Every January, mistake same resolution: "I need to read more books this year."
You download habit-tracking set ambitious page. You try to optimise reading speed books like medicine - something to be endured for your own good.
And then you fail. wrong problem
Reading isn't a function of self-improvement. It's a function of engagement, attention, and curiosity. When you force yourself to read as some kind of productivity exercise, you're already setting yourself up for failure. It's like trying to fall asleep by thinking really hard about sleeping.
So let me tell you what you may have already come to suspect:
You don't have a reading problem. You have an attention problem.
People who read a lot don't do it because they're more disciplined. They do it because they're more engaged. They've preserved their ability to sink deep into ideas, to follow threads of thought, to lose themselves in stories. And that ability is one of the first casualties of our modern information environment.
easy turn reading into a joyless exercise of self-optimisation. "I should read more business books." "I need to get through the classics." "I should be reading 52 books a year." These are excellent ways to make sure you hate reading.
It's hard to read when you're trying to make every page productive. It's hard to read when you're constantly checking how many pages you have left. It's hard to read when the book was chosen by obligation rather than genuine interest. It's hard to read when your attention span has been shredded by an endless diet of tweets, reels, and TikToks.
The secret
secret reading faster. It's preserving your curiosity and your ability to pay attention.
We live in unprecedented access to information. library your pocket. pocket a slot machine that's been precision-engineered to keep you scrolling.
Every notification, every infinite scroll, every autoplay video is training your brain to expect constant novelty. Reading a book is the opposite of that. A book asks you to stay with one idea, one voice, one narrative, for hours. That's a fundamentally different kind of engagement than what your phone offers.
The people who read the most aren't necessarily the most disciplined. They're often just the most protective of their attention. They've made conscious choices about what gets access to their mind.
They've noticed that after an hour on social media, they feel scattered and restless. After an hour with a good book, they feel enriched and calm. And they've arranged their lives accordingly.
Think of your attention like a muscle. If you're constantly consuming bite-sized content, you'll find it harder and harder to sink into longer forms of reading.
Choose how you want to consume, and what content you think will nourish you. But understand that some easy things, over time impede your ability to do hard things.
Every hour you spend mindlessly scrolling isn't a direct trade for an hour of attention you could've spent reading. It actually detracts from your future ability to spend an hour reading.
Every hit of quick-fix entertainment makes it a little harder to find satisfaction in slower, more demanding forms of engagement.
Want to read more? No need to optimise it. No need to gamify it. No need to turn it into another productivity metric. You can, if you like, but if it fails you'll know why.
Instead, protect your curiosity. Guard your attention like the precious resource it is. Read what genuinely interests you, not what seems good to others. Abandon books that don't grab you. Return to books that you love.
Reading isn't a challenge to conquer. It's not a habit to hack. It's a relationship with ideas, with stories, with the written word. And like any relationship, it thrives on genuine interest and dies of forced obligation.
The best reading metrics are joy, memories, and accumulated knowledge. Everything else is just counting pages.
