that might be more powerful, more immediate, and would help them see value in jogging, even if they weren’t 1000X more fuckable 2 months from now.
As this applies to books, let’s start with this: How could you motivate yourself to read, even if I told you that your first book wasn’t going to be much fun, and even if I told you that once you finished your one book, you wouldn’t notice much difference?
External Motivators
Let me give you some examples of motivators specific to some different folks:
Single people:
If you are interested in someone you occasionally encounter, ask them if they’ve read any books they really liked lately. If there’s a cute barista you like, this is a great thing to ask them. Just, “You know, I haven’t read anything I’ve liked in a super long time, and I’m asking people I chat with if they have any recommendations for me. Have you read anything you liked?”
Something that’s good about this motivation is that it has an external aspect: Even if you don’t like the book for one second, reading it confers the benefit of giving you something to talk about with someone you want to have things to talk about with.
That’s a clumsy sentence, but, hey, love is clumsy.
Even if you haven’t finished the book yet, you can talk to the barista about what just happened, meaning it’s not a slog until the moment you finish, which is the point it supposedly flips.
Uh, don’t be a fucking creep, though. If you’re a 50 year-old man and chatting up a 19 year-old barista, you do you, but please don’t use this method of “gaming” someone into banging you, okay? That’s not really what I’m talking about here, I’m talking about getting to know someone you’re interested in a little better through reading something they recommend. This isn’t a trick or a scheme, it’s just a way of sharing an experience. THIS IS WHOLESOME. Don’t drag books down in the mud with you.
People Who Want to Do Something:
It doesn’t matter whether you want to fish, woodwork, live in Antarctica (Big Dead Place), work on an offshore oil rig (Don't Tell Mom I Work On The Rigs: She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse) lift weights (Never Let Go), make a movie (Rebel Without a Crew), produce Broadway musicals (Song of Spider-Man), design fonts (Just My Type), tattoo people (Tattoo Machine), preferably not on their faces, whatever it is you want to do, someone has written a book about it, and most likely, someone has written an entertaining book about it. And if you read that book, you’ll have a much better idea about what you’re getting into, and you’ll probably avoid a lot of the mistakes others have made in the past, wrote books about, and sold to you specifically to help you not make the same mistakes and so that you just might advance the art of 2 A.M. tattooing in Portland, OR, just a bit.
Books are a great way to do this. Why? Because a 15-minute YouTube video is probably made by someone who is really good at making videos, but that doesn’t mean they’re good at whatever it is you want to do. I mean, doesn’t it makes sense that a font designer would be a big fan of a PRINTED BOOK?
And I’m going to go with a mild bias here: YouTube videos, even good ones, are often made by younger folks. That’s how this works. So by diving into a format that older, more experienced people are familiar with, you might open up some knowledge that hasn’t hit the Googles yet.
More Internal Motivators
People who are into the Do Hard Things Scene, Your 75 Hard People:
Yeah, reading an entire book is not easy. It requires discipline. It requires focus and attention. These seem to be the sorts of things you folks are on about all the time. So try this, see how it fits into your ideas about doing hard things because by doing hard things, you learn something about yourself. This is a hard thing to do that is also non-physical, so bonus, you can still be doing hard things even when you’re resting up, which you’re probably doing less than you should because you’re all maniacs.
By the by, yes, I know 75 Hard includes reading 10 pages a day. That might be overkill for you. We’ll get there.
People who want to feel happier:
Doomscrolling is real. We all do it. Books are kind of the anti-doom-scrolling. If you feel grouchy after reading the news in the morning, if you feel hopeless, if you are actually commenting on peoples’ horrifically misinformed social media posts as though that will do anything, reading a book can be a way for you to push aside the doomscroll and do something else instead, sort of like replacing smoking with drinking way too much coffee.
Ugh, I just read that close to 70% of Americans use social media. We’ve crossed the point where more people are on Facebook than have read a book in the last year. THIS is what the apocalypse looks like. And it’s SO BORING.
~
These are just a few examples. Whatever you want to do, there’s something for you, too. Think about it a bit. Think about what you like doing. Think about what’s motivated you to do something before. Think about a big accomplishment from your life and how you pulled that shit off.
Probably The Best Motivation
Because you want to read a book.
The best reason to do anything is always because you want to do that specific thing.
The best reason to read all the Amazing Spider-Man comics from Amazing Fantasy 15 through today’s current issue is because you want to read all the Amazing Spider-Man comics from Amazing Fantasy 15 through today’s current issue.
The best reason to play all the Mario games, all the way through, is because you want to play all the Mario games, all the way through.
The best reason to write a library-related blog is because you want to write a library-related blog, not because you want to get rich and famous and have ALA hire you to be a keynote speaker.
$25,000, ALA. I’ll do it for $25,000.
Negotiable.
Heavily negotiable.
If you want to read a book simply because you want to have read a book, because you don’t want to be in your 30s and realize you haven’t read a single goddamn novel since you were in grade school, that’s an excellent reason to read.
Do the uncomfortable math on this: If you had decided to read just one book every year since you turned 20, how many books would you have under your belt by now?
If you started to read one book every year from now until you retire, how many will that be?
From now until your dead? Assuming you don’t die at your desk, a fate I’m almost certain I’ll fall into, and if you see me in the stairwell at work, clawing my way to the front door, just know that all I want is to die at least 50 feet from the building, so please help me die with something not like dignity, but as I’d wish, if you can.
Why These Types of Motivators Might Help
Because you’ll notice they aren’t dependent on whether or not the book someone selects is any good or whether they enjoy the reading experience.
Because my thinking is that, much like jogging, it’s almost certain, this first time out, non-readers won’t enjoy reading.
You have to find a way to push through that initial period to the time when it gets to be…maybe not pleasant, but not so bad, at least.
And you have to set people up so that they look back at their reading experience and can say, “I didn’t like it, but I DID get something out of it.”
Forbidden Reasons
I want to be well-read:
Can I tell you a little story about this?
I thought I’d be happy when I deadlifted a certain weight in 2021. And then, earlier this year, I deadlifted 30% ON TOP OF that weight I assumed I’d be happy with.
You’ll never be happy. You’ll be strong, but you’ll always have the possibility of being stronger, and the same thinking applies to books.
The more you read, the more you’ll realize how much you’ve yet to read.
If you haven’t read ONE book yet, you’re a ways away. It’s okay to dream big, but sometimes your dreams take you too far out, and when you’re on page 45 of your first book and bored, it’s SO easy to quit because that dream shore you were planning to hit is still ridiculously far away. You end up feeling like the smart move is to turn around now before you waste too much time.
I want people to perceive me differently:
I’m not a big fan of reading as something that you expect others to take notice of, because most times, outside of personal pan pizzas, you won’t get any. People probably aren’t going to assume you’re a genius because you read ONE book this year, and that needs to be okay because that’s how simple the goal is here. Reading, like jogging, is something you mostly do in private. You don’t get a lot of attaboys for either. The perception most people have of you won’t change significantly. Besides, you can’t control how others see you, so aiming to control that sort of thing is fruitless.
I want to prove to someone that I’m smart:
Look…revenge is a good motivator for some things, I’m living proof that a blackened heart can still pump bile-y blood all throughout the human body and propel you to moderate heights. But most times, this sort of thing doesn’t actually work. I mean, what happens is, you read a book to prove you’re smart, and whatever you read, it won’t be smart enough. It won’t be long enough. It won’t be serious-minded enough. Whatever way someone who dislikes you can breed doubt in your heart, they will, and your whole revenge collapses.
If you want to do revenge, do it right: Wait until they die and take a dump on their grave. That, my friends, is how you have the last laugh.
Told you my heart was black. Brown?
Craft Your Reason
The basic idea here is to come up with something that gets you over that hump, that initial 6 weeks of reading that is going to, well, suck. It’s going to be boring, it’s going to be displeasing, and it’s going to be ULTRA tempting to retreat back into your phone during your lunch breaks.
What’s your reason for reading a book this year?
Come up with it, write it down on a card, stick it up at your desk. Use it as a bookmark. Get a custom phone case made with this on it, set it as your phone’s wallpaper to remind you that you shouldn’t be looking at your phone, you SHOULD be picking up a book.
Which is a nice segue into next week’s topic where we’re going to cover the How in a little program I call Couch to 1 Book.
Clumsy title. Will we fix it before next time? Doubtful!