What You Do Today and How You Do It Will Matter Tomorrow

Two years ago, I told myself that I was going to start reading more books.

I wanted to know what I should do with my life. I didn’t know what career to choose, what my life purpose should be, who I should aim to become… I had simply been floating through life, wishing that someone would find me and tell me what my “passion” was supposed to be.

Everyone else seemed to know what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives.

Everyone else seemed happy and content with who they currently were.

I grew jealous of their happiness and desperate to know what I was here on this earth for.

Was I endowed with special abilities and talents by an ultimate creator, or was I part of a random process of evolution and probability?

Did my life have inherent meaning, or was I to find it myself?

I couldn’t find the answer to that question by thinking about it, so I decided to delve into books. People who were smarter than me had already tried to tackle the aforementioned question, which made me excited to search for the answer.

I started with classic books. When you don’t have any guidance, try to follow what other people deem as “useful” or “interesting” enough to keep around.

I treated reading like it was a job. I didn’t allow myself to enjoy most books, and just powered through them. Words flew across my eyes as I read as fast as I could without feeling like I was cheating myself.

After I finished a book, I would close it, put it back on my shelf, and open the next one. I gave myself no time to reflect or recall some memorable lines or scenes. I simply wanted to check them off a list so that I could say that I had read them.

Self-Help, Fiction, Finance, Economics, Psychology, Philosophy, Poetry, Short Stories… I powered my way through many books to find something.

Something that would make me have an “A-Ha” moment. Something that would make sense of my confusing world. Something that would give my life purpose.

I was hungry for an answer but never knew what the question was.

I bought books every week. Soon I couldn’t finish a book because as soon as I started a new book, I would think about another book that I would want to read, which made the current book uninteresting and tedious, even though moments ago I had been excited to start it.

But what happened over time was that I couldn’t recall even the basic summary of the books I had read. I would be sharing with my friend that I had finished a book, and when he asked what it was about, my mind would blank and I realized that I had not retained anything.

The thought of not being able to explain the book summary was embarrassing, and I would feel ashamed as I rambled incoherently and tried in vain to explain the plot as well as the lessons I had learned.

Soon, I started to become bitter. What was all this effort for? Why was I wasting my time reading this book if I couldn’t remember it the next day? Why couldn’t I understand the summary and the message the author was trying to portray? Why couldn’t I coherently explain the lessons to my friends and family? What good was reading if you were not going to learn anything from it?

I thought they saw me as an intellectual fraud. Someone who pretended like he/she read a lot but just upheld the image of a bookworm by having lots of books around them.

Reading became a burden and I avoided reading because I would constantly feel the pressure to read fast and finish so that I could move onto another book. The feeling of having to be efficient made reading a tiresome task, and I felt my love for reading slowly fading.

But over time as I thought about it, I realized that maybe the reason why I didn’t remember anything was because I was not treating the activity of reading with the respect it deserves.

Reading is a difficult task that requires total concentration. In order to follow a typical novel, your brain must understand the symbols that are in the book, decipher them into letters and then into words, and then learn about the setting of the book, understand each of the characters and their words and actions, and follow the progression of events from start to finish.

Then, when you’re finished with the main plot, you must try to understand what small messages the author was trying to tell the reader. You must see the book as a product of the writer’s being, a collection of different personalities that lived within them, as well as actual people who had inspired them.

I was doing the action that I believed would change my life for the better, but I realized the next step was to fix HOW I was doing it.

So I started to slow down and be more deliberate with my reading. I started to take notes of memorable passages and actively remember the lessons I took away from my books.

I stopped thinking about productivity and started to apply the lessons in my actual life, which helped me remember lessons more and ultimately led to actual changes in my life.

“How to Win Friends and Influence People” taught me to smile, genuinely take interest in other people by asking questions, and listening closely to them.

I started thinking outside of my own life and wondered about the lives of other people. Whenever I met new people, I asked questions that I really wanted to know the answer to and found myself surprised at how interesting individuals were.

I found myself being challenged to think from a perspective that I would never have considered had I not talked to that person. I became more open minded as a process and was able to have even more interesting conversations since I was not digging my heels into the sand whenever I had differing opinions.

I found myself being less anxious to talk to people. We’re all social animals and we all want attention and to talk about ourselves. We all want to get along with others and have fun and meaningful conversations.

I found myself thinking less about what others would think of me. In previous conversations, I was so concerned with what I was going to say next in a conversation that I would not listen to anything the other person said.

I would prepare a question that would make me seem insightful and intelligent, and when the other person started talking, I would start brainstorming another question that would make me look good.

This strategy does not allow you to be present and truly listen to the other person’s answer, which may make you miss out on interesting topics of conversation or golden nuggets of wisdom.

So I’ve learned that it’s not really about what you do — it’s about how you do it.

If you eat a salad, but you only put in lettuce and shove in bacon, croutons, breaded chicken and drench it in dressing, you defeat the purpose of maintaining your “healthy” meal.

If you do push ups every day, but you barely go down and do each rep super quickly instead of focusing on the form and straining your muscle, you defeat the purpose of working out.

If you play the piano every day, but you hit random keys and never focus on practicing more difficult songs, you will not get nearly as better as someone who continuously pushed themselves to have a disciplined regimen that pushed them to their limit every day.

Just because you DID something doesn’t mean you did it RIGHT.

You have to push yourself instead of allowing yourself to always take it easy.

What you do today and how you do it will matter tomorrow — your efforts will help you improve exponentially over time.

Your continuous struggle will amount in tremendous growth physically and mentally.

You need to practice patience and believe that your sacrifice today will help make tomorrow’s sacrifice a bit easier.

You may not have the correct method of practice now. You may have to attempt countless times to get it right.

But the only way to get closer to the “right” way of doing something is to keep trying.

All photos were taken from https://academyofideas.com/

:)