About a year ago during lunch, my colleague Ayisha said, “Whenever I want to learn something, I search online and find so many books that I get overwhelmed and never start.”
To escape this trap of plenty, become aware of the following fallacies:
Fallacy 1: We need to find the ‘perfect book.’
No, you don’t — unless this is the last book you will ever read. Instead, find something good enough and start. Even if the book is not great, it will make you better informed to pick your next book.
Also, if you don’t like the book, stop reading it — there is no law that requires you to finish it.
Fallacy 2: Read the most ‘advanced book’ and quickly become a guru.
Let me share an experience here. One of the best books I have read on meditation is ‘Breath by Breath’ by Larry Rosenberg. But if you haven’t read about and experienced breath meditation, the book will make little sense.
Learning is like going up a ladder, not a neat pole-vault jump. You can’t get to the top without covering the steps below.
Fallacy 3: We ignore the cost of not doing anything.
In the amount of time we waste looking for the perfect book, we would probably finish a book.
In summary, don’t make the quest for finding a book a calculus maximization problem.
Pick something decent and start. With every step, the next step will become visible.
Soon, the path will reveal itself.
– Rajan