Aim For The Stars

At the end of last year, I set a reading challenge/aim to read 54 books in 2023. This was based on my logic that I could read and finish one book each week, which accumulates to roughly 52 books yearly. Just for fun, I added two more books to that and it became a target of 54 for the year 2023. I added this goal in Goodread, which makes it easy for two reasons. Firstly Goodread is owned by Amazon and it automatically tracks any book that I read through Kindle. Secondly it shows how many I should read every monthly, and whether I am on target or not to complete my goal.

Sad to say, I am not.

I am short of 18 books and I have only 10 more days before the end of this year. Divided, I need to read 2 books a day! Needless to say, it won’t be humanely possible for me to complete my goal. What a disappointment, or so I thought.

But then I looked at the goals from previous year, and I was reminded how I did previously and also partly reason why I set such a high target to complete for 2023. If I were to compare to my last year target, I have read welllll over 2022 goal. And also there are patterns here: 1. I never manage to achieve my yearly target. 2. The number of the books that I manage to read increases yearly.

Based on this rough analysis, I can safely say and console myself that I have done quite well. Of course I should continue to improve by – you guess it right – setting an even higher target next year.

To be honest too, some of the books that I read was pop/rubbish books which are more for pleasure reading. This is not necessarily bad, but I need to also add an aim to read more ‘beneficial’ books next year, as I can’t read an infinite number of books, I should make them worthwhile. And who knows, I might be even manage to finish my goal insyaAllah, and it would be greater if the books that I read are all the ones I am proud of.

Thank you for reading.