You look left. You look right. It's all the same thing.
People with their heads down, staring at screens.
It doesn't matter where you are. Subway, office, lecture hall—it's all the same.
It seems like no one is able to go five minutes without getting that hit of dopamine from their phones anymore.
It saddens me to hear some of my friends say "I can't bring myself to read anymore" when I ask them if they've read any good books lately—as they continue to send me dozens of Reels every day.
If you're one of those people that loved to read as a kid, but feel like you can't get back into it, let me tell you something:
It's not too late.
It has never been this easy to be exceptional. All you have to do is read.
Read what you love
Read what you love until you love to read.
—Naval Ravikant
Getting kids to love reading is one of the biggest failures of schools.
Rather than letting kids read what they want, schools assign students books from a rigid curriculum.
They assign specific reading assignments, like "read chapters 1-2 for next class" and explicitly tell students to not read ahead. They force students to mechanically pull meaning from the passages they read: symbols, metaphors, themes. And they quiz students on arbitrary facts from the assigned reading that they'll never end up using again in their life.
The school system is designed to get kids to hate reading.
It's nearly impossible to get through the school system and not hate reading by the end of it.
Keyword: nearly.
For the minority of people who love to read, they all have one thing in common:
They read what they love.
It's so uncommon because it's the exact opposite of what the school system teaches you.
Instead of looking for books that you're interested in, you're conditioned to having your language arts teacher assign you books.
You naturally lose the desire to look for books on your own accord when everything is force fed to you.
But that's exactly what you need to push back against if you want to fall in love with reading.
Don't expect someone else to tell you what to read. Go figure that out yourself!
There's a good chance that you already know what you want to read.
Maybe you remember reading a lot of sci-fi books as a kid. Or maybe you read a lot of medieval fantasy novels. Or perhaps you became engrossed with those teenage vampire romance books.
It doesn't matter.
There's nothing that's off the table here. And I know that's a hard pill to swallow.
You're probably thinking of ten different genres that your language arts teacher would disapprove of, but you have to ignore that instinct.
If you love to read it, you will read it. And then you'll read more, and more, and more. Until you get bored of it and decide to try something new. You'll find an interest elsewhere, and you'll fall in love with that. The cycle will repeat, and before you know it, you won't have just read what you love.
You'll have fallen in love with reading itself.
Read how you want
On top of forcing you to read books you weren't interested in, school taught you to read books in a very specific way.
You must start by reading the beginning of each book. Read chapters X-Y tonight. No skipping ahead. We're reading one book at a time. No bouncing back and forth between multiple books.
How constraining.
But you're out of school now. You're in the real world.
You're allowed to read three books at a time, chipping away bit by bit at each one. You're allowed to start a book by flipping to a random page in the middle and going from there. You're allowed to jump ahead a few chapters if it's getting boring.
Sounds like you're breaking all of the rules, right?
Well, it should feel that way. School had a dozen years to drill these rules into your head. To the point that breaking them—even though you're out of school now—still makes you feel uneasy. It makes you feel like you're going to get in trouble.
Well, that's not going to happen.
There's no language arts teacher who's going to call you out in front of the class for reading ahead, for skipping through the book, or for reading other books at the same time.
It sounds silly—getting "in trouble" even though you've since long graduated, but breaking those learned behaviors is much harder than you might expect.
Just try it, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Instead of only having one book in your reading queue, try having several. Instead of reading a book from cover to cover, just jump around based on how you feel. If it's interesting, read normally. If it's boring, then skip ahead.
At first, you'll feel like you're violating all the reading rules you've ever known.
But push through, and you'll find yourself with a superpower that almost no one else has.