If Your Reading Goal Feels Boring, Try This

A quick heads-up: we've just wrapped up A Mug of Insights' rebrand (go check out the home page!) and launched our SESSIONS workshop series. Every session will distil my last 8 years of reading advice into actionable frameworks and worksheets, helping you transform confusion into clarity! From December, we'll run one monthly workshop and demonstration, and the first session is now live, so go and show it some love!

Session #1: Design Your Ideal TBR/Personal Curriculum

A framework for finding the right books and reading them without overwhelming your life.

A Mug of InsightsRobin Waldun

(1) The Idea: The Power of A Reading Ban

December has been a crazy month so far. As you’re reading this, I’m currently putting together the citations for my forthcoming book with Bloomsbury Academic after 7 months of researching, drafting and editing.

The official due date is the 15^th of December, and for the final dash to the finish line, I’ve put many aspects of my life on hold: YouTube videos, podcast interviews, and even reading the books I love. And yes, December might just be another stagnant month in the reading department because so far, I’ve read exactly 0 books since the end of November.

My normal reaction to this abysmal reading progress is to kick into high gear and devise a crazier reading plan. But this time, I was happy with my lack of progress because I’ve implemented a new protocol into my life that I would like to share in this letter: the reading prohibition month.

I came up with this idea when I was getting ready to wrap up the final typescript for the book. For context, I pulled a lot of references from eBooks and PDFs when I wrote my first draft because I didn’t have access to my normal library. I was in the middle of moving, so the vast majority of my 2000+ books were packed away in the garage. But when my publisher asked me to put together a citation list for the entire book, I saw that I had no choice but to unpack a few boxes and manually hunt down my sources.

When I headed into the garage, I only expected to unpack a dozen books. How big could this citation list be? But as I chased down all the sources in my book, the list ballooned into 30, then 40, then 60 books. And before I knew it, there was a giant book pile in my home office, ready to be entered into the list of citations.

I didn’t expect it at all, because this book pile meant that I’ve read and re-read 60 books in the last 7 months. That’s the tricky thing with tracking how much we’ve grown: when things are going well, we’re mostly blind to our progress. The same thing can be said about our health, our career goals and how much fun we’re having with friends. And the only way to explicate our progress is to take a step back and look at what we’ve done in retrospect.

So, around the start of December, I made a rule with myself: this will be a month of reflection with no input. That means no reading, no taking notes from documentaries and zero clippings from magazine articles. The first week felt strange. I found myself itching to pick up a book, and I broke the rule on day 3 when I started reading Guns, Germs and Steel while waiting to pick someone up from the airport. This is when I realised that this obsession with reading more might be a cover-up for a deeper issue: I’m addicted to progress, and I haven’t given myself time to process everything I’ve read.

So, I put the book aside and spent the following week summarising everything I’ve learned in 2025. At first, it felt too self-congratulatory, but after a few days of this journaling exercise, I realised that most of the items on my 2026 reading list no longer made sense. There were certain areas that I’ve already mastered, and certain interests that no longer resonate with me. There were reading goals that started to seem absurd, while new learning projects started to bud. The point is: without a pause in our self-education journey, we’ll find it hard to see what lies ahead.

For me, 2026 is filled with new learning opportunities. I want to

·      Write better newsletters for you guys

·      Learn everything about podcasting

·      Travel to Okinawa and train with the grand masters of Goju-Ryu karate

·      Deepen my appreciation for poetry

·      Learn copywriting

·      Figure out how to organise a book tour

·      Get my C1 certification in French while picking up Italian

And all these goals (and more) were invisible to me when I was trapped in my normal diet of literary theory, novels and non-fiction books. At times, it’s good to take a step back, prohibit yourself from reading anything for a while and see what comes up. Because as we grow as people, our lifelong learning curriculum must also change. And to help you gain some perspective, try this journal exercise with me:

(2) The Prompts

1: List out all the books/lessons you’ve learned this year and give each item a short description. What did you learn? How did it impact your life on a daily basis, and does it still excite you to pursue these types of books/lessons in the next 6 months?

2: Implement a month-long reading ban and note down what comes up. You’ll carry a resonance journal with you during this month, and you’ll capture all the things that resonate with you. This will give you the space to reorient your direction for learning and self-development. Then, take this list and design a new TBR/learning program for the coming months.