A colleague told me a year ago that he loved reading Atomic Habits. He also shared a bunch of things he'd want to pick up as routines to follow. A year later, not much has changed. He didn't have any new habit now that stuck since he read the book.
I'm sure almost everyone in my surrounding have read Atomic Habits but the folks who I find having similar aspiration towards building good habits or routines and are actually doing it are on Instagram and I don't know them personally.
I think reading books (esp. non-fiction titles) for intellectual satisfaction only is the new-age 'watching IG reels' for books. Let me explain.
The average Instagram user now spends about 30 minutes a day on the app, and India leads the world with 400 million users. There's no doubt that the reels format won. You consume tens and hundreds of reels every day; bookmark some, and remember some. And the same trend lives in books. People I know read five to ten business books a year. They post reviews on LinkedIn or an AI-generated summary in groups or X.
Both of these things look productive. Both of them feel productive while you're doing them. Reading and watching feel like learning because they make recall easier. When you finish reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, you can describe System 1 to a friend. Similarly, when you watch a teardown reel of a Dyson V15, you can repeat the headline (cyclonic separators, laser dust detection, the trigger that locks) the next day at work and recommend them to watch the video too. The recall is shallow but it's there.
What actually changes after that is your conversation quality improves. You can now reference things which makes you sound informed at group huddles. People who do this a lot become impressive to talk to as they'd have a take on everything.
But, here's the difference. When you spend an hour with someone who has just finished a blog post on device teardown, they will be able to quote a lot from the reading. On the other hand, when you spend an hour with someone who's just spent a week setting up a Raspberry Pi for a small project will be able to tell you what didn't work during the setup and what to avoid doing. The first individual sounds smarter. The second individual actually is.
Nassim Taleb's whole frame for Skin in the Game is that knowledge without consequence isn't real knowledge. The doctor who has treated a thousand patients knows something the doctor who has read a thousand papers does not.
Now think about what happens if you spend ten years like this.
Taste outruns skill, for a start. When you read about how products should be made faster than you actually make them, you develop opinions you can't yet hold up which means that you can spot what's wrong in someone else's work before you can avoid the same thing in your own.
If you consume for a long time and don't make anything, you slowly become someone who consumes. You can read more books, watch more reels and podcasts, attend more talks, but the gap between what you know and what you can show only gets wider. Thirty minutes a day on reels is roughly 180 hours a year. It's about the time it takes to take a Rs 200 wall clock apart, photograph every part, write it up properly, and publish it.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting the fix to be reading less or watching less. I am suggesting that once you read or watch, have a place to put that learning.
I grew up in my professional life reading Jason Fried's books and Paul Graham's essays and they were insightful, of course. But in reality, they didn't do anything for me. Then I started writing the Godgeez blog. Everything I read today - books, blogs, tweets, an article, etc. become a draft (I have ~300 published blogs today and another ~300 in drafts).
The reels work the same way. I don't consume reels much unless it's a funny one sent by a friend. If I find something useful, I rewatch them or screenshot them. I have them saved in a folder for "things I want to try in the next product" that I actually open frequently to draw a quick scribble in my notebook. The reel feed is not designed for you to use what you watched. It's designed for you to watch the next one. Watch with a build or a project in mind. Watch one thing five times. Pick one technical reel a week and rewatch it until you understand what's happening. Pause at every step. These reels are denser than they look.
And the same goes for reading.
Read with a project running at work or in life. Pick a problem you're stuck on this month and read three things (things. not books) about it. Pick the books where you can find those three things and read the specific chapters or paragraphs that contain the three things. Read with a deadline to apply the learnings. Read once with full attention and then move on, until the project demands a re-read. It'll be more useful.
This is what I mean by input/output. Not that you should consume less. That you should consume into something. What changes when you consume this way is not what you'd guess.
If you start consuming this way, you'll consume less, for a start. Books will take longer because you're stopping to apply them. You'll start skipping reels because they don't fit any folder. The intake volume drops by about half in my experience and the retention doubles, easily.
The conversations will start getting harder too. You can no longer take a clean position on something you haven't tried yourself. You start saying "I don't know yet" more, because what you have read is no longer a substitute for what you have done. This is socially worse and intellectually better.
This is what I want for the readers of Godgeez. Not more reading or more reel-watching. Just more application.