ReadToGrow

The Best Book for You Is Not on Any List I wanted to start reading. I genuinely tried. But every time I sat down to pick a book, I ended up closing the tab and telling myself I would figure it out later. Later. And that later never came. Not because I did not care — because I could not decide. It took me longer than I would like to admit to realise that the problem was not me. It was the lists. A list that does not know you cannot help you pick. It can only overwhelm you. Why Generic Lists Do Not Work Search "best books for freelancers" and you will get a hundred results. Every list is different. Every list is confident. And none of them know where you are right now — what you are learning, what is specifically blocking you, how much time you actually have. So you read through a few lists, feel vaguely informed, and then do not pick anything. Because when everything is recommended, nothing feels like the right answer. You end up mor...

The Problem Is Not the Plan. It's the Exit You Use Everyday. Tonight you'll tell yourself that tomorrow will be different. And tomorrow will come, and feel exactly like today, and you will say it again. Not because you are lazy. Not because you do not know what to do. But because somewhere along the way, you built a very comfortable system for making not doing it, feel okay. The "today was just a weird day" statement. When you make a promise only to yourself, only you know when you break it. And when you do, you are also the one who decides what counts. The "I technically tried" version. The "it was a weird day" version. Small exits — and as long as they are there, you will take them. The barrier was never a lack of information. It was the escape hatch you kept leaving yourself to. The Quiet Ways We Let Ourselves Off Nobody lies to themselves in big, obvious ways. It happens in small, reasonable-sounding on...

Nothing Felt Wrong. And That Was the Problem. It does not happen in a dramatic moment. There is no breakdown, no rock bottom, no single day you can point to. You just look up one day and realise — a lot of time has passed, and you are not where you thought you would be. And the unsettling part is not where you are. It is that nothing felt wrong while it was happening. The scrolling felt normal. The "I'll start next week" felt reasonable. The slow days felt like just slow days. And then one day, you look up. Your life is not shaped by your big decisions. It is shaped by the small ones you do not even notice making. Why Nothing Feels Wrong While It Is Happening Our brain is very good at accepting its environment as normal. Whatever we do consistently starts to feel like just — how things are. Checking the phone first in the morning. Putting off the thing we said we would start. Ending the day with a vague sense of having been busy but ...

AI Does Not Make Us Dumb. Letting It Do Everything, Does. We're all using ChatGPT to write emails, summarize concepts, readings, generate code, draft proposals, plan our strategies and unfortunately, make our decisions. It is fast, productive, impressive, and it works. And somewhere in the middle of all of that — we are slowly losing our ability to think, plan, strategize and decide. A few years ago, getting AI to write something for you felt like cheating. Today it feels irresponsible not to use it. The shift happened fast — and quietly, something else shifted with it. AI is not making us dumb. But handing it everything? including the parts that make us human?. And the fix is not to stop using it. It is to stay in the driver's seat while it does the heavy lifting. When you let something else do your thinking, you slowly lose the ability to think. We Are Outsourcing More Than We Realise Think about what a typical day looks like now....

I Feel Like I Know Everything. But When I Sit Down to Do Something — I Have Nothing. I have been there. Courses finished, videos watched, books read. A genuine feeling of knowing things. And then someone asks me to do something with it — write the proposal, explain the concept, start the project — and I sit there, and nothing comes out. Not because I was not paying attention. I was. It just did not go anywhere. It took me a while to understand why. And the answer was uncomfortable. Consuming something and actually knowing it are two completely different things. The gap between them is where most of us are stuck. The Comfortable Version of Learning We have built very comfortable ways to feel like we are learning. Watch a tutorial. Read a summary. Let AI explain it. Highlight the important parts. These things feel productive because they are easy and they do deliver something — a general sense of the topic, an outline, a feeling of familiarity. ...

I was reading Hooked by Nir Eyal this week — specifically a section called "We Irrationally Value Our Efforts." Eyal was making the case that people associate more value with things they put labor into. To prove it, he referenced a 2011 study by Dan Ariely, Michael Norton, and Daniel Mochon. University students were asked to assemble an origami crane or frog. After finishing, they were asked to bid on their own creation. A separate group — who had not built anything — was asked to bid on the same objects. A third group bid on expert-made origami. The result: builders valued their own origami five times higher than the second group did. Nearly as high as the expert-made ones. Ariely called this the IKEA effect — the more effort you invest in something, the more you value it. I did not know what origami was. What I did instead of googling it Inside Iqra, I tapped the word. What came back was not a dictionary definition. It was the meaning of that word in th...