Read What You Love Until You Love to Read
Whenever someone asks me, “What’s the best way to learn?”, I always return to the same two answers. One, there is no shortcut. You have to sit down and study. Two, read as much as you can. Read everything. Absorb it all.
That’s the whole strategy. It’s not clever. But it works.
I remember when I was younger, my father had his own way of encouraging us to read. He used to give me Nu 10 for every book I finished. Back then, it felt like a clever little trade. One more book meant one more chocolate bar, or a pack of stickers, or if I saved up, a new pencil case. I read because I wanted to make more money. That was the game.
But something happened over time. I stopped keeping count. The books had started to mean something more. The stories were no longer just transactions. They were escapes, companions, provocations. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I forgot about the money and just kept reading.
We live in a time where learning is packaged, polished, and served super fast. It is simplified and algorithmically recommended. But real learning is slower. It’s messy. It takes time to unfold. And reading remains one of the last quiet ways to train your attention and deepen your mind.
Naval Ravikant puts it best,“Read what you love until you love to read.”
At first, this sounds obvious. But it’s actually a radical shift in how most of us were taught to engage with knowledge. We were told what to read, when to read it, and how to interpret it. School turned reading into a chore. And chores kill curiosity.
Start with wherever your attention already is. If you love Sci-Fi, read Sci-Fi. If you're obsessed with manga, start there. If you scroll for hours through niche Reddit threads or long Substack essays, follow that impulse. Because once you develop a real relationship with reading, everything else opens up. The habit forms. The momentum builds and curiosity does the rest.
This kind of reading which is freely chosen and deeply felt does something else too. It helps you develop taste.
The more you read, the more you begin to notice what’s good, what’s lazy, what’s derivative, and what’s timeless. You start to separate signal from noise. You begin to sense what’s original and what’s borrowed. And over time, that becomes part of you. You are not just a reader, but a thinker.
Reading widely also trains you to hold complex ideas. It forces you to wrestle with nuance. It gives you language for things you couldn’t name before. And it humbles you, because the more you read, the more you realize how much you don’t know. That humility, ironically, makes you a better learner. You stop expecting clarity to arrive all at once. You learn to sit with not-knowing.
I don’t believe in learning as a performance. I believe in learning as a way of becoming. And becoming takes time. It’s shaped by repetition and exposure, which is why I always return to those two principles.
There’s no shortcut. And you have to read.
But that doesn’t mean it needs to be painful. In fact, the most reliable way to learn is to follow what lights you up. Read what you love. Again and again. Until, one day, you look back and realize you’ve taught yourself more than anyone else ever could.
And it all started because you gave yourself permission to begin where you are.
Sonam Pelden
Subscribe today to get full access to the website as well as email newsletters, and check out the audio recordings of the articles here