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Finishing Every Book is a Waste of Time - 6 Hacks to Read More, Better, Faster - Future IQ

28,921 views Wait, is this logic right? • May 30, 2025
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Slog Reference: Improve your Reading

Description

Think you're too busy to read? So is Bill Gates, yet he manages to finish 50 books a year. So what’s really stopping you? In this episode of Future IQ, we unpack the surprising truth you’re not bad at reading — you’ve just been taught to do it wrong.
We challenge everything you think you know about books. Why forcing yourself to finish a boring book is a waste of time. Why juggling multiple books isn’t chaotic — it’s smart. Why audiobooks and AI reading companions might be the key to finally building a reading habit that sticks.
This episode is for everyone — the bookworms, the self-help hoarders, the Kindle collectors, and especially the “I used to love reading but now I just scroll” crowd. Reading doesn’t have to feel like homework. It can be fun, effortless, and even addictive if you approach it the right way.
Tune in and rediscover what books can do for your brain, your creativity, and your ability to think clearly in a world overflowing with noise. You might just fall in love with reading all over again.

Book Recommendations:
https://tapthe.link/TheNotebook
https://tapthe.link/TheLordOfTheRings
https://tapthe.link/TheFamousFive
https://tapthe.link/SherlockHolmes

00:00 – Intro
01:08 – #1: Marie Kondo Your Books
02:30 – #2: Skip Chapters
03:31 – #3: Read Many at Once
04:29 – #4: Use ChatGPT
06:24 – #5: Listen, Don’t Read
07:50 – #6: Read-It-Later Apps
09:00 – Bonus: Buy, Don’t Read
11:14 – How to Start Reading
12:16 – Kids Reading Trash
12:52 – Retain What You Read

More Videos:
Finishing Every Book Is a Waste of Time - 6 Hacks to Read More, Better, Faster: https://youtu.be/yViCi9qhzC4
Why Doing Nothing Makes You More Creative: https://youtu.be/WaAAto_010k
Sunk Cost Fallacy, Loss Aversion and Endowment Effect Explained with Examples: https://youtu.be/pgH79XsGlo4
A Better Way To Learn and Remember Things - Spaced Repetition: https://youtu.be/JAPwrsm5OeA


Sources:
https://hackernoon.com/everything-i-knew-about-reading-was-wrong-bde7e57fbfdc/: Naval Ravikant on "Everything I Knew About Reading Was Wrong"
(Also available in audio)
https://fortelabs.com/blog/the-secret-power-of-read-it-later-apps/: Why it is important to use read-it-later apps, like Readwise, Pocket, Instapaper
https://www.driverlesscrocodile.com/books-and-recommendations/tyler-cowen-on-reading-fast-reading-well-and-reading-widely/: Tyler Cowen on how to read
The Anti-Library: https://fs.blog/the-antilibrary/
Apps:
Readwise: https://readwise.io/
Pocket: https://getpocket.com/en/
Instapaper: https://www.instapaper.com/


Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

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Improve your Reading

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Transcript

The smartest people in the world read a lot. Anywhere in the world, this is one thing common to them. Agreed. But I can hear you say, "Oh, I don't have any time to read." Well, are you more busy than Bill Gates? Because he reads 50 books a year. Okay. So, today we are going to talk about how to improve your reading. Speed reading. No, speed reading is [ __ ] Then what? Well, let's first understand the fact that people who don't read are actually reading quite a lot of [ __ ] on WhatsApp. And we recently discussed that is spoiling your career and making you a bad person, right? But people who don't read, okay,
you are probably falling into one of these traps. You waste too much time consuming the wrong content like news and social media or you waste too much time reading the wrong books or you are doing it in the wrong format or you are doing it at the wrong time which is why you don't like to read or you think of reading as homework and nobody likes homework right so what we are going to do is a listical okay six tricks to improve your reading okay six tricks nice let's start with trick number one please. Marie Kondo your books. Okay. If you're reading a book and it doesn't spark joy, quit it. I give you permission to quit a book that is
boring. What sort of crossover universe is this? Future IQ and Marie Condo. But I like it and the advice is absolutely solid. If you don't like reading a book, quit it. There are a lot of people who feel very guilty about leaving a book. Once they have started it, they feel like they have to complete it. Right? It's like their parents looking at them saying you're a bad boy. if you quit the book. But that is not right. There are lots of books in the world. There are good books that you will enjoy reading.
There is the book just for you. So there is no reason to stick with the dud. That is the sun cost fallacy and the psychology of that we have discussed in an episode. Yeah. Yeah. But Naven there are some books that take a little time to you know develop into a good book. So you have to give them that lead time. What do you do? Well if you're reading fiction maybe that makes sense. you just give yourself a little more time but still you don't have to complete the whole book right maybe some number of pages is fine for non-fiction there is a trick just skip forward a few chapters and see if it gets more interesting
right go back and forth it is okay to jump all the way to the last chapter see if that made sense then come back to the middle uh this is a trick recommended by a lot of good readers yeah so trick number two there is no need to read your books in a sequential order of chapters You can jump chapters especially with non-fiction books. With fiction books that becomes a little difficult but yeah with non-fiction books no need to read them sequentially really no need to read them sequentially. Yeah. One of the problems with books is that for them to be commercially successful they have to be a certain length. So there's like a lot of filler material there. What you
can do is look at the table of contents. See which part sounds most interesting. Jump directly there. Start reading. If it doesn't kind of make sense, you can go back to previous chapters. Sometimes you can just jump to the last chapter to get the conclusions and then use that to decide whether you need to go read some other chapters. Yeah. Works for non-fiction books, not for fiction books. Well, for fiction, it might just make it like a thriller, right? So, know suddenly you have like a Christopher Nolan fiction book instead of something else. Yeah. Yeah. You know already what happened, but now the question is how did that happen? Okay. Moving on to trick number three. Read multiple books
at the same time. Right? You can have different books like one heavy book, one light book, one fiction book all going on at the same time. And you can match the reading to your mood. Some days you're in the mood for that heavy stuff. Some days you just want something light. And this way you can make progress on all of them at the same time. Plus what will be happening is that this is like spaced repetition of the ideas in the books. Oh, but won't that cause multiple books to mix in my head and create jumbled story lines? I mean in my experience not really because if the books are sufficiently different from each other, our brain quickly adjusts.
Okay. Also, if you are doing these multiple things at the same time, it actually helps with your creativity because your brain has multiple different things going on at the same time. That's and multiple connections happening will bring up a new thing out of those connections. Correct. Yeah. Very interesting. That brings up trick number four. Okay. Which is use chat GPT or another LLM, right? As a book reading companion. How? Well, if it's a classic, an old book, right? You can just directly start asking questions to ch.
So while you are reading you can ask chipt questions and it'll give excellent answers. If you are reading something and you have forgotten oh well who is Peter? Ask charg and charg will answer. If you are reading multiple books and you are at a certain point and you kind of forgotten the context, ask charge GPT and chip will produce a one paragraph context for you and you are ready to go. Right? That's a very interesting trick and a very useful one. If it is a new book that Chad GPT doesn't know anything about, well, I mean, if you're reading on Kindle, you can just copy paste chunks into Chad GPT for further elaboration. And if you're reading a
paperback, but if you have actually bought the book, then ethically it is completely allowed to download a PDF from Liben, give it to Chad GPT, and then discuss with Chad GPT. The ethics of this are great. I will leave all of you to decide what you want to do with it. We've just mentioned it. We are not essentially recommending it. But here is my question. Doesn't this take away the nuance of whatever whatever you're reading? Will will the LLM Chad GPT be able to recognize the nuance of it?
Absolutely. It recognizes the nuance. But first of all, I am not saying that you don't read the book and only read Chad GPT summary. Okay. Read the book and use charge GPT for further questions for elaborations things you didn't understand or you know sometimes you read a paragraph and it triggers some other thought in your head go ahead ask charg it will deepen your understanding of the book so the nuances will get enhanced yeah absolutely that's trick number four use GPT as a reading companion what is trick number five for non-readers you don't have to read the book yourself. You can have someone else read the book to you. Navin, I don't have a servant or a person who can read
the book for me like a reading service. Absolutely you do. Audible.com, Storytell, all those apps which have audio books. I have had tremendous success with getting non-readers onto books because they just love audible. You can listen to it while exercising, while commuting, while cooking and all of that. And listening is a very different skill from reading. Right? So they love books suddenly. Another thing you can do is even if it is not on audible text to speech exists. There's so many apps which can do that for you now. Right? Use that. Yeah. Audible didn't pay us to say this by the way.
Although we are happy to take their money. Audible if you're listening sponsor us. We'll take it very gladly. We are both have it readers. Which brings me to the point that I listen to a lot of audio books and consider reading. But a lot of people think listening to audiobooks is cheating. It's not reading. That's your third standard English teacher saying because she wanted to teach you to read. That was her job. But now you're an adult. You don't have to worry about that teacher anymore. Right? Do what works for you. All right. Fine. So go listen to audio books on Audible, Storytell, Spotify, LibriVox, whatever it is that is your choice. That's trick number
five. If you're a non-reader that is what is trick number six trick number six is read it later apps separate the acquisition from the consumption. Okay. See, there are two kinds of moods we are in, right? Where we are in a quick quick mood that you know you're on Twitter, you're reading this, then this, then this, then this short attention span, right? At that time, if you encounter a long article or a book recommendation, you are in no mood to read. Okay? But then it is evening, you're sitting at home having a soda or it's uh the weekend, right? At that time you have a few hours you are in a mood to read something longer, something deeper,
right? So what you want to do is that these apps allow you to separate the quick quick reading from the long reading. Right? So when you're in the long reading mood, you go to your read it later app, open the first thing there or you choose the thing that seems to match your mood right now and that will allow you to read much more and in a better mood. See the problem is I have a read it later app and I have a read it never behavior as in I put things in read it later and read it never. That brings us to trick number seven. Seven bonus trick. Do not feel guilty about not reading books. Okay. It is
completely fine to buy a lot of books and not read most of them. Right? In terms of money spent to ROI, books are one of the best thing you can spend your money on. Even if you read only onetenth of the books you buy, think like a VC. Oh, like buy 100 books, read two of them and leave the 98 unread. Absolutely. It'll still be very good ROI. Okay. I love this. This is very sundoku of Naven. Sundoku by the way is a Japanese word describing the behavior of buying lots of books but never actually reading them. So there is piles and piles of books that you may not have read ever.
So Taleb and Naruda talk about the concept of anti- library right? So you have a collection of books that you haven't read, you want to read, aspirational, right? So anytime the mood strikes you, there is something great you can read and so you don't have to go and doom scroll. Which actually ties back to trick number six where he said separate the consumption from the acquisition. Keep acquiring at some point you will also consume them. I love this. But I have so many more questions. And the first of them is a question that a lot of people will also have. Reading takes a lot of time initially. Okay.
When you're starting to read or you're not very used to reading, it takes more time. But the more you do it, the faster it gets. So, you know, it's like a muscle. With exercise, the muscle gets stronger. And if you stop doing that exercise, the muscle grows weaker. So, you'll need to do exercise again from the beginning to strengthen that muscle. So initially it will be slower but you have to keep reading, keep at it, keep at it. But some people cannot develop a reading habit despite keeping at it. And I know some people who are like this, they just can't. Well, part of the problem is because they're falling into the traps we talked about in this
episode, use the tricks in this episode that might work, but the most important one might be the audio one. A lot of people who can't read are completely happy with listening. So yeah, you should go about that. Hm. So is there like a good type of book or series of books that can sort of be the beginning exercise of developing that reading muscle? Yeah, I mean see first start with short breezy books, simple language, nothing too heavy. Don't make it too aspirational, right? Pretty much as with any habit initially you want to focus on just being able to do it easily and conveniently, right? Don't bite off more than you can chew, right? There is
no such thing as bad reading. All reading is good. So just pick whatever is going to be most easy for you. Right? If you like romance novels, do that. If you like detective stories, do that. Read children's books. Even those are fine. Right? If you have loved a movie, pick up the book that the movie was based on. And you will find that it is much easier for you to read. Yeah. Because then you get to compare what's in the book and what's in the movie. And that keeps your interest going because you're always curious to see whether the movie matches up with the book and whether the book matches up with the movie. In fact, that is how we went from
being kids reading books to now adult reading books. But the problem with kids these days as I see it is that they read a lot of trash. Like absolute trash. See, one of the most important things about reading, yeah, is that any reading is good compared to a lot of other things you could be doing. Right. So one thing I tell parents all the time is if your kids are reading let them read. Doesn't matter what it is. Any amount of trash is fine. Over time they will slowly migrate to better stuff. Right?
The reading muscle needs to be developed. That is more important than the content. Content will happen later. Fine. And that makes absolute sense to me. But then the last problem I have is that I tend to forget a lot of things that I have read. Yeah, I have two answers to that. Okay, one is that it is not necessary that you remember everything you read. Okay, even if you forgotten everything, if you engage with the book while reading, it will have changed some things in your brain. It will have changed some way you view things and that is enough. That is the point of reading. If you even don't remember the details, right? Okay. The
other thing is that if you want to become much better at reading or more accurately getting much more out of your reading then a great thing to do is don't just consume you also create along with your reading. So you will remember better if you teach whatever you have learned to someone else. Right? Another thing you could do is you could use spaced repetition to remember the things you have learned. take notes, put them in an Anki or something like that. Anki being an app that we've also previously talked about on the channel on another episode where you basically create cards, flash cards, and then you revise those flash cards in a space repetition manner. Space repetition being an
episode we've done where we've spoken about the Anki flashcards. And finally, a great way to retain all your reading and really understand it properly is to create a YouTube channel where you explain that to people. Yeah. I wonder uh who else has done that. Yes. And if you're wondering the same, do let us know if anybody else has done that.