When I celebrated my birthday in 2015, I wrote a post to set the goal of living a more intentional life rather than putting on auto-pilot mode and flying through the days. At the time, I made a list of goals I aspired to reach before the next birthday. However, soon afterwards, I started my preparation/application journey to business school and all other things fell off my priority list. Sadly, that year, I did not accomplish much except for “#1 Finish the Aramco Half Marathon under 2 hours” (ended up with 2hrs 5mins, but at least I tried!) and “#6 Do a better job of staying in touch with friends around the world” (I became pretty good at it via texts, phone calls, and cards!). Earlier this year, I had some spare time on hand after internship recruiting. Thus, I decided to revisit some of those goals set in the past. I tried to tackle goal #4 and goal #11. I can tell you after keeping it up for at least a couple of months, I have grown tremendously.

Goal #4 Write about six books I read on the blog

Before I had to become a fully committed student for all the Chinese test preparation, I loved burying myself in books. When Harry Potter series first came out, I packed the book along with snacks and lunch for a school trip to a zoo. I also remember after school, I would read the Lord of the Rings series in a nearby bookstore for 30 minutes every day before going home. After moving to the States, I got my mind occupied with college, recruiting, work, and other past times, such as TV, Internet, phone, social activities. I fell out of the habit of making time for reading.

Another reason that kept me from reading regularly was that I felt the obligation to read business books, after getting a business degree as an undergrad. I do not associate reading business books with fun, since I have not experienced as much staying up all night reading as with reading fictions. Whenever someone at any social event claimed “I do not read any fictions at all”, I slowly developed the notion that “reading fictions is only your guilty pleasure”. Looking back, how silly of me holding others’ opinion so highly that I abandoned my own interest. Speaking of others’ opinion, I read a blog post from Ellen Chisa on reading that positively influenced me to go back to reading. In her post “How to Read a Lot”, she shared: (1) read what you love (and give up when you don’t); (2) read fiction, as they “can help you develop empathy with a much broader set of people” and “can teach you lessons from the past, and predict the future”. I love Ellen’s writings on tech/product management so much that she is one of my women crushes in tech. If Ellen said reading fictions will help me develop empathy (important quality as a PM), I will buy it! 🙂 In fact, as she said “Fiction is the rare place you can ‘be in someone else’s head.'”, I can relate that strong female characters such as Scarlett O’Hara and Jane Eyre were inspirations to me when I had a setback.

When I I started reading more this February, I decided that rather than writing about books I read, I wanted to focus only on reading regularly, defined as dedicating at least half an hour to reading every day. I tried to read a mix of fiction and non-fictions, selecting books with gripping story lines for both genres. However, to buy books, the dollars will add up. In the past, whenever I had a casual read (books that I will only read once, such as Crazy Rich Asians), I felt guilty of not rereading it later. What’s more, as someone who loves books, you are constantly buying new books before you finish what you have. Thanks to my section mate Jasmine, I found a perfect solution! She told me that Ann Arbor Public Library has an amazing ebook selection, which allows you to borrow online and send the books to your Kindle app. The online audiobook selection is pretty comprehensive too! Thanks to this app, I have already borrowed and read 10 books this year. I highly recommend you checking it out your local library. I no longer need to worry about spending too much money on fun books, or packing away boxes of books every time I move.

Some of the books I read this year

Goal #11 Reflect every evening and journal the highlight of each day in a couple of sentences

There were definitely periods in my life that I felt I was so busy doing things every day that I forgot how I spent the time, then all of a sudden, one month flew by! It makes me wonder whether I was devoting time to things that matter to me, or I was simply going through the motion and doing things that others made me do. Thus, I started keeping a daily journal that every evening before going to bed, I would write down my thoughts for the day, in 4-5 sentences. When I started this practice, I set a small goal of consistently doing it for 30 days. In this 30 days, there were a couple of days that I forgot to journal and later on, had a hard time recalling what happened in that day. After 30 days, I found that I could not live without the journal! It was a great way for me to remember every day, to live in the present, and to be more intentional! Prior to this daily reflection, whenever I had highly anticipated events, such as a vacation or a friend coming to visit, I sometimes forgot how to live those days leading up to the event. I always wanted to fast forward to the big day and would not consider the prior days as important. This daily practice taught me to be grounded in every day and be present.

As physicist and writer Alan Lightman was quoted in the TED article “Why we owe it to ourselves to spend quiet time alone every day”, “By not giving ourselves the minutes — or hours — free of devices and distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s important to us”. Know what your priorities are and make time for them. You are never too busy to read or to reflect. Now that we are one week into the second half of 2018, what are your goals for the rest of the year?