Yes, I think this is an entire complex and challenging process that kind of gets lost in Kondo's blithe "just accept that you're never going to read that English for Japanese Businessmen book". Some of us, especially those who are good at finding and making stories, are so immersed in our own stories of who we are, have been, or might/will be that it's very hard to untangle it all and find the reality underneath.
For me it was hard numbers that did it: I realized that if I was only reading a couple of books a month, that was about 25 books a year, and in the time it took me to read this year's 25 books, 25 more books I really wanted to read would be published, and so technically I did not need to own any books at all—I could get each year's books from the library as they came out and return them when I was done, and see no reduction and feel no restriction in my reading. In practice I'm still keeping quite a lot of books, because there are other reasons to own a book, but that complete reorientation of my story about myself as a reader, the understanding that I was no longer a teenager reading three books a day or a professional reviewer reading three books a week, was really necessary to the culling process.
no subject
Yes, I think this is an entire complex and challenging process that kind of gets lost in Kondo's blithe "just accept that you're never going to read that English for Japanese Businessmen book". Some of us, especially those who are good at finding and making stories, are so immersed in our own stories of who we are, have been, or might/will be that it's very hard to untangle it all and find the reality underneath.
For me it was hard numbers that did it: I realized that if I was only reading a couple of books a month, that was about 25 books a year, and in the time it took me to read this year's 25 books, 25 more books I really wanted to read would be published, and so technically I did not need to own any books at all—I could get each year's books from the library as they came out and return them when I was done, and see no reduction and feel no restriction in my reading. In practice I'm still keeping quite a lot of books, because there are other reasons to own a book, but that complete reorientation of my story about myself as a reader, the understanding that I was no longer a teenager reading three books a day or a professional reviewer reading three books a week, was really necessary to the culling process.