On losing the reading habit, rediscovering it, and the pages that hold you together when everything else falls apart
There was a time when I was reading two books a month. Not skimming. Actually reading, underlining things, folding pages, arguing with the author in the margins. Then life got busy. Graduate school, job hunting, the daily grind of becoming someone and slowly, the books disappeared from my routine.
Now? I'm lucky if I finish one every three or four months. And I used to tell myself that's just life. But somewhere along the way I realised that "life happens" is often just a polished excuse, a comfortable way to not look too hard at the choices you're quietly making every day.
So instead of forcing myself back into a reading schedule I know I'll break, I've found something that actually works: a small shelf of books I return to again and again. Not from page one. Not chapter by chapter. I open them randomly, wherever the pages fall and I start there. And almost every time, what I find feels like exactly what I needed to hear at that moment.
The books I keep returning to are the Bhagavad Gita, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, Nothing Is Impossible, and The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy. These aren't trendy reads. Their ideas have outlived every trend, because they speak to something that doesn't change, the human struggle to believe in yourself when everything around you is telling you otherwise.
Why We Stop Reading (And Why That's Worth Examining)
Reading a book isn't passive. It asks something of you, attention, stillness, the willingness to sit with an idea longer than a 60-second video allows. In a world engineered to keep you distracted, that's genuinely hard. And when you're at a low point, struggling, grinding, feeling like you're running on empty, picking up a book can feel like the last thing you have energy for.
But here's the paradox: those low points are exactly when these books earn their place. Not because they fix anything. But because they remind you that you already have what you need to fix it yourself.
The Four Books I Keep Coming Back To
📖 The Bhagavad Gita - A 2,000-year-old conversation about duty, identity, and action that somehow speaks directly to whatever crisis you're in right now. It doesn't give you easy answers. It gives you the right questions.
✨ The Secret (Rhonda Byrne) - About the law of attraction and the creative power of thought. People who've been at rock bottom and climbed out will tell you it changed something in how they think.
🧠The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (Joseph Murphy) - One of the most quietly practical books ever written. It explains, in plain language, how the stories you tell yourself below the surface shape everything above it.
💡 Nothing Is Impossible - A reminder, sometimes that's all you need. When you're deep in it, the lie you believe most is that your situation is permanent. This book pushes back on that lie, hard.
The Three Steps from The Secret That Actually Work
Right now I'm spending time with The Secret, and there's one chapter I keep revisiting, the one about the creative process. Rhonda Byrne lays it out in three steps. It sounds almost too simple at first. But when you sit with it honestly, really honestly, each step asks more of you than it initially appears.
Step 1 - Ask: Know What You Want Before You Ask For It
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We walk around with a fog of wants, I want a better job, I want more money, I want to feel less stressed, I want things to be different, but fog isn't a request. It's noise. And you can't ask for something you haven't clearly defined, because some part of you is always pulling in multiple directions at once.
So before you ask, you have to get quiet enough to figure out what you actually want. Sit down with a pen and paper, not your phone, not a laptop and write it out in the present tense, as if it's already real. The book suggests starting with: "I am so happy and grateful now that…" and then finishing that sentence with specificity. Not "I want a good career" but what that career looks like, feels like, pays like. Not "I want to be happy" but what your days look like when you are.
The ask only works when it comes from a place of clarity and certainty. Not desperation. Not confusion. Not "I think I want this, maybe, if it works out." You have to mean it, fully, without a second doubt. Because a divided mind sends a divided signal. And a divided signal gets a divided result.
Ask once. Ask clearly. Then let it go.
Step 2 - Believe: Close the Gap Between Wanting and Knowing
If asking is the hardest step to do right, believing is the hardest step to sustain.
Because here's the thing, most of us believe in our desires and our doubts simultaneously. We want the job and we quietly believe we won't get it. We want the relationship and we secretly think we don't deserve it. We ask, and then immediately start mentally preparing for disappointment. That's not belief. That's hedging. And hedging is just fear wearing a practical disguise.
Belief, in the way this book means it, is a decision. It's the decision to act as if what you've asked for is already on its way, not someday, not maybe, but certainly. The book compares it to placing an order from a catalogue. You choose what you want, you submit the order, and then you don't spend the next three weeks in panic wondering if it'll arrive. You trust the process. You get on with your life.
That trust, that unwavering, almost unreasonable certainty, is what shifts something internally. It changes how you carry yourself. It changes what you notice. It changes the energy you bring into rooms, into conversations, into opportunities. People can feel the difference between someone who's desperate and someone who knows their worth. Between someone who needs a yes and someone who's simply expecting one.
You don't have to understand why belief works. You just have to decide that doubt isn't serving you and choose differently.
Step 3 - Receive: Feel It Before It Arrives
This is the step that sounds the most abstract, and it's also the one that quietly changes everything.
Receiving isn't about waiting. It's not about sitting back and hoping things fall into place. It's about deliberately putting yourself in the emotional state of someone who already has what they asked for and living from that state right now.
Think about a time when something you deeply wanted finally came through. That feeling, the lightness, the energy, the sense that the world is working with you rather than against you, that's the frequency the book is talking about. And here's what's interesting: you don't need the thing to arrive in order to access that feeling. You can choose it now. Not as a performance for the world. Not as fake positivity plastered over real pain. But as a genuine, practiced decision to orient yourself toward what's coming rather than what's missing.
The book suggests saying to yourself: "I am receiving now. I am receiving all the good in my life now." And then feeling it, actually feeling it, not just reciting it. Let yourself smile at the idea of it. Let yourself feel the gratitude ahead of time. Walk into your day as if you're already the person you're becoming.
Why does this matter practically? Because when you feel good, you show up differently. You have better conversations. You take better risks. You notice the door that was always there but that you were too anxious to see. You become magnetic to the very things you're asking for, not through magic, but through the very real shift in how you move through the world when you're not operating from fear.
Feel it now. Trust it's coming. Receive it before it arrives.
"Your current situation does not describe who you are, it describes who you were." - The Secret, Rhonda Byrne
What These Books Share - And Why It Matters When You're Struggling
The Gita tells you to act without attachment to outcomes. Murphy tells you to feed your subconscious the right images. The Secret tells you to feel your way toward what you want. They come from different traditions, different centuries, different worldviews but they all orbit the same truth: your inner world shapes your outer one. And you have more control over your inner world than you've been led to believe.
When life feels like it's happening to you, when rejection piles up, when progress stalls, when the gap between where you are and where you want to be feels humiliating, these books don't hand you a shortcut. But they hand you agency. They remind you that the way you interpret your circumstances is a choice. A hard one. But a choice.
The person who believes they're worth it, who shows up with energy rather than desperation, who keeps their mind on what they're building rather than what they're lacking, that person just does better. In interviews. In rooms. In the quiet moments when they have to decide whether to keep going.
How to Actually Use These Books (Without Finishing Them)
Here's the method I've landed on, and it might work for you too. You don't have to read these cover to cover. You don't have to schedule reading time you'll inevitably cancel.
Just pick one up. Open it somewhere in the middle, wherever it falls. Read two pages. That's it. Sometimes it's exactly what you needed. Sometimes it's a reminder of something you forgot you already knew. Sometimes it opens a question you carry around for the rest of the day and that ends up being the most useful thing that happened to you.
These books weren't written to be consumed. They were written to be lived with. Return to them when the noise gets too loud. Return to them when you need to remember your own roots, who you were before the stress and the hustle and the constant comparison started convincing you that you're behind.
Life will keep happening. It always does. The question is whether you have something to come back to, some anchor, some page that reminds you who you actually are when everything else is trying to tell you otherwise.
For me, that's these four books. Your shelf might look different. But you need a shelf.
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