The Dangers of Reading Too Much

Quit procrastinating and get it done.

I’m that guy. 28 books checked out and 36 books on hold.

Librarians hate me.

As Toronto braced for COVID19, the first thing I did was not hoard toilet paper or stock up on canned goods— no, I raided the library.

Reading is my guilty, non-guilty pleasure. I can get away with it because everyone thinks it’s healthy.

After all, don’t they say reading is like a gym for your mind?

Everybody wishes they’d read more. They think that their life would change if only they had an hour here and there to pop open a book…

Everybody wants to be healthier. If only they weren’t so tired and stressed from work, they’d hit the gym, do some circuits at home…

It’s all fun and games till you’re consumed entirely.

I was addicted to reading about personal development, startups, entrepreneurship, stories about people who became really, really rich by disrupting something or another, and mindset-pop-philosophy-own-your-life-and-habits type madness.

I’m the textbook definition of a “Wantrepreneur” — I’m a fake, a fraud. I read all there is to know but I don’t apply any of it.

Why? Because I’m scared.

I use reading as an excuse to avoid doing the work.

“Reading is good. It’ll make me smarter, right?” I tell myself while procrastinating for another day.

I convince myself that I don’t know enough about the subject matter — I just need to do more research. Who cares about actually following the simple steps laid out in every book?

No, the fun is in a future that will never come.

All these dreams of mine, I watch them float on by.

I live for the dreaming, not the dream.

I was supposed to write an article about a book I really enjoyed. If you’re wondering, the book was Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage by Laura Huang. It’s a book about owning the biases against you and using them to succeed. Accept and transform your disadvantages into advantages. In work, and in life.

I loved how the book included stories of regular people like you and me. Not everybody’s Elon Musk or the second coming of Dale Carnegie.

As a fellow Asian person, Laura Huang’s own stories, background, and perspectives were familiar too. People can be biased against you based solely on your appearance or your name.

Others will form opinions about you before you even open your mouth. Instead of fighting those biases, we have the ability to recognize their existence and weave them into our own story.

We can turn poison into magic.

So far, so good.

But then something strange happened as I continued reading. I’d never heard some of these stories, anecdotes, and case studies — wait a minute, I have!

Using exponential thinking, being authentic to who you are, harnessing the power of constraints, recognizing inversion as an antidote to self-doubt… These were all great ideas, but I’d seen them before in different shapes and forms.

Was it Ryan Holiday? James Clear? Seneca? His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama? Joseph Campbell? Brian Tracy? Maya Angelou? Paolo Coelho? Angela Duckworth?…

It was a sad, sobering moment.

The Law of Diminishing Returns strikes again. The more books I read, the fewer “wow” moments I have. It’s easy to get stuck in a loop of perpetual reading.

I read all the time, and it’s still enjoyable. But… is this it?

The real magic of reading comes when you apply what you learn. It happens when you connect what you read with your life. When the words dance in your very being and make you think and live in new ways.

That’s the true power of reading — when thinking becomes action.

Here I am, writing to you as a fellow reader and lover of books:

Please don’t fall into an abusive reading relationship. There are over 129,864,880 books in existence. If the average lifespan of a human is 72.38 years, you have just 38,042,928 minutes to live. There are more books out there than minutes in your life. You will never be able to read everything.

Just one more book will never be enough.

I offer my sacrilegious words. Forgive me Thoth, Anansi, Orunmila, Athena and all you other Muses and deities of reading.

Books can’t save you.

Only you can.