How to Beat FOMO in Reading (4 Strategies) 

I needed this video. Sometimes I start more than one book and then another then another and i want to read them all and it almost paralyzes my reading.

Such insightful points. There's no point in reading as much as possible if we're reading just to check books off a list.

I really agree with the tip to just read more. What feels like fomo often is really the guilt of not spending enough time reading. It was for me, too. I spent much time reading last year and my „fomo“ vanished.

I have been suffering from FOMO about reading books for years, and I ended up buying thousands of books! Thank you for discussing this topic in detail and actually helping me with my FOMO! 🤩

Nice to see you also use Obsidian. I love Obsidian and I do take notes from books in it. But I was not matching my daily pages number. And than I realized it is not about the pages. I could read in 2 hours only 33 pg. But I noted, thinked, processed the input, I was learning. Learning is not directly proportional with reading. This is powerful. Thanks for making me realize that.

You have made some excellent points! I made an account on thestorygraph and entered only the books that are re-reads for me. About 350 as a good sample. The charts helped me determine what I enjoy most in a book. This was emtional, adventurous, dark, mysterious. Plus character driven. This process seemed a logical way to figure out what I like.

I stumbled across this video and your channel tonight and immediately subscribed. This is a great video! Thank you! Looking forward to discovering everything else on your channel 😊

This was a much needed video! My fyp and most of my feed is book recommendations which I'm actually grateful for but it's quite overwhelming, i have downloaded and then deleted a lot of books past 4-5 weeks and it has definitely taken a toll on my joy of reading, it's more chaotic to choose and i haven't even been able to read the genre i used to enjoy.

Good video bro. Your videos have gotten better over time. Keep up the work.

I work full-time, but a few years ago I decided to read 10 pages in the morning of one book and 10 in the evening of another book. This isn't much, I know, but with this method I was able to read 24, 300-page books in a year (sometimes more).

Thank you! Your videos are so pleasant to watch!

Very reassuring advice which I will be following - thank you 🙏

You my friend are amazing, thank you for all the good tips and please keep up the good work❤

Excellent video, as usually. Your channel is one of the best I have found in a longtime.

Wonderful video! I've been doing this for years, but until I saw this, I didn't realize that's what I'm doing. I also like your encouragement to read slowly. You make a good point, if you really learn from and absorb what you read and what you read is excellent, you are getting what you need to from your reading.

Great advice! Pretty much what I am doing this year. Or planning to do.

Love this! I find that having a focus or a purpose really helps me avoid FOMO. I have a channel focused on independent publishers, talking about books that are a bit under-the-radar. Because I want to tell people about books that deserve more attention than they are getting, I feel no temptation to read the latest book that everyone is talking about. I can experience those books through other people's descriptions of them. And then, I can have a very mission-driven approach to my own reading. Or that's the goal, at least. Great topic; thanks for the thoughtful approach!

Thank you! This was very good.

Thank you 🙏 A real needed food for thought. I have a FOMO of information in a book, which makes me sometimes read so slow, that I am loosing the flow and ability to focus. So I have decided to read a good book more then once. The first reading is then a quick skimming of the information without delays. The second time is extracting the important information.

Very helpful. I find bibliographies useful in guiding me to my next books.

so insightful, thank you 👍

Good points all. Here are two techniques I use to determine if I want to read a book: 1) Read the Amazon 3 stars. They'll often give a more balanced view of the book. 2) Three page random read. If it's a good book, random reads of a few pages will give me an idea if it's going to work for me. Of course, I never feel as though I have to finish a book. Even if I'm halfway through and am not feeling it, I'll abandon the book.

It's like going on a vacation - we won't get to every place in the world, it's impossible. All we have to do is to enjoy the moments and the context that we have chosen to please us, and the rest does not matter. You should be happy that you visited 10 new places a year, not sad that you missed the other thousands.

Loved this! Subscribed.

I like to watch book recommendation channels, and if there is one book that get's promoted a lot I'll check it out. I think too, the more you read the better you understand what you enjoy and are looking for-- which makes it easier to spot and pick the next book.

Thanks! Hoping 2024 is a better reading year for me than 2023 was! Can't believe I'm just finding your channel now, excited to see your other videos!

Great video. Because this fear is very real for readers. One strategy I use is to realize there are whole genres I'm not that interested in. Thanks for this!

I'm new to your channel and thanks for this insightful video!

The greatest part of the video was the part where you invited us to imagine entering a bookshop and experiencing FOMO! That alone made me realize some point about myself, thanks!

It helps when you don't read contemporary novels. I'm stuck reading in the 19th century and happy to be so. However, I love contemporary light novels on audio. Good video thank you.

Interesting vid! This is pretty unique to readers, too, this addiction to knowledge.. Architects aren't like, "I have to see every Dutch Colonial ever made!" Artists don't obsessively seek out every piece of art from every medium. Yet as readers, we have this feeling that unless we read everything that exists, we won't understand being human. The trick I think is that no one will ever understand being human, like it's some kind of objective truth, but reading something today will at least give you a silhouette of the full truth. Read today. Don't worry about reading tomorrow.

Good video, one of your best.

Ok, this was REALLY helpful and really good. I’m not just saying this! FOMO is so real but luckily I do read the classics…and yet I still feel fomo to some degree….but you helped me to parse this out. Damn good stuff!

Completely concur with the third point. Though I have not been victim to FOMO, I have made reading a part of my daily discipline. I see reading as a workout for my brain, if I am putting in an hour on average every day then I am doing well enough. Knowing that I am doing what is in my hands to do is one way of achieving contentment, which leaves no room FOMO.

Om my goodness, that was great. I'm a 72 year old woman who has been an avid reader since tge age of 5!, and yes I am a sufferer of book FOMO. I walk into a Waterstones and I run around like Tom and Jerry, piling up the books on the counter. Only when I get home and realise these books (on the whole) are rubbish, I feel bad. I know the genesis like......so why the blazes do I buy other genres!?! So I will watch your vid numerous times, especially before going into my second home, Waterstones in Wells. I'm also going to read one book at a time, and slower. Thank you so much. Its also lovely to have someone from the UK talking about books. Jx

This channel MUST grow

I do extensive notes as well, doing the painful job of summarizing the book with as much detail i possibly can fit in. Needless to say i read 3 times slower than i could, but i don’t know a better way to learn👍

My method to increase the number of finished books is listening to audiobooks at from 2 to 4 times the speed of recording, depending on the narrator's speed. I sometimes need to slow down to x2, there were a few books I was comfortably listening to at x4. On average, x2.5 is my usual speed. I use it for fiction books read/listened to solely for pleasure or for non-ficiton books I'm going to read later and I use the audiobook version to familiarise myself with a book initially so I can dive more deeply and take notes later while reading. This strategy (reading books I want to learn from and listening to books for pleasure) has allowed me to finish 100+ books a year for the past 4 years. I finished 2023 with over 130 read/listened to books. To anybody interested in trying, may I suggest increasing the speed slightly and making sure you're not missing anything, getting used to it and then increasing the speed again. I listened to a 13-book series in 2 weeks in December and it was like binging a TV show.

How to Read a Book by Adler is a good one. Currently reading Walt Whitman’s America by Reynolds. Picked up The Betrothed by Manzoni the penguin classics edition and a new translation by Michael F Moore. I always have a hard time deciding on which translation to use. New subscriber

I like the "make fomo irrational" idea. A lot. A couple of months ago I discovered booktube (soso so behind the times) and I had to remind myself that some people consume content to put it back out into the world. I am not doing that. I am reading for enjoyment in the evening. My competitive side came out a few times and I was trying to figure out how to read 200+ books in a year - while maintaining my current relationships and hobbies. It would be untenable. I like my life. The change I'm making is that I'll have a Kindle and a reading journal. I really like reflecting on previous books but since most of them actually live at the library I makes notes.

Thank you

Please advise, my English is basic, is it hard to read Fomo?

Bow to choose good books?

Very good advice, i stick mostly to the classics, i read two or three books at a time, its worked for me, and i can highly recommend a youtuber, Benjamin McEvoy, to direct you in the right path.

Please become an actor so I can watch you save the world! We deserve it!

I tend to go deep in a subject, not wide. Therefore if the book is in one of my main interests I will read it. But I will probably pass if it is not-unless it is a truly great book that is a solid choice and widely recognized

I wanna start reading but I don’t know where to start

one of the problems is FOMO and buying books.. my TBR (in paper ) is around 3000 lol :\ and I do read a lot, around 120 books per year but my TBR is increasing. My goal of 2024 is buy less than read...

I read between 80 to.135 books in year.

I only read the very best books

New fear unlocked

Meditations really is a great book. I remember my last year Summer blasting Air Suite No 1 by Bach and reading it while chilling out.

I love books but I am not going to get old and think I should have read more books, hopefully I will get old and think I have lived life, loved people, not books

Books read for learning must be read slower and more carefully than novels. Imo

I listen to audio books at 5x tempo and Alvin and the Chipmunks reading Moby Dick is deeply weird.

"Most books suck" - 😄

I need an AI brain.

Most books are crap

Incredibly stupid advice.

Most self-help books are garbage and derived from better source material. Most fantasy is not very good. Most books are garbage and written by people who don't read very much. Its rewarding when you find an author whose work you like. Read widely. Mix it up. Mix classics with horror and philosophy and history books and psychology. The advice in the video is very good. Many thanks.

another way of narrowing down books that you may have thought were interesting but have a average rating of under 3 stars (or 3.5 if you have the heart to) on online platforms🫢 so instead of just going for what has the most praise, you also know what to "avoid" i.e. books that you deem are not worth your time based on the ratings :) i think there is some merit in reading mediocre books (when it comes to fiction at least) because i feel that saying all books which are not exceptional by our own standards, should be rendered useless a bit unfair. they can in some way be helpful when figuring out what exactly does & does not work. nevertheless, i agree with the gist of what your stating since some people may be overwhelmed and want to extract every bit of wisdom from every book they encounter which is - as you say - irrational. this video will help a lot of my friends asw, tysm !!