I’m a busy person. One of the resolutions I made during my solo euro-backpack trip two months ago was that I would diversify my reading–that I would read the things I wouldn’t normally read. I am a voracious reader and read only business and tech. Everything else, .. mmmh .. I can’t really find the time for.
One of the things I do to cope with information overload is skim reading my emails, separating the wheat from the chaff. I usually discard long rambling pointless emails. It’s become a habit of mine that was really born out of necessity. However, this morning as I try to read this book by Ayn Rand, a good story book recommended by our previous fed chief Alan Greenspan, I just simply could not focus.
The reason was really because at the back of my mind, my brain was reminding me of the bazillion other “more important” things I had to do. As you can see from how thick the book is, some of the passages are not how should I say, straight to the point. It’s a story book after all, the point is the story of how the plot unfolds.
Reading this book is tough because it reminds me of someone writing me a long pointless email rambling about things I don’t care about. However, I also notice this self-defeating behavior of mine–the internal struggle of wanting to read the book, but also wanting to move on to taking care of a more important task. I’m forcing myself not to skim and actually read each sentence. Not glossing over the “superfluous” sentences is forcing myself to focus on something I don’t necessarily like to do.
And you know what? There’s plenty of times in our lives when we just have to take care of some task that we don’t necessarily enjoy, but we cannot avoid. The most obvious that comes to mind is doing taxes. I loathe and hate doing taxes. Is it optional? Heck no, it’s frickin mandatory. Can I just do a sloppy job on it? Not really either, unless I want to risk getting in trouble with the taxman.
In short, I view this as practice: forcing myself to do shit I don’t like to do. It’s discipline. Make doing shit you don’t like to do a habit. Eat that frog.