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Despite getting straight A's and B's in school, I disliked reading, to put it mildly, and only read a few books from the entire curriculum, and even then only in abridged form. So back then, I certainly wouldn't have believed I'd
Discover why reading is more about quality and mental effort than quantity, and how to truly benefit from books.
Key Takeaways
- Reading is most valuable when it challenges your thinking and requires mental effort.
- Quantity of books read is less important than the quality and depth of engagement.
- Slow, reflective reading of complex material leads to greater personal growth.
- Finishing every book is not necessary; it’s better to focus on meaningful content.
- Reading should be approached like a workout, balancing difficulty and effort for growth.
What the video covers
- The creator initially disliked reading despite good grades and only read abridged books.
- Started reading seriously in 11th grade with 'War and Peace', gradually increasing volume.
- Realized that reading many books does not guarantee personal growth; quality matters more than quantity.
- Chased reading large numbers of books, even learning speed reading, but found it less effective.
- Complex books require slower, more thoughtful reading to gain true understanding and mental growth.
- Reading should be like a workout: challenging enough to cause mental strain but manageable.
- Mental effort and reflection during reading are more valuable than finishing many books quickly.
- Many readers stagnate because they do not push themselves mentally or reflect deeply on what they read.
- The author now selectively reads books that challenge him and does not feel obligated to finish every book.
- True transformation comes from engaging deeply with fewer, more demanding books rather than skimming many.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Early Reading Experience
- 00:35Why Finishing a Book Isn't Always Necessary
- 01:38School Reading Challenges and Misunderstandings
- 02:28Starting to Read Seriously: War and Peace
- 03:31The Pitfall of Reading Quantity Over Quality
- 04:23Speed Reading and Choosing Easy Books
- 05:19The Value of Slow, Thoughtful Reading
- 06:14Reading as Mental Workout and Growth
- 07:12Avoiding Stagnation and Reading with Purpose
- 08:37Current Reading Approach and Final Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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read over 200 books, read complex philosophical literature, and truly enjoy it. I especially wouldn't have believed how much my understanding of reading would change during that time.
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In this episode, I want to retrace that path and figure out why this happened.
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Why did I learn to read faster, but it turns out I need to read more slowly?
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Why isn't it necessary to finish a book? What is the main value of reading today? And most importantly, why can you read hundreds of books and barely change, or read 10 and transform your life? And at the end, I'll show you my
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database of books I've read, tell you how I use it, and share a link to a template so you can grab it for yourself. So watch until the end and let's get started. I think few people truly enjoy reading in school. At least
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I certainly wasn't one of them. Tell me, is the average schoolchild capable of understanding the full tragedy and psychological depth of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment? I don't think so. But maybe I'm the only one who thinks so. Let's check. In what
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grade do they study Crime and Punishment? Usually in tenth grade. Is a tenth-grader capable of grasping the full psychological and philosophical depth of a work? Rarely. He'll grasp the plot, the general tone. It's all clear. I think it's precisely this
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lack of understanding that underlies the aversion to reading we experience in school. Despite this, I continued to hear everywhere that reading is beneficial and develops. I didn't understand how exactly, and I didn't experience it myself, but I had no
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reason not to believe it. So a clear conviction formed in me that I needed to embrace a love of reading. And somewhere around the second half of eleventh grade, I mustered the motivation and willpower to force myself to start reading. Guess what I
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chose as my first book? War and Peace. Why not? Just four volumes and a couple thousand pages. It's like going to the gym for the first time and immediately starting to deadlift 200 kg. Even though you've only ever seen a barbell
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in a photo. I definitely wouldn't recommend that approach to anyone. But I was lucky for two reasons. First, my motivation was truly off the charts.
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Second, I started very gradually. First, a few pages a day, then 10-20, and gradually increased the volume. After two or three months, I finished the book. And that's when the most important thing happened. I remember very well the feeling when, over the
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course of just a few months, something seemed to change in my head. I didn't fully understand, and perhaps I don't fully understand now, the nature and reasons for these changes. But then I came to one clear conclusion. If one
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book changed me so much that many books can, then I need to read as many as possible. That's where I was wrong. The more books a person reads, the smarter they should become. That was my logic.
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So I was absolutely convinced that every new book would make me smarter. This idea turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes in my approach to reading. While reading itself is certainly not bad, the problem begins when quantity becomes a goal, when
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reading turns into a sport. And what matters isn't what happens to you in the process, but a simple number at the end of the year. That's exactly how it turned out for me. Somewhere around 2018, I set myself the goal of reading
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70 books in a year. And after reading them, you could say I'd satisfied my sporting interest. I liked the very idea of one day being able to say I'd read 50 books, 100, 150. But when quantity becomes the main indicator,
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quality, as a rule, automatically begins to suffer. We become less selective in our approach to books and read everything in sight. We rush to finish one so we can open the next one faster. And we make it a point to
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finish every book we pick up, because how else can we tick it off at the end as finished? During that period, I even started learning speed reading. The logic was ironclad again. If I read faster, I can read more in the same
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amount of time. And more books means more benefit. In the pursuit of quantity, we also often unconsciously choose simple books over complex ones.
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After all, simple ones can be finished much faster. So, most of what I read were books on business, self-development, and other hyped literature. I saw the main benefit for myself in the knowledge and information I gained from these books. Was it truly
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useful? Of course, but was it the most effective way to use the time spent reading? Definitely not. And today I realize that I could have gotten much more benefit if I had approached the reading process differently from the
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start. Among the dozens of books I read back then, there were complex ones that were impossible to devour in two evenings. And when I did try, I realized I was missing most of the meaning. I noticed something interesting. The slower I read such
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books, the more I got out of them. Take Nietzsche. I read his entire five-volume set of his main works. Did I understand everything I read? Of course not. But to understand anything, I sometimes had to reread the same page several times,
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go back a few paragraphs, stop and just think. Yes, this slow pace tormented my ego inside, and I often thought, but I could read several easy books in the time it took to read one difficult one.
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But, you know, it was precisely in these moments of slow and difficult reading that I felt changes that I didn’t experience after reading a dozen easy books in a row. Let me give you another example. Let’s imagine a
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workout. If you use a weight that’s too light, your muscles receive virtually no load. If it’s too heavy, your technique falls apart and you can’t work properly either. Growth begins somewhere at the limit of your capabilities, when the load already
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requires effort, but you can handle it. Reading is much the same. If a book is too easy, your brain barely works. We either simply skim through familiar thoughts, once again receiving confirmation of what we already knew, or we learn something new, but more
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often than not, we could have learned this new information much faster and better from other sources. And if a book is too difficult, we simply don't understand anything. Real growth begins somewhere between these two points, when a thought compels us to stop,
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reread a paragraph, go back, close the book, think, and argue with the author. This is precisely what, in my opinion, is primarily worth reading for. It is the mental strain we experience in the process. It is this strain that
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constitutes the weight we lift while reading. It is not the number of pages, not the number of books, but the amount of genuine mental effort. Let's return to the reading room. There are always people there who have been going for
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years quite consistently, yet their form remains virtually unchanged. Perhaps some are simply maintaining their current level and don't set any other global goals. But, it seems to me, the reason for stagnation for most is much simpler. They don't experience the
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necessary level of exertion, don't push themselves to failure, don't work on technique, don't pay attention to recovery, nutrition, and other details that determine progress. In short, they go to the gym just to check a box. It's the same with books. When we chase
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quantity, we very easily start reading just for the sake of it. And the very fact that we've read 300 or 1,000 books tells us little about how they truly affected us. It was through difficult books that I experienced mental strain.
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I began to see connections I hadn't noticed before, grasp thoughts that hadn't even occurred to me before, concentrate on one thought for a long time, and question my own beliefs. This is especially relevant because today we can spend hours scrolling through short
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vide
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Staying focused on a single topic for hours, focusing on a single thought, and not being stimulating with every second. Gradually, the experience of reading this way began to move me away from simple business and self-development literature toward more
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complex works: philosophy, science, and fiction. And now, when I look at my book database, an interesting picture emerges. This is a database I've been maintaining for many years, almost since the very beginning of my reading experience. Currently, it contains over
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200 books, for each of which I record the author's title, length, language, genre, format, and start and end dates.
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Now, I can even estimate the ratio of book sizes in different categories simply by their number.
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Business, science, and self-development —there are over 100 books, while philosophy only has 28. Although, I'm sure these 28 books took much more time than all 100 plus on the above topics.
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For the same reason, this is much more complex literature, a deeper and more comprehensive intellectual exercise, and, accordingly, higher-quality results in the form of concrete benefits that we receive as a result.
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And since after reading, I rate each book based on how much it influenced me , we can use the same criteria, using my database, to rate books in different categories. For example, I have four books rated "top" in the philosophy
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category out of twenty-eight, while in the first three categories, I have only six top books out of a total of about 120. Overall, 80%of my books are rated "five" or "top" in the philosophy category. Sixty books are rated "top"
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in the fiction category, and 40%in all three remaining categories I listed earlier. This once again speaks to the quality of the literature I've read, at least in my purely subjective assessment. Incidentally, I've uploaded this database to my private Telegram
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channel. You can see everything I've read there, along with my ratings, and, of course, you can use it to create your own database. I'll leave a link to the Telegram channel below in the description. As a result, these days,
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almost any self-help book feels like a 5 kg dumbbell. It barely sparks interest and is finished in a couple of sittings. And afterward, you feel as if you haven't done any complex mental work, but simply wasted time for the
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sake of checking off another box and adding another book to your database. So today, if I pick up a new book and discover during the process that it's too basic and simple, I don't finish it . I question the effectiveness of this
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activity. If the answer is no, I finish the book, skimming it in half an hour, or I analyze it with AI, searching for any new information or insights it might contain.
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But there's no point in poring over it and wasting hours just to check off a box at the end. You might argue that there are many other purposes for reading besides acquiring knowledge and information. I agree, there are many
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purposes. We can read to develop vocabulary, speech, and diction, just to read fiction, like watching a TV series. But the fact is that simple books for our level are less effective at achieving even these goals, while moderately challenging books have a
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richer stylistic range, vocabulary, and lexicon, which ultimately make them more effective for us in achieving these and any other reading goals. I used to think that books were primarily for informational purposes, and that we should read as much as possible to get
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our fill. But today, there is far more information than we can physically process, and it's practically free. You can get an explanation for almost any question in a couple of minutes. The shortage today is attention. This is precisely the main value of books. They
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change the way we think and our ability to concentrate. And that's why this ability is hard to come by. Not through money or time, but through discipline, mental effort, and the effort we experience in the process. So, there's
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no need to read as much as possible, no need to try to read quickly, no need to finish a book just because you opened it. And you definitely shouldn't turn reading into another pretty number to add to your list of accomplishments.
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You need to read in a way that truly impacts your thinking, because it's not books that change us. A book is a trigger, but the thought process we initiate in our heads changes us. I'll tell you about how I read today, how I
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work with AI, how I work with notes, how I choose books, and my entire reading system in general in a separate episode. So, subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out. And as a reminder, you can find my book database
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and template in my private Telegram channel. I've uploaded it there; the link is in the description. Also, visit my main Telegram channel. There are even more life moments, thoughts, and useful information there. The link to it is also below. If after this episode
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you read fewer books but think about them more deeply, then all this was not in vain. Read, preferably a little, thoughtfully, slowly, but profitably.
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And only good books. See you in the next issue. Until then.
Topics:readingbookspersonal growthreading habitsmental effortslow readingphilosophyself-developmentreading qualityreading motivation
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