We live in a world obsessed with finishing things. How many books have you started with genuine excitement, only to find yourself speed-reading the last third just to check it off your list? There's something deeply misguided about that impulse. A truly good book isn't trying to get you to the ending—it's trying to change how you think along the way. Rushing through it is like gulping down a meal you spent hours cooking.
The counterintuitive part: slowing down actually makes you smarter. When you linger on a paragraph, sit with an idea for a few days, or reread a sentence that stopped you cold, you're not wasting time. You're doing the real work of learning. Fast reading feels productive—you've consumed so many pages—but slow reading transforms you. You start noticing connections to your own life, you argue with the author in margins, you change your mind about things.
This applies beyond books too. We've trained ourselves to consume information like we're trying to fill a bucket. But depth comes from dwelling, from letting ideas actually land. The pressure to keep moving, to stay ahead, to know everything—it's the enemy of understanding anything well.