![[Pasted image 20250322143601.png]] I see the same ten personal development books on the shelves of all the productivity adrenaline junkies. We've all been there. Atomic Habits, Deep Work, Essentialism. Checking boxes and highlighting passages, but somewhere along the line, reading became just another metric to optimise. As Cameron Adams writes > "Each passage I highlighted in yellow marker was a point for the scoreboard, not a memory to be treasured." Reading transformed from a leisure activity into another profit-driven pursuit. The joy drained out, replaced by a hunger to consume only the literary diet deemed "productive." > But reading was never meant to be joyless self-improvement calculus. Somewhere, we lost the spark - that childhood sense of delighting in the journeys books could take us on, free of checklists or "development" plans. Who are we performing for? Do we even like reading? Why are we all reading the same ten books? There’s so much out there. Fantasy worlds, inspiring characters, mind-bending stories. I’m trying to be more selective of what I read. Wider funnel, stricter filter. A lot of the recommendations I get come from [The Marginalian](https://www.themarginalian.org/).