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Read the World: From Grief to Opportunity

Avil Beckford
4 min readJun 4, 2024
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Introduction: Read the World

On October 3, 2012, I got the news no daughter wants to get. My mother died unexpectedly from a heart attack. My heart shattered into many pieces. To get through the grief, I felt like I had to do something I loved. And my choice was to read the world. At the end of my reading journey, I’d visited 30 countries via the books I read.

A friend who had travelled extensively helped me map out how I would travel the world via the books I read. I wanted to add in a technology piece where I had an interactive map of the route I took reading the books. I couldn’t get it to work, so I abandoned that idea.

Since I was born in Jamaica, now live in Canada, and have lived in the United States, I decided these countries had to be included in my “read the world” tour.

The Read the World Tour

With any big project, you’ll face bumps in the road, so you work them out. Here are some bumps I faced along my journey:

  • I did not conduct enough upfront research, which was a deliberate choice because I knew that if I conducted too much research on must-read books, I would have refused to read some books because they cover a subject that I wasn’t interested in. I intentionally chose not to conduct extensive…

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Avil Beckford
Avil Beckford

Written by Avil Beckford

Founder, The Invisible Mentor & Art of Learning: https://bit.ly/32bK3k2 Interviewer | Book-a-holic | Reimagining what it means to read nonfiction books

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