How to make yourself crave hard books (not just want to want to read them)
How creative intellectual projects make my pragmatic brain choose books
You love to read mind-expanding books.
But you rarely do it.
I know the frustration.
Just yesterday, I was sitting on my couch, tuckered out from a writing session, scrolling mindlessly through YouTube shorts.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw War and Peace sitting on the coffee table. At that moment, I desperately wanted myself to pick it up.
And yet, I kept on scrolling.
I just couldn’t tear myself away from the YouTube shorts feed to do it.
In other words, I wanted to want to read it. I knew from past reading sessions that reading it would be enriching and intellectually stimulating. I wanted to live up to my identity as a reader, and yet I just couldn’t choose the book.
How do we fix that?
How do we make the gravitational pull of books on our psyche stronger than that of our phones or other mediums of fast-paced, dopamine-pumping entertainment? How do we increase the rate at which we choose reading as an activity in our spare time?
There are many good solutions to this problem, from deleting social media apps to reading more in line with your curiosity.
But today, I want to focus on one powerful technique that has increased the likelihood I choose reading over other activities.
It’s called creative intellectual projects.
If you implement them, at least occasionally, into your self-education, you’ll be amazed at how often you feel the urge to read.
Moreover, it’ll deepen the reading experience and help you retain more of what you read.
Before I get into the technique and its benefits for your reading life, we need to understand why it’s so hard to choose reading hard books as an activity in the first place.
Our pragmatic nature and how it affects our reading habits
All humans, to some extent, are pragmatic creatures.
We are drawn to activities that will have a high fitness payoff. We feel the urge to take actions that are low-risk, easy, and likely to result in some concrete, desirable outcome.
Pragmatism is a survival strategy rooted in our evolutionary biology and amplified by the modern world’s obsession with efficient use of time.
The practical, future-based evaluation of activities is a tendency most of us cannot avoid. It’s part of us, whether we like it or not. So we might as well use it to our advantage.
Why do I bring this all up?
Because that pragmatic way of thinking is exactly what makes it hard to justify choosing a book.
Compared to other activities, like mowing the lawn or posting something clever on social media, where the result is right there in front of you, and your sense of progress is high, the positive impact of 30 minutes studying philosophy or classic literature is much more difficult to spot.
The invisible effects of book-reading
Let’s compare what happens after a weight-lifting session to what happens after a 45-minute reading session with a challenging book.
During a weight-lifting session, gym-goers get to add weight to the bar. And afterwards, they can admire their muscle pump in the mirror.
The added weight and the pump are signs that their strenuous action (going to the gym and lifting) is impacting their big goals (gaining muscle and strength). The payoff of the effort is clear.
And that’s highly motivating. It makes the gym-goer feel the urge to hit the gym again tomorrow.
Now let’s compare the effects of reading hard books.
In most cases, unless you are being tested or part of a book club, the positive results of a 45-minute session with Plato or Virginia Woolf are much more challenging to discern.
You cannot remove your scalp and inspect your brain for increased gray matter in the region associated with whatever subject you just read about.
You cannot really tell if you are now smarter or progressing on big goals like deeper expertise, improved critical thinking, or better understanding of the world and yourself.
You may feel calmer. Perhaps a bit more thoughtful.
But these benefits are mild and often hard to notice and appreciate, especially if, right after shutting the book, you must immediately return to he hustle of daily life, attend a work meeting, or plunge back into social media.
This problem of “invisible results” is especially common for autodidacts
Self-learners don’t have the opportunity to raise their hand in class to show off what they learned last night during their bout with Hemingway or Freud.
Therefore, in self-education, it can be difficult to stick to a reading habit precisely because we cannot sense the fruits of our labor.
And this inability to see the results generates doubt about whether reading Freud is actually getting us closer to our goals of becoming sharper and better educated.
Even advanced autodidacts and readers sometimes have these flare-ups of doubt.
I know I still wonder:
Am I actually learning the material?
Is it making me smarter?
Is reading this book helping me achieve my intellectual and creative goals?
In sum, the results of reading are often completely hidden from sight.
And therefore, the pragmatic part of our brain doesn’t let us read, despite how misguided it is in its cost/benefit analysis.
It’s misguided because it’s missing data.
We need to give our brains evidence that the hard work of grappling with a text is leading to meaningful results, like learning, understanding, and intellectual transformation.
Then, in theory, our mind will decide to read hard books at a higher rate. The pull of books will be stronger.
So how do we do that?
How do we make the results of our reading clear and obvious?
