The Blind Spot
When I was 12 years-old, I decided to pick-up a habit of reading. I always saw people in my classes be praised by teachers for reading and saw it as an opportunity to start a new hobby and maybe get some academic clout in the process. The book series I started with was Diary of a Wimpy Kid, a classic from many people’s childhoods. However, when I began talking about how I was also a reader to my peers, many seemed to deny that, saying ‘You aren’t a real reader because you read childish books’. Needless to say this upset me, because here I was trying to pick-up a good habit and being quite proud of myself for enjoying the process, yet having the hobby gatekept by people who felt more superior reading books by Shakespeare, Roald Dahl and Stephen King. Even when I tried to get into the more “acceptable” book series, I found myself struggling to actually finish anything I started. After about a year of scrutiny I decided to hang-up my books for good because I simply wasn’t enjoying it.
The reasons why I never picked-up the habit of reading from a young age, in my opinion, goes much deeper than simply gatekeeping by the other people in my classes. It tells me something about the way our education system instils certain ideas into our heads that stick with us for a very long time. This blog is a case study about how the classroom scared me away from something that I actually loved by putting a very rigid framework around how I viewed it, and how I am now freeing myself from those shackles to rediscover a love I never knew I had. If you don’t know what I am talking about, keep reading. I promise it’ll be worth your while.
Why I Hated Reading
Growing up, I was never an avid reader at all. However, there were many people who used to shove the idea of reading books down my throat, mainly my English and literature teachers at school. Herein lied the first problem.
The rules my teachers gave me for reading books were extremely rigid. They emphasized 2 main points (above others):
- You need to read to grow your vocabulary
- You need to read books by specific authors
The first reason - reading for vocab - was brought about because we used to have weekly vocab tests where we were given a list of words and we needed to explain what each of them meant. The second reason - reading specific authors - supplemented the first. Authors who wrote long, intricate narratives were more likely to use words we hadn’t seen before in our day-to-day. Both of these reasons conditioned me to believe reading was only an academic tool to help you in the classroom and had no real use outside of it. As you can imagine, this lead to many problems.
Teaching young students that something as fundamental as a book is only meant to be utilized inside of a specific context takes the enjoyment of the activity out of it. It’s as if I told you socializing is a skill you should have only because it will help you communicate better with your boss at work. You would never view the act of having a conversation with another person the same again if that is the viewpoint that you grew-up hearing. This also causes another issue that I highlighted in the introductory paragraph: People become gatekeepers if you don’t fit the template. As everyone was conditioned to believe specific authors are better than others, if somebody was to step outside of that norm and read a book written by someone else, they were looked down upon. They felt as if they didn’t have the right to be a part of that community in the first place. Hence, they leave.
I hated reading because the ideas that were put into my head about why and how I should be doing it made me feel as if I wasn’t allowed to step too far outside that norm and find books I genuinely enjoyed reading. I started reading books that other people were reading mainly fictional stories by authors like Roald Dahl (he was all the craze back then), and though he is a great writer, I wasn’t enjoying his books at all. It felt like a chore to get through The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Every time I picked up a book, I had to write down every new word I came across, and remember what it meant, otherwise I felt like I was wasting my time. When I came across a book I was genuinely interested in reading, I had to check if it was written by any very well-known authors, otherwise it wasn’t worth reading. This sucked the enjoyment out of the whole activity, which is the most important factor in developing the habit.
A Hidden Love
I didn’t pick-up a single book for years after that. I was almost disgusted by the thought of reading, and made my views clear to those who told me they enjoyed it. Who could ever want to do something so unenjoyable and rigid? That is until high school.
When I was entering high school, I wanted to seriously revamp my entire academic career. I wanted to be the guy who got straight A’s and wasn’t afraid of parent-teacher conferences. I started watching a YouTuber, called Thomas Frank, whose whole channel is dedicated to productivity and time management for students (and others). I was obsessed with this guy and applied most of what I learned. I stumbled across a few of his videos talking about his top picks for books he thinks everyone should read. Though I wasn’t a reader, I still watched these videos because I was such a huge supporter of what Thomas did. He convinced me to try reading again, but this time, I got to choose why I did it, and what books I was going to read.
The first book that caught my attention was A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley. At the time, I wanted to learn more about how to grasp new concepts I came across in my math and science classes, so this seemed like the perfect fit. I downloaded the book (as I couldn’t find a physical copy) and got to reading. My intentions were clear: Learn how you can better absorb and apply concepts you learn in your classes. I read that book back to front in about 2 weeks, the fastest I had ever read a book of that size in the past few years. I enjoyed every minute of it. I realized I enjoyed non-fiction books much more than I did fiction, because there was a personal reason for me to read them: I liked to learn. The next book I picked up was Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. The book is a simple introduction to the core aspects of astrophysics (an area I am interested in) for people who aren’t physicists. Once again, I burned through the book in a few weeks.
Today, in college, I continue reading primarily non-fiction books about learning and productivity, but am slowly branching out into other topics like creativity, business and career. More importantly, I enjoy every minute of it. Had I not decided to put my preconceived notions aside I probably would never have picked up another book again.
What it All Means
As I sit back and think about my journey from hating reading to enjoying it on a weekly basis, I ask what other things I may blind to because of the way I was conditioned to think about them. Are there any activities that I have put-off because I was told I’m bad at them? Or anything I haven’t tried because I was told they’re a waste of time? Anything I avoid because of the fear that stuck with me the first time I tried and failed at it? And I realized, there is one thing: Writing.
When I launched this blog last summer, I told myself that I’m not going to dedicate too much of my time to writing. This was because I did not particularly enjoy it, and once again, the reasons were tied to my school days. My writing assignments were all about book reviews, descriptive writing with a list of prompts we had to choose from, and writing exams. It was all too rigid. Though, as I started writing about topics I care about for the blog, something flipped. I began to enjoy brainstorming ideas and sitting down for a couple hours every week to write. My love for the activity was hidden because of what I was taught at a young age.
I criticize the education system here because I’d argue that the majority of our conditioning is done within the classroom. We go to school from the age of around 4 till the age of 18, roughly 9 months out of the year, 5 days a week, 7-8 hours a day. That is a significant proportion of our crucial developmental years spent locked into the education system. (This doesn’t take into account the time we spend outside of class on homework, test preparation and reading). It suffices that a decent chunk of what we believe is most-likely taught to us during that time, some which can make us more narrow-minded and scared of experimenting. It can stop us from trying new things and becoming better versions of ourselves in the process because of our prior experiences or narratives fed to us about a specific topic. It can stop us from finding happiness altogether.
I want to state that I understand other factors can be at play when we talk about what we are conditioned to believe. But, if people took the time to self-reflect, they’d find that school had a lot to do with their beliefs. I’ve heard many stories of people saying they hate a certain subject because of a terrible teacher they had, and I’ve also heard the opposite of how they went into a certain field because of a teacher or peer in their class. School has a massive effect on the way we think that should not be taken lightly.
Conclusion
The point of this entire blog is this: Check your blind spots. Go and try things that you never have before. Get rid of the belief that you aren’t good enough or smart enough to tackle something new. Get rid of the idea that you hate something because of an experience you had or because of what someone said. You never know how you might feel when you reengage with it on your own terms and for your own reasons. You might find a path forward that you never saw before because it was hidden under a pile of preconceived notions. You may find answers you never knew you needed to push forward. You may find people and form relationships that prove valuable to you. The possibilities are limitless.