The book is not the boss

“Can you help me with this problem?” Adam asked. His math book was open in front of him.

I looked at the problem. I thought about the work that Adam has been doing over the past week. Really hard work from a challenging, well-written math textbook. Work that, at times, brought tears. He had already tackled two dozen problems like this one.

“I can help in a different way,” I said. “Do you think you can let go of the need to do every single problem in the book?”

Adam smiled. He wasn’t expecting that. “I can try,” he said. “But it’s not going to be easy.”

I suggested that Adam “renegotiate his commitments to himself,” as productivity expert David Allen might put it. I turned the page to the next chapter. “Let’s try this instead.”

Fifteen minutes later, Adam was humming along comfortably with a clean slate and a fresh set of problems — including the problem of being okay with calling the shots himself instead of letting the book do it.

After all, the book is an inanimate object. It can’t adapt to our needs on its own, but it can be adapted. We can skip ahead, repeat sections, review a previous chapter, or spend a whole day on just one intriguing problem. A book is a pretty sophisticated piece of tech, in its way.

We run into problems when we let a book — or any other resource — dictate how we feel about ourselves or our progress. We get to decide our own pace, degree of difficulty, and level of investment. Just because a problem is there doesn’t mean we have to do it. And just because a certain problem is next doesn’t mean we have to do it now.

If we have a track record of good work habits, we can treat the book as a buffet. We already know better than to fill a plate with nothing but dessert, but we also need something more substantial than steamed broccoli. We want to find just the right thing to suit our tastes and appetite.

Every student knows they should be working hard. But once that hard work is consistent, the next step is to begin to strategize — and that is less widely known. Not everyone is ready for the “book as buffet” approach, but it can relieve tremendous stress for those who have earned a little treat.