While we’re not quite crushing 100 books a year, we are avid readers over here behind the Blue Door.

It’s one of the best habits you can develop. It helps us stay informed while taking much needed time off from the screens. Reading also fuels our imaginations, helps us maintain curiosity, and sets us up to be life long learners.

This sounds like an advertisement for reading. Well, it is…kind of. We want to encourage people to adopt reading as a daily habit, especially now.

What we want to highlight today is that you don’t need to continuously dive into new material. For us, rereading our favorite books has proven to be just as beneficial, if not more.

Here’s why we constantly reread our favorites and some tips on how to do it:

Forget Me Not.

Like it or not, most of us forget the majority of what we read. It differs across the board, but if you take a look at the ever-popular forgetting curve, you can get an idea of how much we lose over time.

Even when reading for pleasure, we are still learning lessons in ever book. Mastering something takes repetition. So, if you really want to get something from your reading, you should continuously re-read your favorites.

Keep your favorites close.

As you learn more about yourself, you can identify what behaviors, characteristics, and skills you want to work on. Find books that align with these and stash them in places you’ll see regularly.

We’ve been practicing different breathing techniques for a few months now and if you look around our office you’ll find The Oxygen Advantage in plain sight.

We also continuously encourage our readers to create side business opportunities using their creativity and passion. Hence why you’ll find at least three copies of Side Hustle laying around as well.

Keeping these well-read favorites around helps remind us of our values, goals, and things we want to improve.

Mark them up!

How do you even know a book is your favorite if it’s not heavily marked up? Admittedly there are some books we refuse to mark up (including one pristine version of The Hobbit), but for the most part, you’ll find underlines, notes, highlights, and dog eared corners.

Marking up your books turns them into something that’s yours. When you return to them you get to revisit the most meaningful lessons more quickly.

Making notes or underlines is also known as active reading and it is one of the best ways to remember all the information that you want to.