Somewhere along the way I came across a simple demonstration. Someone asked another person to read at a normal pace for two minutes. By the time the two minutes were up, the reader had gotten through three pages. A page a minute, give or take, depending on how dense the text is. That’s it. That’s the whole math problem.
But when you start extrapolating it, the numbers get interesting fast. Ten pages a day is three hundred pages a month — roughly the length of an average novel or non-fiction book. It’s three thousand six hundred and fifty pages a year. Given the right books, that could be ten or more titles in twelve months. Most people say they want to read more but don’t have the time or the patience. Ten minutes a day is less time than it takes to get in line, order a coffee, and sometimes receive it. It’s certainly less than the time it takes to drink it.
That’s the routine. Ten pages or ten minutes, whichever comes first. Every day.
The other thing the framing does — and this took me a while to appreciate — is give you an easy out when a section isn’t landing. Some books drag. Some chapters are a slog. Committing to just ten pages means you only have to get through the next ten. It’s the same logic as a hard set at the gym. You don’t have to love rep eight or nine. You just have to get to ten. Then you’re done. You showed up. That’s the whole job.
What Reading Does That Watching Doesn’t
There’s a version of this argument that goes something like: reading uses more of your brain than watching a video, therefore it sticks better. That’s not quite right — video gives you more sensory input, not less. What reading actually does is demand more cognitive engagement. You are the engine. The book doesn’t play in the background. It doesn’t pad for time. It doesn’t optimize for an algorithm or cut away when the pacing slows. It just sits there, waiting for you to do the work of moving through it.
That effort is the point. There’s something about having to work for information that makes you value it differently. When you have to construct the mental image yourself, when you have to follow the argument through its own logic rather than having it delivered to you with music and editing and a presenter who’s already processed it on your behalf — you pay a different kind of attention. You are not an audience. You are a participant.
Most books also can’t survive on clickbait. A video can make a single interesting point and pad the rest with recaps and b-roll and personality. A chapter has to earn its thesis. It has to explain the idea, build the case, offer the evidence, connect it to the next idea. That structure — which can feel slow compared to the dopamine hits of a well-edited video — is exactly what gives you the tools to actually use the information afterward. Clickbait is an argument without cognitive substance. A chapter is an understanding. And understanding is what lets you explain something to someone else, apply it to a problem, or build on it the next time you encounter it.
I’ve watched plenty of videos about topics I care about and found, weeks later, that I could recall the vibe of the video but not the content. I’ve read books about the same topics and found myself explaining the ideas to other people with a clarity I didn’t know I had until I opened my mouth. The information went somewhere different. It got processed rather than consumed.
Reading Is A Muscle
The ten pages or ten minutes routine isn’t strictly about non-fiction or self-improvement or any particular category of book. Reading is a muscle, and any reading strengthens it. Fiction, long-form essays, whatever you’ll actually do. The goal is the habit, and the habit is the consistency of showing up and doing the active work of moving through text.
The passive alternatives are easier. They’re designed to be easier — that’s the whole business model. And easier is fine for a lot of things. But if you want to actually learn something, to absorb it in a way that lets you use it rather than just reference having encountered it, the effort is the feature, not the bug.
Ten minutes a day. That’s it. You almost certainly have ten minutes. The coffee is probably still hot.