I Haven’t Finished the Two Books That Were Supposed to Fix Me. I’m Not Giving Up on Them Either.

There are two books on my shelf with a bookmark stuck around the one-quarter mark, and they’ve been sitting like that for a long time.

Atomic Habits. Deep Work.

I didn’t abandon them because they were bad. That’s the part that took me a while to understand. Bad books are easy to quit — you feel a little smug about it, even, like you’ve dodged a waste of time. These two are the opposite. I quit them and felt like I was the waste.

The books weren’t the point. The person was.

I need to be honest about why I bought them, because it explains the guilt.

I didn’t buy Atomic Habits and Deep Work the way you buy a novel — for the story, for a good evening. I bought them the way you buy a gym membership in January. They were a down payment on a version of myself. The person who works with real focus. The person who builds discipline out of small daily things instead of waiting to feel motivated.

I believe in that person, genuinely. I’ve lived enough of both work and life to be sure of one thing: you can get away with not being the smartest person in the room, but you almost never get away with a lack of focus and discipline. Nobody fails at the start for not being clever enough. They fail, slowly, for not doing the thing they already know they should do.

That’s the trap, though. Knowing it and doing it are two completely different countries. I know the whole map of the first one. I keep failing to move to the second.

So when I bought those two books, I wasn’t buying information. I was buying a promise to myself. And a quarter of the way into each, the promise just… stopped. I didn’t decide to quit. I just drifted off, the way I drift off from the discipline the books are about — which is its own small, private joke I didn’t find funny at the time.

Why the guilt hit differently

Every article about not finishing books says the same reassuring thing: it’s fine to quit a book that isn’t working for you, you have permission, life’s too short, put it down.

And they’re right, for the books they’re talking about. But they’re all talking about bad books. Books that let you down.

Nobody’s talking about the guilt of quitting a good book — one you chose on purpose, one that’s genuinely well made, one that represents exactly the person you were trying to become. That guilt is a different animal. It isn’t “this book failed me.” It’s “I failed the version of me who was going to finish this.”

That’s the thing I was actually carrying. Not two unread books. A quiet piece of evidence that I say I want discipline and then don’t practice it. The bookmark at page sixty wasn’t a bookmark. It was a receipt.

What I actually changed — and it wasn’t quitting

Here’s where I part ways with every “just DNF it and move on” article, because that advice would have made it worse for me, not better.

I didn’t need permission to quit these books. Quitting them for good would have felt like officially closing the file on the person I want to be. What I needed was permission to stop treating a stalled book as a verdict.

So I changed two things, and neither one is “give up.”

I killed the imaginary deadline. There was never a real one. No one is waiting for me to finish Deep Work. The pressure was entirely invented by me, and inventing pressure is a strange way to punish yourself for something no one asked you to do. The book will be exactly as useful to me next spring as it is now. Nothing expires.

And I separated the book from the self-judgment. I have not finished Atomic Habits. That is a true and completely neutral fact. The story I’d wrapped around it — that unfinished book means undisciplined person means I’ll never get where I want to go — that part I made up, and I can un-make it. A stalled book is not a character flaw. It’s a stalled book.

Where I actually am with them

I want to be clear about something, because it’s the whole point and it’s where most of these articles would tell me I’m doing it wrong: I am not quitting these books.

They’re still on the shelf, bookmarks still in. I still intend to read them. Not because I should, and not on a deadline — but because the person I want to be is still someone I’m walking toward, slowly, and those two books are still part of that walk. I’ve just stopped needing to arrive by a certain date to prove I’m allowed to be on the road.

Some months I open one of them. Some months I don’t. Both are fine now, which is new. The bookmark used to make me flinch. Now it’s just a bookmark, holding my place in a thing I haven’t gotten to yet — not a monument to a person I failed to become. The same thing happened to me with remembering what I read — I’d turned it into a test I was quietly failing, until I stopped keeping score there too.

If you’ve got a book like that — the one you wanted to love, that was supposed to fix something in you, and it’s sitting there un-finished and making you feel like less — I’d gently offer you the same split I gave myself. You’re allowed to not have finished it. You’re also allowed to not give up on it. Those two things can be true at the same time. They are for me.

— Still Set

I write about reading, work, and the quiet gap between the person we mean to be and the person we manage to be on a Tuesday night.