Should You Pursue Your Ambitious Reading Goals?

When you should –and When you shouldn’t

The new year’s getting close. Social media is going to be full of buzz. It’s also the time many screenshots from Fable, StoryGraph, GoodReads, etc. start popping up. We’d start seeing tweets, Instagram posts, stories, reels, and YouTube videos discussing reading goals and how they accomplished them. And the last-minute readers will boost those “How to read fast” videos and articles to meet their reading goals.

But why are we even starting this challenge? Why should you have a reading goal? I have seen absurd numbers: 75, 100, 80, 156,200 and many more. 156 Books a year implies reading three books a week. It’s an amazing number. Yet, if you sprint through a book (only if you are doing that) without enjoying it, are you enjoying your habit? It becomes another stress-inducing factor if you force it onto your other daily tasks.

But why do that? Why force yourself into reading? Why are we focussing on this number more than the books we love reading? What are the advantages that we’d get from setting these goals?

I have asked these questions to many bookworms on the internet and realised that there are four key points to note.

Why Reading goals can help

Let’s first get the major advantages of setting the reading goal out of the way. As many of you already know the reasons, this part would be short.

The motivation behind the goal

We never have an incentive to read a good book except for personal satisfaction. (Unless you get paid for reading). Measuring and gamifying this reading process is one of the best advantages of having a reading goal. This helps us stay on track and keep sticking to the habit of reading.

This habit of tracking anything, not only reading, makes the habit more attractive. Why? You shouldn’t be asking that question if you’ve read Atomic Habits. But if you didn’t, I’ll briefly share it here.

When making a new habit, we should ensure it checks four boxes, called by the author the four laws of behaviour change:

• Make it obvious: The habit’s trigger should be as obvious as possible. If you want to run, keep your running shoes where they stand out.
• Make it attractive: The reward for the habit should be attractive.
• Make it simple: The more complex a process is, the more you will avoid it.
• Make it satisfying: If you aren’t satisfied, you aren’t going to repeat it.

Habit tracking checks of three of these four laws. Here are the author’s own words for it:

Habit tracking is powerful because it leverages multiple laws of behaviour change. It simultaneously makes a behaviour obvious, attractive and satisfying.

Now that we know it, it’s obvious why a reading goal is so powerful.

The hidden advantage of announcing your goal: The Community

We almost always imitate the habits of the masses. Once you announce the goal, other than the advantage of accountability and peer pressure, we also meet a community focused on the same goal. This community greatly reduces the difficulty of doing things alone.

Additionally, announcing a goal can help one integrate the habit into one’s identity. Identity is the most important for habit, as it acts like a north star when someone’s drifting away from the goal.

Now that we understand why a reading goal is the easiest and most important way of reaching the goal, why do I and many others hate its current state on social media?

Why the same goals backfire

The reasons for avoiding reading goals on social media are filled with much noise. I’m not going to nit-pick every tiny thing in this noise; rather, I want to choose two major areas of confusion.

The problem with the measure

Any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. –Goodhart’s law

Surprisingly, this law, originally intended for economics, applies to all the goals we set in our daily lives. You measure the number of books to become a reader, not a reading machine. Once we acquire reading as a habit, we must stop focusing on the numbers.

Keep a reasonable goal and start reading. Over-stressing these goals can help you avoid choosing those amazing books that take too much time.

An example is “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy. That’s a 1,000-page book right there. If you set a goal of 52 books a year, I don’t think you’d be willing to choose that book. Similar 500-pager books, like Influence, Nexus, Game of Thrones, Mistborn series, Sapiens, etc., take a long time to read but are worth every second you spend reading them. Keep these things in mind when you set that goal next time.

I keep my reading goals around 30–40 books a year. It’s not too low to make me stray from the habit, but not too high, which forces me to miss the large but interesting books.

The problem with readers and those around them

As with any field, it becomes haywire once it enters social media. We have seen this in many fields, including health advice, finance advice, education, and other domains. Once they enter social media, they join the race to likes, comments and shares.

Books are not an outlier in this. The recent state of books on Instagram and other social media sites has been a race of follower count, likes and comments. This sometimes takes the fun out of reading. As someone who has tried this, I have nothing against the people. It’s the medium. The more we post, the more we anticipate the reach, the followers, the likes, etc.

But that’s where the approaches change. Some don’t care too much about their reach and continue doing what they do, while others change what they read and their persona to get a better reach. The latter leads to bizarre choices that could take a day to discuss.

Unfortunately, there is no right or wrong in this domain. I have chosen the former, where I mainly focus on things I read and stop worrying about the “billboard” that my Instagram profile can be. I use it so that it can be a tracker of my reading journey. You can use an entirely different thing, too! If you find one, please share it with me.

If you want to make reading a habit, then go ahead, set the reading goal, and keep reading and sharing it with us. But if you already have reading as a habit, like me, we can take it easy and read at our comfortable pace. Everyone has their own pace of reading, so there’s no “best” goal.

Choose a number that helps you focus on reading but doesn’t dominate you. The main thing is to read, not reach a number. I place my goal around 30–35 books so that I don’t stray away from the habit of reading.

What about you? What was your goal, and what will it be for the next year? Share it with us in the comments!

I hope you found some value in this article. Thanks for reading till the end. Until next time –happy reading! ✌️