Life Is Too Short To Finish Every Book You Start

Hi there!

It's been a wild week on my end, and as I'm writing this, I've just received the proof copy for my forthcoming book with Bloomsbury. Now, I have two weeks to do a final pass on the manuscript before it's sent to a proofreader.

And as I'm fact-checking through the manuscript, I realised that most of my ideas came from no more than a dozen books.

This is crazy, because that is rookie numbers during a time when most of the internet is bragging about reading 50+ books a year. Yet, sometimes I wonder if reading a lot is actually as useful as people think.

In my experience, my worst reading years were when I over-read and fried the circuit in my brain. I hated that feeling of having too many ideas in my head while my life stayed stagnant.

Whereas the best years of reading usually came from reading a handful of books that completely shifted how I see the world. These are the books that I keep re-reading as their ideas become cornerstones of how I live.

And this leads to one of the bitter truths I had to face recently: not all reading is time well spent. In fact, reading too much can actually stall your progress in life. We become too busy playing with ideas that we've forgotten what reading is supposed to do: inform how we live.

In other words, our sole purpose in our self-education should be searching for those cornerstone books that make up a complete life's philosophy. Everything else is simply entertainment or distraction.

This is why recently, I stopped expecting myself to finish every book I start because my goal isn't to add another trophy on my shelf. In fact, I started celebrating not finishing books because every book I ditch is simply a step closer to those cornerstone books.

Once I started to see reading in this way, it became clear to me that no one can do this search for me. No list of '12 books to read before you die' can substitute for a lifelong search for our personal philosophies.

And of course, I cannot give you this list either, because my small collection of life-changing reads will do nothing for you. You have to embark on this search yourself. Here is how to do just that: