"I am a small bird that wants to fly but always does not fly high."
It is most appropriate to use this sentence to describe myself many years ago. At that time, I was at two o'clock every day, going to work and going home, without a trace of change, like a backwater.
Haven't we all lived like this anyway? In this way, I constantly comfort myself, as long as I live happily in the moment, it is enough, but in fact, I know in my heart that this is just a kind of self-deception.
It's not that you don't want to make a difference, it's not that you don't want to live your life as you want, it's just that there is no way and you don't know how to change.
Until one day when the unit moved to a far away place, when the job and the child could only choose one, I decisively chose the child, and resigned from the company where I had worked for ten years, when I was 33 years old.
Without a glamorous education and the ability to take it, I don't know how to find a job to make ends meet, insomnia in anxiety, a vicious cycle in insomnia.
I knew I couldn't be like this, but I was still at a loss for the future. When I was bored, I began to pick up a book to read, who knew that I couldn't put it down as soon as I took it.
Reading made me develop the habit of self-discipline
If you think I enjoyed reading in the first place, it's a big mistake.
As a scum who almost threw himself over all subjects except for a slightly better language, he did not like to read. When I was young, it was because the countryside was closed and there were no extracurricular books to read, and when I went to junior high school, I also borrowed one or two romance novels from my classmates.
Although I read a little more books after high school, until I worked, the number of extracurricular books read would not exceed 20, which is my real reading situation.
And I really started reading at the age of 33, an unemployed mother of two children because she was too confused about life, so she could only rely on hard work to get a little psychological comfort.
At that time, I just felt that I should learn and improve. And what kind of progress can be made, to what extent can be improved has not been thought about. At that time, there was a concept: call it three seven twenty-one, do it first and then say.
This fearless mentality also made me start to linger in the sea of books, initially through WeChat reading and developing reading habits, and I met many book friends across the country.
To say that these book friends are really excellent, many of them graduated from 985 or 211 master's degrees, as well as literature majors, returnees, and even university professors, reading with these excellent people, often feel that they are too small.
Seeing that his literary background and knowledge were not as good as those of book friends, he had to read more hard and hard, absorbing the nutrition in the book, and then secretly decided to insist on reading.
I didn't think that this persistence was four years, and I read almost every day for four years, mainly reference books, psychology books, and some philosophical and literary books.
After four years of reading every day, I finally made reading, writing, and sports my way of life, so that I could live a full-time self-media person with free time and economic freedom.
This is the change and change brought about by perseverance, and it is also the four years of rapid growth in my life.
Insist on reading, and meet a better self
When I first started reading, I used fragmented time to read, because every morning when I had to go to work at 7 o'clock, I used to get up half an hour early to read.
At that time, when I woke up early, I was particularly sleepy, and I often fell asleep while reading, but even if it was formalism, I insisted on getting up half an hour early every day, even if I actually only read for 5 minutes, which forced myself to have a sense of early ritual.
After three months of deliberately waking up early, morning reading is no longer a good look in form, but is truly integrated into daily life, and it seems that if you don't read a little book every day, you will feel uncomfortable.
I think this is the motivation that comes with love, and when a person encounters a bottleneck period and has nowhere to put it, force yourself to grow and try to shorten the gap with others.
Especially when I see people who are better than me working harder than me, and then I stop, I really feel guilty and uneasy. At that time, it was not terrible to think that the skills were inferior to people, but the terrible thing was that the heart was also poor, and the fighting spirit and motivation were lost, which was really terrible.
Many times I think, life is already so bad, how about trying again? Anyway, life always has to be lived, you may wish to insist on doing one thing, even if there is no result in the end, you want to do your best to live up to yourself.
Fortunately, after I insisted on reading for two years, I started self-media writing, which is called essays to be precise, writing my own feelings about life, writing about the thoughts brought by reading, and also writing about the pain and happiness brought by life.
Release what you think, think, and feel in your heart with words, and use words to vent your sadness and happiness, and at that time it was a fantasy to yourself.
I didn't expect to insist on it for more than four months, but after four months, I actually had a profit, initially realized the realization of writing, signed a contract with the Golden Mang Project ten months later, and later won many awards.
This is a lot of times in a magical reality, can't believe that all this is true, and sometimes question whether all this is all luck.
Until June 2020, when I quit my job to become a stay-at-home mom, I was very skeptical that I could really make reading and writing a career.
But at that time, I had a lot of reading speed, at most I could read more than 200 books a year, and these reading volumes gradually allowed me to achieve reading speed and deep understanding, thus achieving a breakthrough from quantitative change to qualitative change.
When reading a book, you can do a few lines at a glance, and you can quickly draw out the key points, and then find keywords and key paragraphs, after reading nearly a thousand books, you have the following experiences:
First, reading is the fastest growing and lowest cost shortcut. Especially reading books that you are not very good at and do not like to read, which means a breakthrough out of your comfort zone;
Second, insist on self-discipline. Self-discipline is a difficult thing, you can start from micro-habits, and slowly integrate habits into your lifestyle;
Finally, try topic reading and diversifying. Online articles and anxiety-style best-selling literature, try to read as little or no as possible, be sure to read more classics and some famous works, as well as psychology at home and abroad.
The way of reading must be correct, otherwise it may not work no matter how much you read.
Courage keeps me going
The other is the power of courage. In my own case, I never knew how to write anything at first, but also insisted on trial and error, continued to connect, and finally gradually moved from self-congratulatory writing to vertical and precise writing based on the premise of readers' demands.
And courage also accompanied me to constantly try new directions, from essays to everything later, to the final book reviews and drama reviews and character analysis, and finally determined my own writing direction.
From the initial groping and stumbling, to teaching others to write, constantly input and output, and constantly telling the concept to more people, at this time I found that I was constantly expanding new directions, and I continued to refresh my writing philosophy and topic selection angle.
What I want to say is that the road of life is bitter, we always feel that it is not too late to do it tomorrow, and it will be better to work harder next time. But when I thought about it this way, time slipped away quietly, and in the end I did nothing.
At this time, you may wish to take a step forward, think about it, do it, you can start immediately, don't wait, as long as you want to do one thing, the difficulty is nothing.