Very rarely do I make it to the last page of a book these days, I used to chase the dopamine of closing a book and thinking ‘I finished it’ Until I realised that most of the time I was slogging my way through books that I didn’t enjoy and just kept relearning the same lesson over and over again. Not all books are great, some books have a core message that you understand within the first two chapters, some books make you read till the end to get the point but lessons are only learnt if they are put into practise. There’s a difference between knowing something and embodying it. It’s easy to know that the obstacle is the way. It ’s easy to know we shouldn’t care so much about what others think, or that we shouldn’t take things so personally, or that life is too short to worry about most of the things we stress over day to day. You know that. I know that. But how often are we actually living that way? I’m trying my best to embody it, not just know it. But I’m learning that as humans, we’ll never embody these things 100% of the time. Still, we can aim to embody them most of the time, and ground ourselves quicker when irrational thinking inevitably shows up. Sometimes, I used reading as a form of procrastination. I’d hide inside the pages and tell myself I was learning. But learning doesn’t happen just from reading the words. It happens when you apply them, when they meet your own life with context. Go out into the world and find an experience that links to the words you read. Once you do that, you might realise… you didn’t need to finish the book to understand the message. Of course, this isn’t true for all books. Some authors genuinely hold your attention until the final line, and that’s a skill. But many self-development books? They’re built around one core idea, stretched across chapters. If the lesson is learnt by chapter 3 and you feel like your just learning the same thing over and over again, Maybe It’s time to apply it to your own life, And then move onto the next. These days, I dip in and out of books. And I revisit the ones that hit me differently depending on the season of life I’m in. That, to me, feels like a deeper form of learning than simply finishing for the sake of it.