How I’m reinventing myself in 2025
Lessons from my most successful habits
This girl is lying to you.
I know I brand myself as a writer and a smart cookie and part of the reason why is that I wish to be someone who reads books voraciously. But there are many better things to do than to hunch over words printed on a stack of dead trees. Like watching Arcane. Or culling my wardrobe. Or writing this essay.
The thing is, I wish to read more books. I dream of being the person that could effortlessly pull out an erudite™ historical reference and make some mind-blowing parallel to a present social dilemma like, I don’t know, the emerging kakistocracies in America, Indonesia, and the internet.
Yet I still struggle to read books. Struggle isn’t the right word. There’s a lot of friction to reading books. I fantasize about reading books instead of actually reading them because I find the action of committing to a long piece of text a bit… much. It’s not going to be a 4-minute read. Most books take hours. And most require multiple sittings.
Reading books isn’t an impossible task. I’ve done things before. Hard things, too. Like publishing essays weekly on this Substack, creating an art book, competing in a fitness race.
The simple truth is that a person is made up by their actions. If I want to be a person that reads books, I should read books.
Looking back, I’ve started things that I am now proud of because I figured out how to remove the friction that prevented me from doing stuff and actually just do it. If I “analyze” how I managed to reduce friction to my advantage, maybe I could draw some common “steps” that I could implement into this new book-reading thing I apparently aspire to do.
These are some steps that I have taken and will follow so I will read more books in 2025:
Identify who I want to be and what the action is that follows it.
I wanted to write long-form pieces, so I wrote. I wanted my art book, so I printed an art book.
I want to learn more from books, so the action is to read books.
One tip I learned to make these goals stronger is by making them my identity. In this case, my identity is “I am a person who reads books”.
(Side note, it’s okay if the identity comes from someone else. I was two years into publishing weekly on YouTube before
called me a “creative”. I wrestled with that identity tag for weeks. I never thought of myself as “creative”. Eventually, I needed a bio on my Substack page so I put “soulful creative” (his words also) because, yes, I am a creative.)Set frequency goals, not milestone goals.
Most big and lofty goals require a lot of hard work and a long time horizon to get to. It’s hard to write a book in one day (lmk if you can hack this), but it’s a lot easier to write it across a few months or even years.
But visualizing something in a few months’ time is hard. I personally can’t comprehend time beyond a week. So I shrink my horizon to weekly. Thinking in 7-day periods makes everything less daunting to reach and easier to schedule into my calendar.
Instead of aiming to read 25 books a year, the goal is to read thirty minutes before bed. I chose a time goal here because it was easier to control for that than to overly shoot for “two chapters a night”. Besides, some book chapters are really long.
By breaking the goals down into a frequency basis, the goal feels more realistic too, which increases the chance of me doing it. In 2016, I inputted “read 50 books” as my Goodreads’ annual reading goal because it was a nice, round number. I missed that goal by 40-something books. I only realized by December that the goal of 50 books meant 1 book a week!
It also helps to get quick wins by scaling the goal down to something that’s impossible to fail at. I started exercising by running 1km on a treadmill, 1x a week, before I worked my way up to 6x/week (the whole process took 8 years).
Look at existing life routines and slot the actions in.
Reality check. I am not going to overhaul my life just to read more books. It’s a lot more realistic to make little tweaks into my calendars, slowly moving the goal post as I go.
For example, I have lunch breaks at work, so I narrowed down my gym options to those that offer lunchtime classes. I’m home every Tuesday night for an 8PM work call, so I do my meal prep after getting back from the office and before the meeting.
I find it a lot easier to attach those actions-that-contributes-to-goals to an already existing routine. It has a stacking effect (that I will go to the gym because I already have a lunch break) that’s a lot more accessible than trying to do a completely new action in a vacuum (it’s much harder to drag myself to the gym from my bed on a Sunday afternoon of doing nothing). Without considering already existing habits, this “unrealistic” behavior could even destroy new habits before they get off the ground.
In the case of this book reading habit (it’s a recurring action and not just a one-off) I put reading right before bed. Now, the action of reading books is tethered next to sleep and not floating in this ambient nothingness of the idle time between dinner and bedtime.
Figure out the easiest way to do the action.
I romanticize doing things in its fullest form. I want to run a full marathon. I want to make ramen from scratch, broth and all. I want to read hardbacks and crack the book’s stiff, tight spines and inhale the aroma of sawdust.
But doing things in its fullest form is hard, unrealistic, and guaranteed to have loads of friction. My new action would cook me before I could cook it. So my focus here is to get rid of friction, to make the action of reading as smooth as possible.
So instead of reading a hardcopy of a book, I’m going to read my books on Kindle. This way I don’t have to turn off any lights before bed, don’t need to use both hands to prop up the book, and don’t need to fiddle with bookmarks.
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Now that I’ve figured out how I will read books in 2025, here is the fun part: finding books I want to start reading.
I’m currently reading The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by
, my favorite silkpunk author (he calls it that in lieu of steampunk), Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes (recommended by ), and The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Other books on my radar are Paradise Lost by John Milton (anyone know a good reading guide for this?) and the forty-something books I abandoned from that failed Goodreads-goal year.I’m all for accountability too, so feel free to check in with me anytime to see if I read the previous night.
How about you? Are you reinventing yourself in 2025 and what’s the action (that you’re going to make easy) that will get you there?
Thank you to folks who made this essay easy to publish: , , , , , , and .
Update log:
🎮 Jin got me Astro Bot for Christmas and it’s surprisingly hard to play! But very fun.
📺 Late to the game but we’re watching Arcane. We also signed the petition before watching the show.
🏠 Simone Giertz’s tiny house tour is amazing. I also had no idea that stupid-robot-girl had such a glow up. I’m going through her YouTube backlog of videos.
✏️ Contrary to this post, I’m reading The Gene (p43/495) on paperback while annotating the beautiful prose with pencil. I’ve come to appreciate writing craft so much more now that I’m trying to get better at it.
🎧 Catching up with my Beautiful/Anonymous podcast backlog from the year. Grateful for Chris Gethard and all that he does.
🎥 Posted my January creative updates here.
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I’ve struggled with this too and agree with all the action steps you mentioned. On books, a few shifts that have made reading easier and more enjoyable for me:
1. Keeping a Kindle by the bedside helps me sneak in more reading time.
2. I’m buying hard copies again for certain books, especially tactical ones, since flipping around on a Kindle can be a hassle. Kindle still wins overall.
3. I’ve stopped feeling like I have to finish every chapter or even every book. That old habit of needing to finish everything was hard to break, but once I gave myself permission to skip chapters, drop books, or even read multiple books at once—like I would with newsletters or blogs—reading started to feel lighter and more fun.
4. If I’m not into a book by 15–20%, I just move on. Most books, even the great ones, boil down to a handful of key ideas, so there’s no point slogging through if it’s not working for me.
5. I still buy books at 3x the pace I can read them. These days, they compete with newsletters, and I skim a lot more. If I even think I may want to read a book, I just immediately buy it on Amazon.
6. One litmus test I use: If I couldn’t tell anyone about what I’m learning, would I still read this? It’s a way to check if I’m reading for myself or just to sound smart.
As Naval puts it, “If you can speed read it, it isn’t worth reading.”
One tip I learned to make these goals stronger is by making them my identity. In this case, my identity is “I am a person who reads books”. > this is so key. I feel like reading has been a huge goal for me too this year and strangely, what's helped has been subscribing to booktubers who do reading vlogs. just seeing them read while they eat, take the subway, before bed makes me go, "hey I CAN eat and read too / I CAN spare an hour before bed to read", pause the video and grab a book :D
I also track frequency goals !! especially for writing and personal research. it's such a, "game-changer" as the cool productive kids say it :p