Read Like You Don’t Give a Fuck

Nobody cares except you; unlock your potential by caring less

I’ve struggled with attention from my earliest memories. My mind would wander disconnecting me from what was being said.

When I started school and learned to read, I soon found that long passages were often too much for my limited attention. I’d finish a paragraph and wonder what had I just read. I drew a blank.

My reading comprehension of individual sentences was very good. But, long passages became boring and I’d find myself in daydreams. Books were a challenge.

By the time I finished high school I had given up the idea of reading for fun; attempting to finish assigned reading was enough stress and struggle for me to handle. Nothing fun about reading.

I’d read a page and then re-read it because my mind had drifted somewhere along the way.

Lost years and an epiphany

In the two decades that followed, I read only three or four books beyond what college courses required of me; one-and-a-half self-help books during college, and a few more afterward during 7 years of very boring 45-minute train commutes.

Two were long but exciting Jason Bourne yarns, and one was a very short self-help book called “The One Minute Manager”. Short. Great for me.

Each book left me satisfied that I had done something worthwhile for myself, grown in some way; triumphant that I had slogged through a dreaded ordeal. The process was not enjoyable but reaching the finish always was. I felt enriched each time on reaching and completing that last page.

I’m a slow reader so the satisfying finish was always slow to reach. I knew jumping into a book would be frustrating, so I avoided the hop.

Another decade passed without reading a single book. I watched movies and documentaries, but they never hit the same. They were easy and I never felt I’d gained anything life-changing or lasting. I had passed some time; that time was forever gone. Sometimes watching and listening is like taking a nap with your eyes open.

The stresses and struggles of reading were entirely from me holding myself to a standard of keeping track of what I had just read; as if I would be tested. I had no such standard when enjoying a movie or a documentary.

What if I could read like I watch a movie?

Remove the pressure

I decided to read like I didn’t care if I remembered what was on the pages. Could I just read without caring?

It sounds absurd, but hear me out.

I was ready to experiment, just to see what would happen. No pressure. Just progress toward the last page.

Picked up an old hardcover book at the library, some kind of 1950s science fiction by a long-dead author I’d heard mentioned in a blog about good books. I fought the urge to re-read paragraphs and just marched my eyes forward one sentence at a time.

One page at a time with no page re-reading whether I zoned out or not. Nobody was going to test me.

This was strange at first. The urge to stop and revisit a paragraph, because my mind had wandered, was strong. Habits are hard to break, even burdensome habits. I felt like an idiot flipping pages with very little retention.

But it was liberating to turn the pages without giving a fuck whether my mind had drifted and left me with no recollection of the page.

I read on. I was in it to finish, not to understand it.

By the time I finished that book, I’d grown comfortable with caring less about what I had read and caring more about reading the next word and getting through the next page. Wax on, wax off. It changed me.

Along the way, I discovered, that as I relaxed I retained the content without trying. I remembered.

That book was just the start for me; I checked out several more books by that author and went through the same process. Then purchased an e-reader and started reading, and enjoying, esoteric old books from the free guttenberg.org website.

I had a desire to catch up to where I felt I should have been by now. I wanted to become a “well-read” person. Something unthinkable to me before this experiment.

Results of caring less

I’m still a slow reader but a world of knowledge has opened to me and now I enjoy the process, not just the results. My home is full of books, fiction, self-help, and anything interesting. I’m always in a book and planning the next one. Books have become a welcome part of my life instead of a dismissed unwelcome burden and source of occasional deflected embarrassment.

My grown children are avid readers too. I firmly believe children learn by example more than by what they are told. I feel good about whatever my example contributed to their joyful carefree reading habit. They are a regular source of insight into what my next book should be, and sometimes, I’m a welcome source for them.

Removing the pressure to understand each page made it possible to read more and unlock my true potential for understanding like never before.

Caring less has enabled me to feed my mind the rich insights of diverse authors; a richness lost to me before. Today I’m in a wonderful book-rich environment through which I connect with important people in my life more deeply than I could have before.

What could have been?

I’ve read books that have changed me deeply; improved me as a human being. Read them as a grown man. I regret not having consumed their knowledge as a young one.

I’m pretty well educated; just brute-forced my way through liberal arts and sciences — the self-imposed pressure to retain what I read served me well on standardized tests of word problems and comprehension checks. These wordy challenges were never more than a page or two. Test success reinforced this unscalable brute-force practice.

What if educators had taught me, perhaps everyone, at an early age to read a book without planning to answer questions about it?

What if sometimes the exercise was to read every word and then just move on to another book? No book report. No graded assessment. Would I have discovered that I would have remembered anyways? Perhaps I would have.

In any case, I’m grateful to have discovered this insight early enough to shape important parts of my life and constructively impact people I care deeply about. And now I’m sharing this insight with you.

I’m also grateful to have grown up in a home with a mother that read to me and regularly read books to herself. This left a positive constructive impression on me; reading books was normalized in our home.

Tomorrow

Perhaps you know a young person that struggles to read. Perhaps they can unlock their potential by caring less as they turn each page. Perhaps they will discover the wonderful surprise that during that stress-free process, they learned without trying.

Perhaps a few gray-haired people can discover this too.