I was hungry for some ideas on how to create a money keystone habit, so I picked up Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T.Harv Eker. 

But this time, I went straight to the chapters that most resonated with what I needed now, skipping past most of the first half. The necessity of the situation dictated the action, and I was glad to finally break that persistent but sub-optimal reading habit of mine—having to finish a book from start to end.

Because after tearing through record number of 29 books last year, I learned a few important lessons:

• I really enjoy reading. Always been a nerd since young, still one now.
• Input determines output, and without reading on a regular basis, I wouldn’t have fresh inspiration for my writing and my work, and therefore, not be able to perform at my peak.
• I would finish each book from start to end but only a few key ideas stay with me, mostly because of life context and needs of the moment/season. It came to a point where sometimes I knew what I was reading while reading it wasn’t really useful, but half-forced myself to finish anyway, just because “thou shalt finish one’s book”. As if the true value of a book is in finishing it (even if I learned a lot from finishing). I’d say it’s remnants of social conditioning from school and society.
• That there’s also a status game at play. Finishing it from end to end means I can then check the book as “completed”, and I can then proudly declare on social media. A vanity metric, at best.

What if I could truly read like I didn’t care less about these useless past narratives of books and reading? How would that look like?

Cue, Naval Ravikant. In this podcast, he said: 

“I read for understanding. So, with a really good book, I’ll flip through it. I won’t actually read it in consecutive order. I might not even finish it. I’m looking for ideas and things that I don’t understand. When I find something really interesting, I’ll reflect on it, research it, and then when I’m bored of it, I’ll drop it, or I’ll flip to another book.”

Yes, yes, yes! Reading should serve us, not the other way round.

So, taking his cue, I found that I could optimize my applied learning of each book much more if I just took the parts that I needed at the moment, instead of worrying about finishing it end to end. I might not be able to say I “finished” the book in the conventional sense, but book-reading isn’t a competition (though it can feel like that in our era of social media). I coin this demand-driven reading. 

Coincidentally, I started on ebooks recently and it actually helps with making that transition over to demand-driven reading. Ebooks have different affordances from physical books. With ebooks, not finishing feels… easier. Somehow, it always stays at the last opened page. So it feels like you’re still reading it, not dropped. Like you just had not found time to get back on it yet. With physical books, uncompleted books stay closed and on the shelf, out of sight, out of mind, forgotten, and dropped. A tiny deceit of the mind perhaps, but helps with making the transition.   

So, f*ck that vanity metric. I’m giving myself permission to stop playing the old games about book-reading, and doubling down on the efficacy of it for life and work. 

And it never felt more liberating.