If you know how to read, odds are you feel like you’re not reading enough.
Like with exercise, most of us recognise the wonderful impact of reading more. We just can’t get ourselves to do it.
Life’s distractions don’t help our cause. But there’s something we do that directly contributes to our inability to read more:
We’re Terrible at Choosing What to Read
I have a Singapore library subscription that allows me to borrow 16 books at a time. And while I don’t read most of it—you’d better believe I max out my borrowing credit.
Every time I borrow a new set of 8-10 books, the one book I end up reading is the one I almost didn’t borrow. And the book I was most excited about borrowing goes back unopened in 6 weeks.
As a species, we are bad at affective forecasting, that is, atpredicting how we will feel in the future. One of the worst offenders is our projection bias, which is our tendency to project our current feelings about something to our predicted future feelings about it.
This affects our reading choices, biasing us to pick “harder” books that we should read.
When we choose books, we are energized, motivated to read, and in high spirits. So, we take home “harder books” to read.
It’s worse if we pick up a book we should read. Piqued at the prospect of being someone who reads that book, we project our excitement we project on our future selves.
We mistakenly think we’ll be as excited at reading the book as we are at imagining ourselves reading it.
Here’s the Truth About Reading More
To read more, the moments you need to pick up a book are: at the bus stop after work, as you’re going to bed and on the toilet in the morning.
Put simply, the moments when we need to read are banal, not exciting, and tired, not energetic.
So, the only way to consistently read more is to read something that you’d want to pick up in the tired, slow moments as well as the more inspired ones.
For that you’ll have to give up on what you think you should read and read what you like.
How?
- Take home what you started in the bookstore rather than what you picked up to read “tomorrow”.
- Pay attention to what you find yourself reading despite thinking it’s too irrelevant, too embarrassing, or too short. And then read more of it.
Should You Really Read the Silly Stuff You Like?
The worry with reading what you like is that it will not be as educational, as aspirational, or as transformational as you want.
There are two reasons why this isn’t an issue.
- Graduate to Reading Better
Even if what your reading isn’t ideal—and it’s hard to be objective about this—reading what you like will allow you to graduate to bigger and better reads:
But reading what you like isn’t just a gateway drug to reading, there’s something deeply valuable in knowing what you like.
2. Cultivate Fulfilment
By reading what you like, you can cultivate a pursuit that becomes more fulfilling the more you read:
As you read what you like, you find out what you really like. At the same time, you become more attuned to the pleasures of reading what you like. Leading to a practice that becomes ever more fulfilling—and resonates ever more deeply with your being.
The maestro is more deeply in love with the sound of the piano and plays it better. And so it is with the reader.
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