10 Pages a Day

I have a confession. I love buying books far more than I love reading them.

There is something genuinely satisfying about walking into a bookstore, holding a new title, reading the back cover, imagining how it fits into the expanding cosmos of what I want to understand. If it fits, I buy it. The problem appears a few pages in — the mood shifts, the discipline wavers, and the book joins the growing shelf of good intentions.

My appetite for buying books has very little relationship with my appetite for reading them.

For years I set the same ambitious target: ten books this year. And every year I arrived at December having finished two, maybe three. The goal was clear. The execution kept falling apart.

This year I tried something different.

Instead of a yearly number, I committed to just ten pages a day. Every day. Including public holidays. No exceptions — but nothing more than that single small commitment.

Four months in, I have finished four books. More than I have ever read in the first four months of any year in my life.
What I learned from this is simple but worth saying clearly. A large goal lives in the future. It is easy to defer because there is always tomorrow, always next week, always next month. But ten pages today is immediate and concrete. It removes the question of whether you have time. You always have fifteen minutes.

The small daily commitment also removes the psychological weight of the larger goal. You are not thinking about ten books. You are just reading ten pages. And the larger goal takes care of itself quietly in the background.

This is the same principle behind every meaningful practice I have built over the years. Not the size of the ambition but the consistency of the smallest daily action. Not the destination but the repeatable unit of movement that actually gets you there.
Break your goal down to its smallest daily parameter. Commit to it every day without negotiation. The larger goal will most probably take care of itself.

Ten pages. Every day. That is enough.