A simple-to-implement and actionable guide to learn how to read more books this year. And why reading is important for your overall health.

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What was the last really awesome book you read? And when did you read it?

Chances are, it’s probably been months, if not years, since you enjoyed a good page-turner.

About 75-percent of the population has read at least one book in the last year. One book. That’s a pretty low bar to set.

And yet, it also reveals a huge problem: almost a quarter of the adult population doesn’t read at all.

How can we expect to raise the next generation of superstars and heroes and encourage them to read and learn and expand their minds if we aren’t setting that example ourselves?

We’ve got to find more time in our busy day to pick up some books and read.

In today’s article, I’m going to help you learn how to read more books:

• We’ll start with why you need to read more
• The dive into a few of my strategies to make it work
• And we’ll wrap it up with a few additional tips to make this your most productive reading year ever

Let’s get into it.

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Why You Need to Read More Books

Wait. I thought this was a site dedicated to health and fitness, what the hell does reading more books have to do with it?

Great question. Glad you asked.

Of course, I like to spend some of my time on this site talking about more than just calorie deficits and deadlifts. Just like I explained in my 5 Principles to Living an Awesome Life article.

Not to mention, reading makes you smarter. And no one likes a dumbass.

Yet here we are in a world where most people are more than fine avoiding books and just getting all of their info from YouTube or TikTok.

Strive to do better.

The answer is that reading has a bunch of benefits that translate to overall health:

• improves brain connectivity
• increases your vocabulary and comprehension
• empowers you to empathize with other people
• aids in sleep readiness
• reduces stress
• lowers blood pressure and heart rate
• fights depression symptoms
• prevents cognitive decline as you age

Reading, along with practicing mindfulness regularly through things like journaling and even meditation are like mental workouts.

Understand this: reducing stress is one of the biggest factors for 1) adhering to your diet program and 2) helping to flush out the hormone cortisol to help make weight loss and that calorie deficit more efficient.

Not to mention, you shouldn’t live life like a total stupid neanderthal.

Take pride in learning new shit

You might even find that you learn more about health and fitness than your favorite friendly neighborhood fat loss coach (that’s me, by the way).

Now that I’ve convinced you to take a few moments to actually care and pick up a book and read on the regular, let’s start finding a few ways to make it happen so you can be consistent.

Like any habit out there, it’s all about building momentum through small action steps. Bake it into your regular routine and reading a book will come along as second nature to you, like brushing your teeth.

Building a reading habit

“The key to reading lots of books begins with stopping thinking of it as some activity that you do. Reading must become as natural as eating and breathing to you. It’s not something you do because you feel like it, but because it’s a reflex, a default.”

– Ryan Holiday

For some reason, we tend to assume that the learning stops once we earn that degree or diploma. From then on, reading is a chore and we just don’t want to do it because it reminds us of homework assignments, book projects and term papers.

This is so far from the truth.

There’s also the idea that reading is not manly enough. That it’s more important to watch football and drink beer and burp the alphabet rather than learn some new and interesting stuff.

That’s just fucking stupid. And despite spending almost a decade as a sports reporter, I still bash the thought of being only knowledgable about sports scores.

There’s the excuse that between all of the responsibilities of work and life and parenting that there just isn’t enough time in the day to pick up a book and turn a few pages.

Allow me to show you just how stupid that logic really is, too.

The key to winning this game is to start really small. The idea of building a new habit (a good habit) gets a ton of play. But, the problem is all in the approach.

Stop trying to solve all of the world’s problems with one swoop and try to think of smaller incremental steps towards achieving a behavioral goal.

Think about when you’ve tried in the past to lose weight. You start all or nothing on Monday––because all diets start on Monday, duh.

It’s off to the gym for a 60 minute workout or hitting the pavement for a 60 minute run.

• You ditch all of those carbs;
• you eat a salad at work every single day;
• and you change everything and end up being miserable.

It’s simply not sustainable.

So you fall off of the bandwagon and curse the weight loss Gods only to swear to try it all over again in a few months.

That’s not how to build a successful habit. It’s a recipe for failure.

Instead, you’d be better served starting with smaller and more sustainable tactics to developing a healthy lifestyle. It needs to be something so easy that there really is no excuse for skipping it.

For instance, if you’d incorporate two workouts of about 15 minutes per week, that is much easier to maintain. Everyone has 30 total minutes per week to train and improve their physical health.

Is it terribly easy? Yes. Will it get you to Ryan Reynolds level of fitness? Probably not. But are 30 total minutes of training per week better than the zero minutes you’re doing right now? You betcha.

We’ll take the same approach with reading.

The One Page Rule

When all else fails, it’s time to take drastic measures to ensure this reading thing becomes a solid habit.

One of the ways I build basic habits with my online coaching clients to ensure working out is a new and unbreakable habit is to focus on behavioral change.

Instead of just random goal setting and motivation, I turn to practical strategies that get shit done. Because, we’re all busy and motivation is overrated and sucks (more on that here) and you need systems in place to prevent the inevitable falling off of the proverbial wagon.

We want to change the behavior to make working just a seamless part of the day. In order to do that, we’ve got to hit the lowest hanging fruit possible.

And that means making the workout as easy as possible. So easy that it is embarrassing to miss it.

In some cases, I’ll encourage my clients to perform just one pushup. Their workout is simply one pushup.

“What??? That’s too easy! That’s just silly,” they’ll scoff, knowing full well that they aren’t even doing that much for themselves right now.

Is one pushup better than zero pushups? Yep.

Do my clients end up doing more than just one pushup most of the time as a result of committing to just one? Yep.

So what’s the takeaway here?

Commit to reading one page. Just one page of a book. That’s one more page than you read yesterday. If you can only read just one page, no worries. Read it and be done and come back tomorrow.

Chances are, you’ll likely end up reading more than just that one page once you get started. And that’s how you create a habit.

Build momentum towards your reading goal

Instead of blocking off hours at a time to read with a goal of completing the entire Game of Thrones set in less than a month, start with something so easy that it’s almost insulting. You’ll have no choice but to hit your behavioral goal and sooner or later, it will become a habit.

Start now with just 10 to 15 minutes per day. Make it a point to head off for bed just 10 to 15 minutes earlier with a commitment of reading during that time.

In other words, the teeth are brushed and the bathroom has been used, the PJs are on and the TV is off.

In 10 to 15 minutes, you won’t be able to read an entire biographical work from Ron Chernoff, but you’ll be able to knock out about five to 10 pages. That should get you through a shorter book in about two to three weeks or a longer piece in a little more than a month.

Congrats, you just read a book. Now, lather, rinse, and repeat to really drill home some new knowledge and expand your mind.

Get the kids involved

We don’t read enough to our kids. Think back to your days as a young one trying to learn as much awesome shit as possible, it was always a treat to have a parent or loved one read a book to us, right?

Somewhere along the lines we forgot how awesome it was and we stopped doing it regularly to our own children.

This is a massive mistake. Children are encouraged to read by parents and they learn from that behavioral habit.

If you read more books, the kids will read more books. If the kids read more books, they’ll have dramatically better school performances and comprehension going forward.

This is a great opportunity for you to get a few extra rounds of reading into the mix. While a young one may not be ready for you to read aloud the inner workings of the brain from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, your son or daughter may be at the right age for Harry Potter.

Make a pact with your kids that they can’t watch the movies until you’ve read the books together. And then read the books to them––or have them read it to you.

Everyone wins.

Find the hidden pockets of time in your day

One of the best ways to establish the reading habit is to knock it out early in the day.

Perhaps going to bed 10-15 minutes earlier is a bit of stretch for you. Maybe you just get really tired from all of the office tasks, working out and parenting that you accomplished throughout the day, so your focus will shift to the beginning of the day to conquer your goals.

Establishing a morning routine is one of my keys to success in both personal and professional life.

Having some time in the day to yourself before the sun rises and the kids get up to fuck it all up is a huge factor in allowing for more time to complete things you want to take care of to make life seem pretty awesome.

Reading can be a part of this routine, as well.

Pop up out of bed and get some gratitude out of the way, jot down some notes in your journal and then spend another 10 minutes or more reading a good book.

Think of how awesome your day would be if you managed to get some of these habits out of the way before the rigors of day to day life started knocking at your door to pull you every which way.

Bottom line, the key is to start small

Find a manageable goal for hitting a target number of pages read or perhaps the percentage of a book and then stick to that goal with a regular time in your day to make it happen. Schedule it in your calendar if you have to do so.

Reading furthers your education. It broadens your cultural experiences. It expands your mind.

If nothing else, it’s a conversation starter that gets you further than the standard small talk about the weather or last night’s sports scores.

Let me help you learn how to read more books this year … 

I’m here to help you out. 

If you have any questions, reach out. I answer all of my emails at pete [at] petecataldo [.] com … Hit me up with the subject line “Read more books” and I’ll answer any questions you have to make this work for you.

Or you can hit me up anytime on the socialz on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

If you enjoyed this post, maybe you’d like more knowledge bombs from me. I’d be honored if you join my mailing list to get regular updates every time I post something pretty dope.