“What else?” This is a good question to ask yourself. What else could I do right now? Am I spending my time wisely?
When you stand in line to get free popcorn, Is the popcorn really free? No, not really. You give up the opportunity to do something else with the time you spend in line. That something could be work a job, read a book or shoot heroin etc.
It’s called Opportunity Cost; The loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. And you better keep assessing the opportunity cost for your decisions.
I decided to stop reading Michel Jordan’s biography. It was not bad, it was just not for me. But for some reason I just kept going. I caught myself in my madness during conversion with my friend @simonjk.jpg ,who had also read the book and didn’t think too much about it.
It’s easy to be a completionist. It’s harder to make a proper decisions on when to persist and when to let go. Let’s do the latter.
Some books i parted with before I hit the last page:
📖 Braving the Wilderness
📖 Braiding Sweetgrass
📖 Power vs. Force
📖 A Primates Memoir
What books did you leave unfinished?
Find books that really captured my attention in my reading lists!
Funny. I actually quit MJ’s biography too. Although I finished Power vs Force with little trouble.
I think I’ve become more picky over the years. So I used to care a lot about finishing books. But now I kind of don’t.
But it’s a tough one, because a few books I persisted with became some of my favourites. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are examples. Or The rise of Theodore Roosevelt.
But by and large, I now think information is created hugely unequal, and being severe in filtering out stuff to get to the very best is important. But can definitely be taken too far, and it’s also important to finish the good ones and persist once in a while so you don’t lose the ability.
Difficult balance, at least for me.
I feel the same. It’s a case by case judgment you have to make. I, like you, have had several books that I thought about quitting that came to be very dear to me after the initial hurdle.
ps. I also loved The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.