I could never seem to read as fast as my best friend.
When we would spend time reading at weekends, he seemed to devour one book after another while I slowly chugged through. What took him hours to read might take me days.
I began to borrow his books rather than read my own in the misguided belief that it was his books, rather than his reading skills, that governed how quickly he could read. That didn’t help: I read his books at my own dogged pace and concluded (falsely) that he would just always be a faster reader.
I believed this fallacy for the next 20 years. As I advanced through college, and as the length and complexity of the texts I read increased, it took me longer and longer to complete assignments. I just accepted as fact that it would take me a long time to read anything, and I spent hours every night trying to finish my work. I had falsely accepted the fact that my reading pace was fixed; I wasn’t aware that it could be improved.