The scoreboard of my 2020s books

When I was a teenager I used to read a lot of books. Everything started with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It was an amazing trigger to develop the habit of reading. Fantasy, science fiction, and novel books have always caught my attention. But then, I became an adult and reading Percy Jackson didn’t fulfill my necessity of being productive and learn from every single piece of information I could. So, gradually my love for reading started to fade out being overlayed by the monster called “work hard”.

I’m lucky, I’ve made some good friends that love to read books as well. In fact, my best friend (also my girlfriend) is crazy about reading. They were the triggers that got me to think about why my habit of reading books was gone, despite the working hard routine I have — after all, I kept reading a lot, just not books. Then, a realized that it was a missing part in this equation — the fun. Since I was inspired by productivity and happiness at work I stopped considering fantasy and science fiction books helpful for these two topics of study. I began to read more “professional” books and the habit of reading arrived at the home of daily tasks, not fun.

After this insight, I started to reimagine my routine with books in a funnier way. Not only I found out new books well written that were connected with my inspirational topics and fun necessity, but I also created some systems around my reading routine to make it even more attractive. The scoreboard comes out of this system.

The scoreboard system

I’m passionate about data and any measuring thing. Then I thought, “why not connect it to my reading routine?”. So I did.

Before we go to the system, let me list for you some of the benefits that this scoreboard gives to me:

• It engages me to read more. I’ve made readings more fun connecting them with a measurable system. Plus it gives me a lot of dashboards such as the best readings for gender, month, storytelling, life impact, and so on (yes, I’m a happy kid in sheets land).
• It makes me read in a more mindful state. As a positive psychology and productivity enthusiast, I could not be prouder of myself due to how self-conscious I need to be during my reading in order to promote a fair score to my books.
• It helps me socializing. Like a lot of habits, reading is a thing that you do alone, but it feels awesome to share with others. The more I read more I have to talk with my closest ones. Bringing my scoreboard to the table makes it even more interesting.

There are a lot of apps, platforms, and websites that allow us to rate books in many specific ways. The most common is to rate the book on the website we bought it — I’m sure you’ll find your last reading rated on Amazon. But I’m not a huge fan of the five stars metric that we are used to. I’m curious about how a score is generated and what variables were considered to achieve such rate. Therefore, I elucidated my own scoreboard system to rate my read books. Here it follows:

• I picked up 3 main standards: Life Impact, Storytelling, and Writing. Though they’re all well self-explained, let me detail it to you a little bit. Life Impact refers to much I’ve changed my habits or ways of thinking after reading that book. Storytelling refers to the capacity of the author to keep my attention through the ups and downs and persuasion of the story. And Writing refers to how accessible the author’s vocabulary and writing style are.
• Each standard should be scored by a number between 1 and 4. Again, very intuitive. 1 not good; 2 regular; 3 good; and 4 amazing.
• Each standard has its own weight. Life Impact 10; Storytelling 7; and Writing 8.

In the end, a simple mathematic form in an Excel cell generates the average score of every book I read between these three standards, considering 10 as an anchor.

The scoreboard of my 2020s books

The books I’ve read this year are related to the definition of my own “style of books”, which should be fun, impactful, and mindful again. Here are the results:

1. Atomic Habits, James Clear (8,6)
2. The Productivity Project, Chris Bailey (8,2)
3. Nudge, Cass Sunstein (7,6)
4. Measure What Matters, John E. Doerr (7,0)
5. A Regra é não ter Regras, Reed Hastings (7,0)
6. Comece Pelo Porquê, Simon Sinek (6,4)
7. A Sorte Segue a Coragem, Mario Sergio Cortella (5,7)
8. Work Rules, Laszlo Bock (5,0)
9. Roube Como Um Artista, Austin Kleon (4,4)
10. The Game, Anders De La Motte (4,0)
11. O Poder Da Simplicidade, Susanne Andrade (2,8)

As you could see, not every reading was stunning. But every single one allowed me to redefine my style of book and achieve my goal of felling reading books funny, impactful, and mindful again. Also, I’m pretty sure that not everyone agreed with the rates in this list and I’m looking forward to hearing their opinions and exercise one of the benefits of my scoreboard: socializing.

One highlight to finish

I would like to attach to the first book on my list (Atomic Habits) an important and short fact. Until October I was procrastinating in my project and I had read 3 books so far. In October, thanks to a good friend, I read Atomic Habits. The size of the impact this book made in my life you can see above looking at the total numbers of books on my list.

I hope to write about my scoreboard of 2021s books at the end of the year.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.