Stop Reading The Whole Book

There's something that's more important to take away than reading the whole thing.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

I just started reading a new “productivity” book. It’s kind of painful. It’s one of those classic non-fiction books that could have been written in 3 pages but for some reason needed to be 300 pages. And yes, I get it, I get it. Making a book 300 pages long makes most readers feel like they really DID something. It makes them feel like they read a whole book.

This lowering of the bar tells me this book is for an audience that doesn’t read books. It wouldn’t be the first time I slogged through a book full of fluff just so I could get to the main point. So, there’s that.

What’s sad is that the overall message is really about how to alleviate perfectionism and give yourself more opportunities to bounce back from failure—which I’m into right now. It’s a worthy message and a worthy practice.

Anyway, the book is called “The 12-Week Year” and you can find it anywhere.

In order to stay sane in these situations, I made a decision a few years ago to allow myself to quit.

I’m now a person who stops reading the book when he “gets the joke.” (I stole this line from Seth Godin.)

I don’t feel bad about putting it down. I’ll flip through the other chapters to find a useful example or any other caveats, but once I get the main point, I’m done. It counts. I accomplished the objective.

Once that happens, it’s time to take out my notebook and start figuring out how I’m going to apply this to my life—probably the most critical step that people don’t take after reading a book.

We love to be inspired. We love to tell others about the new way to do something—but for some reason, we don’t like to figure out how we’ll begin to do it.

The moral of the story? You don’t need to finish the book. You just need to understand the concept and tradeoffs, and then integrate them into your life. Finishing the book isn’t a prerequisite for that.