Number Of Books Read Is A Vanity Metric

Listen, I see it everywhere now. Someone finishes their fiftieth book of the year and posts it like they just summited Everest. The comments roll in – "Amazing!" "Goals!" "So inspiring!" – and I'm sitting there thinking... wait, what changed?

Because here's the thing about books. They're not trophies. They're not Pokemon cards you collect to prove you're cultured or smart or whatever performance we're running these days.

I used to do this. I'd set these aggressive reading targets – sixty books a year, let's go – and I'd tear through them like I was training for the Olympics of intellectual consumption. Got to the end of the year, looked at my Goodreads list feeling accomplished... and realized I couldn't tell you what half of them were actually about. Not really. Not in a way that mattered.

The moment it clicked for me was when I was re-reading "Meditations" for the third time. Third time. And I caught something Marcus Aurelius wrote that completely shifted how I thought about ambition. How did I miss this twice before? And then it hit me – I hadn't missed it. I just wasn't ready. My life hadn't asked that question yet.

You see, books don't work on our schedule. They work on life's schedule.

Reading fifty books means nothing if you're just moving information from page to brain like you're filling a warehouse. What matters is – did anything land? Did a single sentence crack you open? Did you pause, put the book down, and stare at the wall for ten minutes because something finally made sense?

That's the metric that matters. Integration, not consumption.

I know people who've read three books in five years but they can speak with depth about ideas in ways that reshape conversations. They let those books marinate. They argued with the author in the margins. They tested the concepts against their actual lives.

And I know people with hundreds of books on their shelf who sound like they're regurgitating Wikipedia summaries.

The real question isn't "How many books did you read?" It's "How many books read you?" How many rewired something? How many made you uncomfortable enough that you had to change?

There's this beautiful idea in Eastern philosophy – you don't need a thousand teachers, you need one teaching a thousand times until it becomes part of your bones. That's what reading should be. Depth over breadth. Transformation over collection.

So yeah, read fewer books if that's what it takes. Read one book five times. Sit with a paragraph for a week. Let it disturb you. Let it challenge the story you've been telling yourself.

Because wisdom isn't about how many books you've finished. It's about how many times you've let yourself be finished and rebuilt by what you've read.

Count that instead.