I read my first book at the age of 6-years and have probably read 1,000+ more since then. Those 1st books showed me worlds I could never have imagined. But now I am getting to the time in my life where I start yelling “Get to the point!”

That might be because I have lived a full and challenging life and therefore don’t need all those extra words now. I still read a couple of books a month whereas before it was two books a week but my tolerance for unnecessary words is now creeping up on me more than ever before.

That is one of the reasons I invented the category “Having My Say – in 500 words or less” years ago. I kinda think getting to the point is now a generational thing. Every morning I read a number of blogs and such that have certain words highlighted in the text that the author thought was important. Often times, when I see the side cursor moving slowly down page because of the article length I start scrolling until I find the next highlighted section.

Finally, getting to the point of this post (yeah I know, BLAH BLAH BLAH), I am beginning to think that even 500 words is sometimes blah, blah, blah. So I am bringing up a new post category for 2026 called “2 the Point – in 200 words or less. I think even for the slowest readers that will be accomplished in a minute or less, and I won’t have to do any highlighting to make that so.

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When I read books in my youth they helped me expand my worldview beyond the small rural homestead where I grew up. I can’t imagine what my life would look like now without all those books in my past. For that reason I hope that the Get-to-the-point mentality is a learned behavior waiting in our adult years and that kids still enjoy the long version of the story.