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The Power of Setting Lower Expectations
If you don’t expect anything, even the minimum will be enough.
I started reading a popular fantasy saga of eight books because everyone around me told me it was the best set of books they had read in their lives. With 4.21/5 on Goodreads for the first book with one million reviewers, I felt like I was going to read a master piece, and I was extremely excited for this journey.
But I started reading the first book and I find it boring.
There was nothing special about this book, and the 16-year-old protagonist drove me crazy. I spent three months picking it up and putting it down before finally finishing it. For someone who reads at least eight books a month, this was incredibly worrying. This had never happened to me with a book before. In the end, I rated it 2/5.
Everyone around me told me I should keep going, since the first book was more of an introduction to the world to give you context for the protagonist’s past, and that the best was yet to come.
I believed them and kept going. The protagonist improved a little, but again, for the next book, I didn’t find anything special about the saga. My expectations were too high, and I was reading a normal book.
