When I was young, I was a bookworm. Remember those Scholastic Book pamphlets we’d get in school to order books at a huge discount?

I. Loved. Those. 

I didn’t know at the time, but when we were really young, we lived paycheck to paycheck. Mom, Dad, and my ông ngoại were scraping together every penny to handle the mortgage, our school expenses, music lessons. 

This was before engineers got paid a lot of money and while we were living in Boston (okay, Milton to be exact). We had made the move to this nicer place in a tiny 2 bed, 1 bath home after bouncing from Dorchester to an apartment in Quincy. But that’s a story for another time. 

The point is, we were broke. 

Yet, they still always found enough money to buy us books. Mom would ask me for the catalog every year and go through and circle books and place the order. Everyone at school remembered me as the kid who always had to get the teacher to help him pack all the books into a box to bring home. 

But somewhere along the way, I stopped. It’s quite embarrassing actually, and I talk about why in my other blog post here. 

I’m just glad that at the end of 2019, I decided to get my sh*t together and start reading a book a week. I’m happy to say that even though I didn’t finish 52 books, I did open my mind to 68 of them, 44 of which I read fully, and at least 10 I re-read two to three times! 

Here are the 3 ways reading changed my life.

1. It gave me the courage to start. 

Just starting something is half the battle. I’m feeling this more and more now that I’m not constantly surrounded by fast-paced cutthroat pre-med, pre-law, and pre-business students. I always think back to how I managed working 6 different jobs while studying for 6-7 classes in undergrad. 

Now, I can barely get the energy to wake up in the morning and make me a cup of tea. 

Comment below with your favorite tea(s)! Mine are Chamomile, Roasted Brown Rice, and Matcha Green Tea. :)

But reading gave me a sense of purpose. I knew I had a tangible number to hit (52 books), and I set a goal for myself to read a minimum of 15 minutes a day. Some days I was able to stretch that out to several hours thanks to audiobooks! 

Here’s one of my favorites. 

You can find my entire 2020 reading list with appropriate topics in my blog post: 

I really loved reading business/entrepreneurship and productivity/self-development books, which really helped me level up and take actionable steps to create my ideal life. Part of that is writing for Nguyening Lifestyles and coming up with new ideas for future podcasts and Youtube Channels! 

2. It opened the doors for me to self-reflect.

This might come as a shocker, but I’m by no means perfect. Put a crying emoji in the comments if you sensed the sarcasm. Seriously, put a few of them down there. 

If there was an award for the world’s worst son, brother, boyfriend, cousin, nephew,  friend, etc., I guarantee you that I’d easily place in the top 100. Okay, so I’ve got to be more realistic, closer to the top 25. 

We all have our demons, but I was more interested in facing mine. To put it into perspective, if I was less of a jerk and read more in college, my family and I would have a way better relationship, and my girlfriend and I would be rich today. Like almost guaranteed. 

She had the idea to start a blog and YouTube channel and her and my mom were all about trying meditation and exercising back then, but I totally shut it down. These will forever be two of the biggest regrets in my life. So now, I’m hustling to make up for it because so much time was lost. 

I started to read psychology and self-help books. Stuff on happiness, controlling emotions. Medical related texts to understand my brain, and its chemical imbalance. 

Man oh man, did I see that mom and Susie were ahead of the game. So now, I really stop and try to think about what I’m going to say or how I’m going to act and react to different aspects of life. Because what’s the point in living and having a lot of wealth if you can’t enjoy it with the people you care about? 

3. It helped me release my emotions.

One of the worst things about growing up in an Asian community is that we’re taught to be “modest, reserved, and humble.” 

I’m quoting this from some dude on Facebook who overreacted when someone wanted to share their success on LinkedIn about getting their first internship and writing a long post to commemorate it. 

I really wanted to just shut that guy down, but you can have some laughs and read about that post over here in this blog post.

Back to my main point. I never really knew how to manage my emotions. It still doesn’t feel okay to cry sometimes, and I’m always bottling up my happiness AND my anger that eventually, the anger just builds up and overpowers all those feelings of happiness. 

I know there are some scientific papers written on this out there, I just haven’t gotten the time to do a full literature review. But trust me, in families where it doesn’t feel safe to share emotions, this can be a real problem. 

And it’s not so much that my parents didn’t let me share and ‘have feelings’, but that I was afraid to because it just wasn’t socially acceptable in my social circles and extended family. 

But man oh man, when I read Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, Through the Fires by Robert Owen Carr, and Educated by Tara Westover, I could feel my heart being squeezed and my eyes ready to explode. So many of the books I read, I could feel the emotions the authors had. They were reaching across the black ink and putting an arm around my shoulder, telling me “it’s okay, I know what you’re going through. I’m here.” 

Now there are SO many ways other ways that reading has really helped me, and I’ll continue to share those in future blog posts, podcast episodes, and our Youtube Channel. But hopefully these 3 are enough to get you started today. 

If you made it this far in the post, go ahead and comment down below with one book you’re looking forward to reading in 2021!