Hit them hard, hit them fast, and hit them a lot

A common criticism of fiction novelists is, all their books are the same.

Each time you crack open a new title, you’re reading a different story, but with the same characters doing almost the same thing as the previous installation. After five or six books, you can see the plot twists coming from a mile away.

But in my experience, this is a feature, not a bug.

Because as a reader, predictability is precisely what I want my authors to deliver. I want to read the exact same book over and over again. It’s truly a gift when novelist do this, and I’ll explain why.

Here’s a case study.

Reacher is my favorite fictional of character. Jack is a retired military policeman, who roams the country, taking odd jobs and investigating suspicious and frequently dangerous situations. I have read dozens of books about this guy, many of them three or four times a piece, and every story follows roughly the same plot.

Reacher walks into town. A bad guy mildly insults him. Jack makes one of those foreboding comments like, nobody throws my friends out of helicopters and live to tell the tale. The more he walks around town, he discovers that the bad guy he beat up and his crew are doing something evil to some innocent party. Reacher gets angry.

He beats up five henchmen in less than a minute, snapping their limbs like rotten twigs. Then he grumbles some more badass cowboy shit like, hit them hard, hit them fast, and hit them a lot. After the fight, he quietly eats pancakes, sausage and eggs at a greasy diner, along with an entire pot of black coffee. Next he buys new clothes at a thrift store. At some point he gets a girl who is young and lithe.

Towards the end of the book, there will be big battle, where he clobbers the remainder of the bad guys. But not before dropping his final nugget of wisdom, something like, the best fights are the one you don’t have. Reacher then limps away unscathed and out of town without a backwards look. Credits.

Wow, these books are just so perfect. You couldn’t ask for anything more.

But let me share the real reason why they are such a gift to me.

Because I only read these books at night. Reacher is strictly before bed material.

See, this is more than simply my nighttime ritual, it’s a health and wellbeing strategy. Which mainly has to do with sleep hygiene. There are fifty to seventy million people with ongoing sleep disorders in this country. According to the centers for disease control, not getting enough sleep is linked with chronic diseases and conditions like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and depression.

In light of that, I am hyper intentional about my sleep hygiene. I don’t mess around when it comes to getting my zees. Hence the reading. And so, with this particular series of fiction novels, the predictability is comforting and enjoyable.

The moment I lay my head on my pillow, I instantly immerse myself in a world that I know well. It’s not an overstimulating activity. I’m not working too hard to process new information. I’m not so eager to find out what happens next, that I stay up for several hours reading. I’m just focused enough to block out my racing thoughts, but also soothe my mind and reduce cognitive load.

Reacher books signal to my brain, okay, it’s time to wind down the day. Let’s shift from a state of alertness to a state of relaxation. The consistent routine reinforces the association between reading and sleep. And on most nights, within ten minutes, I am out like a light.

Do you think I care if the critics and readers call these books repetitive trash? Not one bit. The novels solve a real, urgent, pervasive and expensive problem for me.

Every time I spend ten dollars on one of those books, I am hiring it to do a job.

Startups often call this the job to do theory. Founders claim people buy their products and services because they are trying to accomplish some kind of goal in their lives. They are hiring the software app or the phone or the cleaning service to execute a task to create progress.

Reacher does that for me. I hire him to help me go to sleep. Do you have something in your life that does that? Are you willing to look past something’s faults because the upside is so great?

As the military policeman also once said, always have a penny in your pocket, because you never know when you’re going to need it to unscrew a pair of license plates.

Do you personalize the routines that suit your unique needs and preferences, or do you internalize popular wisdom as absolute truth?