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So I am quite behind in my reading schedule and I got a message a few days ago from somebody in the community who said the same thing. I had sent a message out in my newsletter asking a question. Question was this, should I add a premium section to my newsletter where I am diving deeper into specific things like essays or poetry or a passage from a really great book, showing my highlighting methods and so on. And I gave the option, avoiding yes or no. Do I keep the newsletter completely free or do I keep it completely free plus a little paid subscription section down below? And a lot of people email me back and said we would love to see extra stuff, but to be honest, I am behind in my reading and I would probably not have time to read it because I've already got too much going on. And so I thought, that's an interesting topic. Why is it that we get behind in our reading? Why am I behind in my reading? I want to talk to you about that today and sort of how I deal with that mentally. And you know, spoiler alert here for the newsletter. I think I'm going to just keep everything as is for now. I'm not going to add the extra sections because I don't want to give you more stuff to read. I want to make sure that what we are reading together is to the point, on purpose and meaningful. And with that in mind, let's get into the episode. Welcome to this week's episode of the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm your host, where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes, and let's get ready to learn something fascinating. Hey, everyone. Welcome back. My name is Eddie Hood and I am the host of the Read well podcast. So happy to have you back here today. This is going to be a bit of a conversation, not so much a presentation, but just a chat. You and me chatting about what it feels like to be behind in our reading again. I had somebody in my community send me this message and she was giving me a response to the length of my newsletter along with all the other things she has to read. And I, I really felt the responsibility on my end to make sure that my newsletter was meaningful and impactful and not unnecessarily cumbersome because it only adds to the overwhelm. I feel this sometimes when I go into a bookstore. Do you all feel this when, if you go into a bookstore, especially a messy bookstore, where there are like books stacked everywhere and there's Just a billion billion books. I go in hopeful to find a new book. I'm excited to, you know, to explore a new bookstore, but I don't buy anything. There are many times I go to a bookstore and I don't buy anything simply because I get so overwhelmed by the number of books there. And then I start thinking about all the other books that are still at home that I haven't read, and I start feeling guilty about those and so on. So I think to myself, I'll come back and buy books later. But I. I need to go home and finish my list. It's that sense of overwhelm that I want to talk about today. That sense of always being behind as a reader. It's something I struggle with. It's a. It's like a mental challenge. And so I want to talk today about a few things. First of all, I'm going to talk about where I'm at in my reading life. If you can see my desk right now, it's got books all over it. That's because these are books that I am currently in the state of reading or processing notes on. And it is. I don't know. There's a lot of books here. And so now I've gotten myself into a bit of a mess because I have books coming at me from many, many spaces. And so I'm going to talk about why we get behind in our reading. First of all, I'm going to talk about how it affects me psychologically and then how I deal with that. And then at the end of the video, I'm going to give you several tips on how to handle the weight of being behind as a reader and how to work your way through that and always feel like you are accomplishing the reading life that you want to achieve. Now, stick around to the very end, because my last tip is going to be the very best one, and it is the one that helps me the most. And of course, when we finish up, I'll give you a book recommendation for the week. Okay, so let's talk about why I'm behind. Well, it's because I have several avenues in my life that give me things to read, and you're probably the same way. So, first of all, every time I go in anywhere, I'm always looking for a new bookstore to visit. So when I go to these new bookstores, like I mentioned, I don't always buy stuff, but sometimes I do. And as I bring books home, they end up on the shelves or the to be read pile. And that's the first thing now, I am starting my own bookstore called Edgewater Bookstore. I have an online version of that bookstore, but I'm under contract to buy a real building in Bountiful, Utah. For those of you who are in Utah, it's on 5th south and 1st East. It's called the Old MacArthur Building. It was built in 1933. It's a sort of beautiful white. You're going to love it. I can't wait for you all to come and visit me. It will be a clean and organized bookstore, by the way, so that you don't feel overwhelmed. Anyway, when I visit these bookstores, in the process of running my own bookstore, I've recently just received access to the catalog of all of the publishers. Now, as a bookseller, as a professional bookseller, I've been given sort of backdoor access to these catalogs, so I can see all of the stuff that's coming. So just to give you an example of this, I looked at the Penguin. It's called the Penguin Spring Omni adult catalog for 2026. And there are hundreds of these catalogs, by the way. But for just that one catalog alone, there are over 500 titles coming out in the spring of 2026. So that gives you a sense of the. The idea that there's just this sort of influx, this massive amount of books that are just coming to us as readers in the bookstores. There are too many titles to read. There are hundreds of thousands of books being published every year, many more than that around the world, but it's just. It's more than you'll ever handle. So I want to point out, first of all, that because the fire hose that is being sprayed at us is so big, we're never going to be caught up. And that is my first argument. I think we need to acknowledge the fact that we're never going to go, oh, hey, I'm caught up. I've read all this stuff, right? If you're the kind of person that loves to go into a bookstore that's always curious, there's always another book to read. You're always going to be behind, especially with people like Penguin and Random House and all these publishers just pumping out books like nobody's business. Now, the second reason why I'm behind is because I'm in a book club. I actually run a book club called the Readwell Podcast Book Club. And you are probably in that club or in other clubs, which means that you are reading books with people. And I am a huge advocate of book clubs because they keep you in the reading habit, they put you in a community of other readers where you make friends. But I have a few people in my club who are in multiple other clubs at the same time. I've got one lady who's in four book clubs. I don't know how she does it. That is an incredible amount of reading. Now for me, I like to read my books in my book club slowly because our mantra is read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. So in our club, we're not saying, hey, we're going to read a book a week. Here we go. Let's crank this out. We typically read anywhere from five pages a day to at the most 15 pages a day, depending on the complexity of the book itself. So right now we're reading the Remains of the Day. This is this beautiful novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's the story of Mr. Stevens, who's an English butler. And he has to go on this. Well, it's a very literal journey, by the way, but it's also a metaphorical journey as he's trying to find his meaning in life and where he fits. And it's just this beautiful book. But we're reading this at 15 pages a day. So this is one of the books in my life right now. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. I don't regret it, I love it. But yes, I am currently reading that book. So that's on the list. Now, if you're in multiple book clubs, that means you've got several books like that going at the same time, which can be a lot to juggle. The third reason why I'm behind personally is because I'm currently getting a degree in philosophy right now. My beautiful wife is a teacher at Weber State University. She teaches nursing. And while she's employed there, we found out that her, her loved ones, that's me, get access to 6 free credit hours every semester of college. Why would I not take that? I am a book guy. And so I thought, I'm going to go back in my quote unquote spare time, which there is none. But I'm getting a degree in philosophy and that degree requires a minor. So I happily chose English Literature as the minor. But because of that, those are two very, very sort of book heavy degrees. Lots of reading in the philosophy department, even more reading in the English lit department, right? So right now I'm only doing two classes. I'm doing an ethics bowl class where we debate about topics that are kind of hot topics on the day that has very little reading. So that one's been nice. But I'm also taking a course on the existentialists, and so we're doing quite a bit of reading there. I've read these books a few times, but I have to read them again because I'm being tested on them. And so I didn't feel comfortable just kind of going off of old readings. So I just refinished Albert Camus the Stranger, which is a really nice book. It's a small book, it's 123ish pages, but it is in itself a very strange book about a guy named Meursault who goes through lived experience in a way that is kind of moment to moment. He's. It's almost like he's in a daydream all of the time, and then something very dramatic happens to him and it sort of makes him reevaluate sort of the meaning of life and how he should be responding to events and so on. It's a crazy book, but it's good. I really like it. We also are reading the Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. You're kind of getting a theme here. Our professor really likes Camus and I think he's great as well. But Mythicisphus is a great book and I'm. I'm. I'm finished with that one. And then we're also reading on the Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche, which is just a really cool book. Now, this is the basic writings of Nietzsche. It's not this big, right? It's. It's. This is one of many books that Nietzsche wrote, but I'm currently holding the basic writings of Nietzsche. Yeah, but the Genealogy of Morals is not a fast read. It is a read that you just kind of have to go through page by page, step by step. And so my last tip of the day at the end of this video will help me in processing that novel. I have to finish that book in the next couple days because I might. I'm in a midterm right now for school. I'm being tested on all of those Camus books as well as the Nietzsche book. And I gotta get those under my belt, guys. Lots and lots to do. Which is why we need coffee. And that brings me to this week's video sponsor, which is myself. We're going to talk about my coffee. Somebody pointed out that I don't do a very good job at talking about the coffee that I sell. And I thought, you are right. You are very right. I don't talk about it at all. It's on my bookstore@edgewaterbookstore.com but I want to just walk you through really quickly. The coffee that I drink on a daily basis that I love. I fell in love with coffee. As you know, I left the LDS Church or the Mormon Church. For 45 years, I was not allowed to drink coffee. And then when I left, I am now allowed. And my goodness, it is a magical little thing. So I went out and started a little coffee company. Why wouldn't you do that? Right? So here are my four brands of coffee. These bags are empty. I just use them for show. But this is the Deep read coffee, and I like this one. I use this in my espressos. So if you order this from me, I can grind it really fine for you for your espresso drinks. Or I send all of these whole bean as well, if you'd like. But the deep read is my dark roast, and it's got a really dark chocolate, nutty flavor going on. Yeah, that's the deep read. The second one is. And. Oh, and let me point out that the deep read is a blend of coffee, meaning that the beans are coming from multiple locations. Right. All roasted dark. So it's got that nice chocolatey, caramel, nutty flavor to it. The next coffee I have is called Anthology. It's this blue bag. This one's actually one of my favorite coffees. It's really good. It's a medium roast coffee. It's also a blend, but these beans come from the Americas, so down in South America. And it's just really tasty. People always buy this. This coffee, and they're like, wow. Wasn't expecting that from a blend. It's just if you're looking for a coffee that's, like, no surprise, just tastes really good. It's like a reliable cup of coffee in the morning. Cup of coffee. I said cup of coffee. I need to drink more cups of coffee. Anyway, it's a really reliable cup of coffee that just is working hard every morning. I love it. It's the one I drink the most. Then I have pros. Oh, this one's got some beans in it. There you go. Cool. Prose is fun. This is known as my most beautiful bag. It's this pink bag with, like. Is that lavender people? I don't know what color that is. It's like a teal color. Anyway, Peroz is really great. It's. It's the. It's the most surprising flavor that I sell. It's a single origin coffee, which means that it comes from one farm, one place. All of the beans are collected from one person. And these come from Ethiopia. There's this little farm in Ethiopia we work with that is just beautiful. And. And this coffee, when you smell it smells like nothing you've ever smelled before. It is just gorgeous. It is my favorite coffee to drink black just because it tastes so stinking good. I wrote on here, the coffee notes are, let's see here, Blueberry, black cherry, strawberry, and anise. A, N, I, S, E. I can never pronounce this stuff. All I know is it smells really good. And when people open up the bag, they're like, wow, this is awesome. Okay. And that is a light roast. So we've gone from dark to medium to light. And then the fourth coffee that I sell is called Plot Twist. You'll notice that these all have a book theme, right? So Plot Twist is fun because it changes every month. That's the Plot Twist. It is my coffee of the month. And this month right now, I'm in October, I'm doing a single origin bean from Honduras. These are always single origin beans. I've done them from India and from all over the world. So right now we're in Honduras, and it has been a popular coffee to sell. So also light. So I have two light coffees, a medium and a dark. You can go check them out@edgewaterbookstore.com okay, back to why I'm behind in my books. And then we'll talk about sort of how it sits with me mentally and how I process that sort of weight. And then I'll give you a few tips to get you through that so that you can feel better as a reader. Now, I'm also behind in my reading right now because I have a job, and many of you at work are given books to read from the leadership team. The CEO has read some great book and now feels that everybody in the company should read that book. And so this happened to me. This is a book called Traction that we've been reading at work right now. And it's about a fine book. It's a business book, and it works. It's not a book I would normally read on my own in my own free time, but for running a company, sure, it's great, but it just adds to the pile, right? So work is another source of books. So so far, we've talked about the bookstores, the book clubs, being in school, being in work, and then what about me? What about my own personal wants and desires, right? So what if. What about the books I already have that I haven't read. Well, I've got a few books here. This is the last source of reasoning for why I'm behind is just because I'm surrounded by books in my life, in my home and in my office. And I haven't read all of them yet. I would like to say I have, but I haven't. Case in point, I recently read Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. This is the strangest book I've ever read. If you've read it, you'll know exactly what I mean. The COVID is just like craziness. But it's this book about this place called Area X. It's like a sci fi, futuristic. It's not fantasy, speculative fiction sort of situation going on about this place that is almost like this. Like a Bermuda Triangle sort of thing where when you go in, it's. It's otherworldly and there are these strange animals and people are disappearing and there's these weird forces taking play and people are dying. It's just. It's nutty. But anyway, I read Annihilation and thought, okay, wasn't expecting that. But I think I would like to read the other two. So I have them and I can't remember which one. Oh, yes. So Authority comes next, and then Acceptance is the third book of this, what is called the Southern Reach series. I haven't read book two and book three yet, but because I read book one, now I got to read book two and book three. I haven't done that yet. Also, this is a bit of a confession. Many of you have probably read this and you'll probably be mad that I haven't read this, but I've never read Gravity's Rainbow. I know, and I want to read it. It's just been sitting on my shelf and I wouldn't say collecting dust because I keep my book rooms pretty clean. But yeah, I haven't read Gravity's Rainbow and I would like to do that. Gravity's Rainbow is a book written by Thomas Finchen. And it's just one of these sort of like staple books that, for the genres I like to read, you know, it's kind of a pillar book and I haven't read it. Dang it. There I am, being behind. Okay, let's talk about how this sits with me mentally, because maybe you've felt this before. Look, I think reading is meant to sort of enrich our soul. It's meant to make us happier. Meant to, you know, help us escape the realities of life and go and Solve mysteries and learn about cool things like the notebook, History of thinking on paper. What a cool book if you want to learn about how to take better notes and all that stuff. There's just so many books, right? But sometimes reading doesn't feel like that. Sometimes I feel guilty as a reader. I feel like I'm. I'm falling behind. I feel a psychological pressure, a weight. I feel that when I go into bookstores and I see the millions of titles and I'm like, I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, like, there's just not enough time. My work is killing me. I want to be a good dad and a good husband. That takes a lot of time. I got to clean the house and all of that. Where am I going to find time for all of this? And so I start to resent things. I start to, like, get angry that life is demanding so much of me that I can't sit down for a few minutes and just read a book. Now, I know that that's not fully true. I know that life, yes, it is demanding. But I've also discovered that when I prioritize something, it definitely moves up the list and gets more of my attention and time. And so when I am not reading, as much as I would like to, if I'm being honest with myself, it's because I've deprioritized reading and I've moved up other things. So the first thing I would say is maybe try to stop blaming all of the things. The boss, the kids. Maybe you're not feeling super healthy. That, that, that's actually a different thing, because if you're not feeling healthy or energetic, no matter what, it can be quite challenging to read. So let's. Let's stick with the. I'm not going to call them excuses, but the reasonings behind why we're not reading. So the boss, the kids, the dirty house, all of that stuff, right? It's perfectly okay. And I think we should allow ourselves to be okay with prioritizing reading at the top of the list or sometimes even prioritizing it lower because other things need to get done. That's okay. Just know that that's what's happening. It's not that you don't have enough time. It's that you've moved it further down the list. And if you can acknowledge that, oh, wait a minute. My reading is number 12 on a list of 10 things right now. And if you want to read, look at the first 11 things above it and ask yourself, why am I so focused on these other 11 things. And you can probably find a few things that are just killing your time that don't need to be there. And of course, that one of those is going to be that gravitational pull to social media, to the Internet, to what my wife likes to call unwinding at night, right after a long day of work, she likes to come home and just kind of unwind and watch something funny on the Internet for a bit. And of course, a quick YouTube video or an Instagram thingy. Is that what they're called, Instagram thingies? I don't think so. But anyway, an Instagram thingy we're going to stick with that can turn into many Instagram thingies. And you've spent many hours doing that. So that's the first thing is acknowledging that reading can make you feel actually bad about yourself at times because you're behind. And if you acknowledge that, you're never going to be caught up and you sort of acknowledge the idea that there's a priority list at play, and it's not that you're a bad person or you're failing, it's just that you've got some priorities you need to shuffle around. That's probably step one. And the moment you, you, you can move reading up two or three priority levels, you're instantly going to feel better about yourself. Now, here's another sort of truth that I don't like to admit, but it's true. When we're reading from behind, which we're all always reading from behind, by the way, as I already mentioned, that sort of leans into the concept of speed reading and skimming, you start to think in the back of your head, there's so much to do here, I have to speed up. So instead of being with a book properly and paying attention and enjoying it, now you're just trying to get through it. So you can check this book off the list and get to the next one and so on. And we only have so much time, right? You can feel that anxiety building in yourself that you have to get through this book so you can get on the next one. Especially if you're in multiple book clubs where you're on a schedule now you're really reading quickly, your speed reading and so on. So if you've ever felt yourself. Well, if you've ever said to yourself that you've read lots of great books but you don't really remember what they were about, or you don't, you don't have anything that you can sort of draw from that book, it's probably because you were reading from behind and you let the sort of, the weight of that get to you and push you through quicker. Okay, so let's just acknowledge that that happens, that reading from behind gives us justification to speed read. But now we're not really accomplishing the main goal. We're not reading books at all. We're getting through books, and that is a very different thing. I don't think you're here to get through books. I don't think that's your intent. Just know that it happens, right? It's a very normal thing that it happens. And. And I think that if we acknowledge it then, then it's much easier for us to slow down. Now, the last thing I want to talk about before we get into the. The actual tips on how to deal with this is that when. When we're reading from behind, it actually sort of devastates that space between books. I love the space between books. So let's say I'm reading. I just finished Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which I did. We read this in book club. Fantastic. Such a good book. And let's say on my next to be read is Reader Come Home by Marianne Wolf. Also a great book, people. So if you are feeling like you're behind, here's what happens. You finish Brave New World, and when you're about 10 pages away from the ending where everything's wrapping up and it's starting to get really good and the payoff is coming, maybe you don't do this, but I do. I start thinking about the next book. I start thinking about Reader Come Home, I start getting excited about this, and Brave New World becomes a little less interesting. And so I'm already trading mental spaces from one book to the other. And that's a really serious problem. When we're reading behind from behind, we're reading on a list. And so my argument here is that after you finish Brave New World, what I like to do is take a few days and then open up my journal and write about what I read. I like to go through my notes because I highlight every book I read, and I like to sort of plot the best passages and journal about them and think about them. If I'm reading from behind, that's not going to happen. So acknowledge that there is some really valuable space between books that will make you a better reader. That is part of the reading experience. Right? The space between books is part of the reading experience. And I don't want you to miss out on that. That's really, really good. Stuff. But for whatever reason, we feel like we have to close the book, open the next one, and just keep going. I'd like to argue that you're really missing the best part of the book when you do that. Okay, four tips to help you deal with reading from behind. These are things that I do when I have this going on. And yes, because I have many books on my desk right now, I'm going to have to do this with myself after this video. So the first tip is a mental tip, and it really does help to acknowledge that the sense of reading from behind is never going to go away. So I should probably stop trying to make it go away. We've already argued as to why there are so many books in our lives. And if you're a curious person and a reader, you're always going to have books to read. So just embrace that. Embrace the fact that you are going to have a to be read list at all times. The second tip is this. So there's this. There's this guy called Dave Ramsey. He's a finance guy online. You. I'm sure you've heard of him, right? He talks about how to get out of debt and on and on and on. This is not about him, but when I was first married, he helped me figure out how to manage my money a little bit because we were spending money on. On our debit cards. And at the end of the month, we had nothing left in our bank account. And he had this thing called the envelope system, where you would have an envelope for every aspect of your life that needed money. So you would get like 12 envelopes out and on one you would write, you know, date night, and another one you would write groceries, and another one you would write utilities or whatever. Right? All of the aspects of your life that need money. And then when you got your paycheck, you would pull that money out of the bank, you wouldn't leave it there, you would get it in cash, and then you would divide up that cash into the envelopes that you needed to spend. So maybe date night would have $50 of cash in it, and maybe groceries would have $500 of cash in it for the month or whatever it is. Okay? So now when it's time to go on a date with your wife, you grab your date night envelope and you head off to date night and you have $50 to spend. Once the money in the envelope's gone, you're out of options. All you can do now is maybe go for a walk around the park, because that's Free, but you have no money left to go to the movies or whatever. Well, I would like to make the argument this is actually a good strategy for readers who are feeling overwhelmed by books, for people who, when they go to bookstores, buy way more books than they're ever going to read, and then they bring those books home and they feel overwhelmed and depressed and stressed and so on. Now many of you are rolling your eyes going, I have never felt that. I only feel joy by being surrounded by the billions of books. That is really great. You're not dealing with this, but some of us are. Some of us are thinking, oh, my goodness, I'm going to die one day and I haven't read War and Peace yet. Or I haven't read Joyce Carol Oates. I'm looking at books on my shelves back here, right? I haven't read enough Shakespeare. I've got to get this done. Some of us feel anxiety by that. Others are just feeling comfy and cozy, which. Leave me a comment down below. Who are you? Are you. Are you the person that's like, yeah, I'm feeling comfy and cozy. Just give me all the books and if I don't read them, don't care. Or are you the reader that's like, ah, I have no time. Like, I've got to get all of this done. Let me know. I'm curious. I'm more the latter. I have a sort of impending sense of life is getting shorter and shorter and the book list is getting longer and longer. And so I'm doing my best to kind of keep my crap together and just be a calm reader. So if you have an envelope of cash and you call it books, right now, you set up a budget for yourself every month of how many books you can buy. So let's say you put $50 in there and it lasts for the month where you're not allowed to spend more money on books than you have in the envelope of cash. This sort of limits the onboarding of new material to process or to read, right? And it forces you to only pick the books you genuinely, truly, really care about, the ones you know you're going to read, because you've only got 50 bucks, or maybe you do 20 bucks, I don't know. Right now you got one book a month kind of thing. So that's one strategy to sort of limit the intake of material coming in. Now, the third tip, which is a good one, but the fourth tip is the best, so stick around. But the third tip here is that you need to be a Little more judicious about the books that you read. I've said this before on my podcast and I will say it until I'm blue in the face. Not every book is worth reading. Now, they might have beautiful jacket covers. The author might have a really strong history of writing great books. And maybe you love everything this author has ever done. But you get into the new book and you're. You're 20, 30, 50 pages in and you are hating it. You're lost. It's not making sense. It's not working. It's like rubbing sandpaper on your face, right? It's just not getting you there. That's okay. You don't have to finish it. You can actually, you can DNF this book. Do not finish. That's perfectly fine. I DNF books all the time. Now, my personal rule of thumb is I give every book 50 pages. And this works for some people. Other people like to go much longer. Some people have a really short tolerably and they'll give it like three pages. I feel like a book needs a little longer than three pages to make its case for being worth my time. So I give every book 50 pages. But at 50 pages, I make a critical decision. Should I continue or should I DNF this thing? I DNF books a lot. Now let's get into the last tip that helps me the most. Whenever I'm feeling as though I'm reading from behind, if I. If I'm just sort of overwhelmed with the sense of these books and I don't know where to start, I start to feel scatterbrained. I start to feel sort of itchy, right? Like I don't know how to deal with it. What I've noticed is that our brains crave quality. Our brains really want some depth. It's like eating candy versus eating really high quality food, right? And if you can give your brain some sense of depth, your brain will wake up, it will calm down, it will lean into the work, right? But because we spend so much of our time skimming on surface level stuff, our brain gets agitated. And so my tip for you is this. If you're feeling like you're reading from behind and you don't know how to deal with stuff, commit to reading one paragraph of your book deeply, thoroughly and thoughtfully. So I'm going to give you an example of what this feels like. So I'm going to be reading the Genealogy of Morals again by Nietzsche. Now this is a hard book to read. The first paragraph is not very difficult here in the preface. But I'm going to read the first little few lines of this because it'll help you understand what's going on. Now, if I were to read this normally, as though I'm like, oh, my gosh, I'm behind. I got to get through this. I got to read. I got to read. I got to read. I might do this. I might read the first words. As we're unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge, and with good reason, we have never sought ourselves. How could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said, where your treasure is, or will you there will your heart be also? Our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are. Okay, so that's sort of the first couple lines of this amazing work. Now, my brain caught some of that, right? Like we were cooking through those words, I stumbled on a few of them. Something about knowing ourselves. Something about bees. I don't know. I'm sure he'll explain it later. Now, if I were to feel the sort of impending sense of doom that I'm behind as a reader, if I commit to just slowing down to one paragraph, I want you to watch what happens. I want you to feel this in your brain. Okay? So I'm going to start over, and I'm going to read this thoroughly. We are unknown to ourselves. So I'm going to pause there. What is he saying? Okay, well, we is a pronoun. So he's talking about all of us, not just himself, not just me, but we're unknown to ourselves. So if I think about my own personal life, if. How well do I know myself? I'm constantly changing. I'm constantly in a good mood, in a bad mood. Curious, not curious, tired, excited. Want to start a business, don't want to start a business. Being a father, all of the things, right? How well do I actually know myself? So he says, we are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge. So that's interesting. So the we men of knowledge thing, we're walking around with a heads full of ideas, right? We walk around spouting that we know things as truth or fact. Perhaps we might say our political party is better than your political party. Perhaps we might say our religion is better than your religion. Perhaps we might say my way of raising a child is better than your way of raising a child. We might not say any of these things explicitly, but we have those thoughts in the back of our head. We're pretty darn convinced that we are right? So again, that sentence says we are unknown to ourselves. We men of knowledge, right? So is it possible that we're walking around with a bunch of preconceived ideas, but we haven't really analyzed those ideas, we haven't really applied them to our own personal life to consider whether we agree with them or not? He goes on to say, and with good reason, we have never sought ourselves. Okay, so that's a cool line. I completely missed that in the first reading. When we read at the normal speed from anxiety, right? But we have never sought ourselves means that we have never sat down and actually thought about who we are. We've never done the journaling work to discover what our beliefs are, where we stand, what philosophies we subscribe to, which ones we don't subscribe to. But more importantly, why? For example, case in point, I lived the Mormon lifestyle. I was in that church for many, many years. And I did it because my friends and family were doing it. And at 43 years old is when we left the church for me. My wife and I sat down and we said, what do we believe? And we had to sort of interface with the belief system there and who we were as people and realize that there were many, many differences which caused us to leave that high demand religion and find our own personal selves. That was a path that was right for me. And if you're an active member of that church and you're doing it for yourself, you that's fantastic. But I had to face that for myself. He's saying we have never sought ourselves. Sought, as an interesting verb, to seek something means that it's going to be difficult, right? It's somewhat hidden. You have to go on a bit of an adventure. You have to go through a circuitous path probably to get there. It's not like going, you know, next door, knocking on the door and coming home. You're going to have to wander a little bit in order to find yourself. So again, he says we have never sought ourselves. How could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? So he's making a very strong argument here. Hey people, we are not doing the work of self knowledge, of self critical thinking. And because we're not doing that, because we're just waking up and going to work and doing what our boss says and doing what our parents say and what the government says and their religion says, because we're not doing our own thing, we're never going to find ourselves. We're always going to be lost. And of course, he's leaning into the idea of the herd. The herd is the Bigger population, the massive men that just sort of make the world work and are running on that sort of hedonic treadmill that just never, ever stops and never pays off. Okay. He says, it has rightly been said, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. He acknowledges that he agrees with that statement because he starts with the proposition that it has rightly been said. It has rightly been said that where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. What he's saying here is that what you care about. Remember in the beginning. Oh, this is really good. We're tying to the beginning of the podcast where I was saying you might not be reading very much because reading has fallen in your priority level and other things have sort of risen above it. Right? So what you treasure is where your heart is. And so what you treasure becomes the top of your priority list. Right. And it's very possible that the top of your priority list wasn't put there by you, it was put there by your boss or by other forces. Yeah, I think you get the idea. Right. And Nietzsche is trying to rattle you and say, hey, where is your treasure? Right. What are you putting at the top of your priority list? Where's your heart at? So then he goes on, and we're almost done here. Our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are. Okay, so that's where we ended off. And when I read this quickly, I was like, something about bees. I don't know if you think about a beehive. A beehive is a center point of work. It's where lots of worker bees come in and there's a queen bee, and they are about a specific thing. Those bees aren't making music. They're not playing guitars. They're not writing poetry. They're not mowing the lawn. Well, they're kind of mowing the lawn. I mean, they're. They're doing the flower thing, but they are making honey. They're making honey and they're making a hive. Right? Their priority, their treasure, where their heart is, is to make that hive, to make the best dang honey they can make. And that's why bees are really good at what they do. And so for you, he suggests that our treasures is where the beehives of our knowledge are. So what's at the top of your priority list is the sort of the center point of your work, Right. The thing that you're doing the most. Where are you making your honey? That's going to be the top of your priority list. Right. So to Summarize these two lines of text. We don't know who we are as a people, and it's because we're not doing the work to know ourselves. And there are forces at play creating a priority list in our lives. And if we don't take time to look at what's at the top of that priority list, we're never going to do our best work. We're never going to lean into what we were designed to do as humans. And if we decide to do that work, we're going to have to seek after it. It's going to be a long, wondrous, circuitous path to get there, but it can be done. And he goes on to argue that we have the ability to rise above that herd. He has a term called the ubermensch, which is the goal of Nietzsche to become an ubermensch, or the overman, or the Superman, the person who is living at the extreme of life kind of thing. That's an example of reading slowly. Now, that might be very slow, and it might. It might stress you out, actually, because you're thinking, eddie, you just made my problem worse. I'm reading from behind. I've got tons of stuff I have to read by the end of the week. I can't do that. That will make it worse. Now, it's going to take weeks and weeks and weeks to read even a page or two. I'm not making that argument either. What I'm trying to do here is show you that if you commit to reading one passage in your book deeply and slowly, like my mug says that I. Yep, another commercial. But my mug says, read slowly. Take notes and apply the idea. These are the Edgewater Bookstore mugs. If you commit to do that for just one paragraph, people, just one paragraph, your brain is going to crack open and go, whoa, there are ideas in here. There are things happening that I completely missed by speed reading. And your brain's gonna get excited about reading again. It's gonna. It's gonna want to make time to read books, and it's gonna shift reading up into a higher priority level because you now are benefiting from the books. You're now enjoying the books, and they're no longer a task or a chore. Okay, I'm gonna give you a quick book recommendation. Now. I've done this book in the past, but I would like to share it again, mainly because of what we're talking about today, and it is Marianne Wolfe's book Reader Come the reading brain in a digital world. I did an interview with her about a year ago. Now, she is this incredible researcher who has looked at how the process of reading well, not speed reading, but reading well, changes the shape, size and efficiency of your brain. So if you want a book that will teach you about the art of reading well, and also if you're kind of a sciency nerd and you want to understand how this whole thing benefits you beyond just having access to great stories and great information, but how it's physically making you healthier, smarter, more capable in life, then yeah, Read or Come Home is a fantastic book. I'd go check that out. Okay, everybody, that was a big episode today. I hope you got something out of that. If you did, please take a moment to like the video, subscribe to the podcast, whatever it is that you do. Also, if I could ask one last thing from you, it's been a while since I've been able to get some testimonials for the podcast. So if you wouldn't mind going over to, I guess Apple, itunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to the show and just, you know, log in real quick and give me a rating one to five. Hopefully we got a five. If I did a good job for you today, that definitely helps spread the message and build some momentum behind the show. And as always, remember to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. I'll see you all next time. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to read well. You'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well podcast.