How Small Rituals Shape a Life
20 pages at a time
It’s easy to let the days pass without much intention. You wake up, go to work, move through your routines, and before you know it the week is over. Lately I’ve been thinking more about the small rituals that make up those days and how changing them might change the direction of a life.
I’ve been trying to improve my daily rituals as a way to improve myself and create the kind of life and environment I want.
One of the things I’ve been working on is being more intentional with my reading.
There was a time when I would have considered myself an avid reader. Before medical school I read constantly—mostly sci-fi, thrillers, horror, and adventure. Pretty typical stuff for a young guy who just enjoyed getting lost in a good story.
Then medical school happened.
For those years, it became about survival. Most of my time was spent studying and trying to stay afloat with the volume of information we were expected to learn, and reading for enjoyment fell by the wayside.
I still read a little during that time, but not nearly as much, and most of it shifted toward nonfiction, finance, health, and self-improvement.
In the years since, reading has stayed part of my life, but it’s been inconsistent. I’ve definitely read more since becoming an attending, but not as much as before and not with the same enjoyment
Recently I decided I wanted to change that.
One thing I’ve become more aware of is that I don’t want to spend time reading without really getting something out of it. Enjoyment matters, of course, but I’ve found that I actually enjoy things more when I’m actively engaged with them.
When I exercise, I want to improve.
When I work, I want to grow.
And when I read, I want to extract ideas I can think about and apply.
So I decided to create a simple challenge to improve my daily reading.
The goal is straightforward: 20 pages a day.
That number gets thrown around a lot—20 pages a day equals dozens of books a year—but the number itself isn’t really the point. The point is consistency. The number was just an easy starting point.
If I can read 20 pages every day and actively engage with the material, then little by little I’m exposing myself to new ideas and hopefully improving myself in small increments.
To help with the structure, I actually used AI—not to do the reading for me, but to help me organize the plan.
I try to use AI like an assistant. Not to do the meaningful work, but to help remove friction from things I tend to get stuck on.
Planning is one of those things.
I have a tendency to overplan. I’ll refine a system endlessly before ever starting. Sometimes I get stuck perfecting the plan instead of actually doing the thing.
So I let AI help me create a simple framework and then focused on execution.
I gave it a general outline of what I wanted and let it do the rest.
The basic plan looks like this:
Daily
• Read 20 pages
• Highlight and Mark → while reading
• Write a quick summary after
Book Rules
• Quit bad books guilt-free
• Write a short summary when finished
• Apply one idea from the book
Habit Anchor
• Attach reading to an existing routine.
My morning looks like this now.
(My normal daily routine)
I wake up early.
Take a cold shower.
Make a cup of coffee.
(Habit Anchor)
I sit down and read while drinking my coffee.
The past few mornings I’ve done this, it’s actually been surprisingly enjoyable. What used to be a loose habit now feels more like a ritual. Drinking good coffee while reading before anyone else at home wakes up.
And rituals have a way of changing how something feels. Instead of rushing through the activity, you slow down and engage with it.
It’s also had an added benefit, it replaced a ritual I didn’t realize I had. I used to drink my coffee while scrolling on my phone or sitting at my computer. That was something I wanted to remove and now I have.
And that’s really the idea.
Small daily improvements that compound over time.
If there’s anything I’d encourage others to try, it’s this:
Take something you already do—or something you wish you did more consistently—and turn it into a small daily ritual.
Give it structure.
Engage with it intentionally.
Try to extract something meaningful from it.
You might find, like I did, that the activity becomes even more enjoyable once you start doing it with purpose.