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My English is not perfect. How I still read Hooked.

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 the context of that paragraph — what origami meant in the middle of a behavioral psychology argument, not in general.

Along with that, I got an explanation in Urdu. I read it in two seconds and kept going.

The reading did not stop. The understanding did not break. I just moved forward.

Why this matters if your English is not strong

Most people who say they cannot read English self-help books are not struggling with English. They are struggling with unfamiliar words appearing at the wrong moment — breaking focus, breaking flow, and eventually breaking the habit.

Googling a word mid-read takes you out of the book entirely. You land on a general definition, written for no context in particular. You come back and the paragraph has already gone cold.

What actually helps is getting the right meaning, in the right context, in a language you think in — without leaving the page.

The honest takeaway

My English is not perfect. I read Hooked, They Ask You Answer, Show Your Work, and Crucial Conversations — all in English. Not because my vocabulary was ready, but because the tool filled the gap without interrupting the process.

If you have been putting off a book because the language felt like a barrier, that barrier is smaller than you think.

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Location: Pindigheb, Pakistan

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