How I stumbled upon the hobby of reading?

I consider Reading to be one of the most impactful habits that I have cultivated. It has shaped my thoughts, attitude, and behavior from the day I picked up the first book. It has exposed me to ideas, and knowledge that I wouldn't have been able to learn otherwise.

I developed this hobby out of sheer necessity in life, and I am glad I stuck to it even when the necessity was no longer urgent.

Having done my schooling in the vernacular language- Marathi, I was not required to be good at communicating in English, nor had any motivation to get better at it. During my first year of undergrad, I was asked to give a two-minute extempore in a communications skills class. As far as I remember, this was one of the most dreadful things anybody had ever asked me to do. I was struggling to pronounce even the most basic of words.

I think that incident, with a few similar others, pushed me to pick up a book and figure out how to be a better communicator. After a short research on google, I decided to buy these two books - “How to win friends and influence people” and “Word Power Made Easy”; the titles of the books are self-explanatory, in a sense that what I wanted to learn from them.

I am unsure how much learning I could derive from these books, but they helped me tackle my long-held fear of communication, especially in English.

I started buying every well-reviewed self-help book, thinking they would be my savior and make me a better person. And for the most part, I did learn quite a few things from these books, but I think I was devouring so many books out of fear and not just for the benign reason of learning.

The fear stifled a lot of learning I could have extracted from these books, like many other things I have pursued in life, out of fear of being left out and continuing to do so till this day. For whatever reason, I am glad I just picked that first book, for it changed me for the better.

Through reading, I have found that I had the curiosity to learn and explore different things, the curiosity that was long there but never knew how to present itself. Curiosity opens different paths you never knew in life, and I am glad it could open a few for myself; I hope it does the same for you.