With only a couple of days left of the year. It is time to review my 52 books in 52 weeks challenge.
I can safely say I did not hit my target. I did however reach 30 books. I feel this is still impressive. I started out well, but soon things didn’t quite go to plan. Here are the things I learned from doing this.
My Lessons
1. Some books take time
Not all books should be read quickly. Some books are meant to be slowly chewed and digested.
If you really want to learn the lessons from it and how it can affect your life. Then you need to breathe with the book.
I learned this the hard way, as I am now going back through the books, I have read this year and re-studying them.
Using a journal to write out the teachings and lessons. I want to implement these moving forward.
2. let it go
Just because you are halfway through a book, and you don’t want to have wasted half a week on it. That doesn’t mean you should continue reading it! There were a few books that ended up taking a couple of weeks, just because I didn’t want to pick them up again. I found those ones hard to read, and they just weren’t for me at the time.
3. Time
If you try and read a book once a week, you probably won’t have time to do all the exercises and questions in them. This kind of goes with the first. But if you think I will do them next week while reading the next book. I can safely say it won’t happen.
4. Tabs
Only tab thing that you really want to learn or add to your life. At the start, I seemed to add tabs to nearly every page. Really not needed * Choose carefully what you want to look back at. Sometimes I wanted to record the exercise pages to do. With those add tabs/labels that come off easily. Once you have worked through them you can take them off.
5. Tab alignment
Add the tabs facing away from the spine. Not the top of the book. Might sound odd, but it looks so messy on the bookshelf with the tabs sticking up * but with them down the side of the book instead, they don’t annoy you as you can’t see them. I know I am odd. But learn from my mistakes as now going through them to re-do them all.
There is only one thing that can replace a book... another book.
Am I pleased I did the challenge… 100% yes! I would never have worked through 30 books otherwise. Would I try the challenge again? Honestly not so sure on that one. There is a part of me that would love to just because I love a difficult challenge. But the other part of me says it would be a waste of time. Because you won’t get the lessons and learning you need from it.
I have now developed (and will continue to develop) my way of learning and studying these books. So that I (and you when I teach) get the most from it. This is something I will use for the rest of my life and would never have started without this challenge.
I have two journals for the books. One where I write in my own words the lessons, and re-draw important diagrams to learn. Then the second is for me to work through the exercises and questions. How I am going to implement it into my life. By having these separate I can re-read the notes and learn in the future without the person I am today getting in the way of my answers currently. It will be books I will continue to flip through and read. I am sure over the next year my system will grow and adapt.
Next year I will let you know how it goes.
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