When Warren Buffet was asked about the keys to his success, he pointed to a pile of books and said:
“Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”
Leaders are readers.
It’s such a simple idea.
But it’s amazing how few people take advantage of it.
Devoting the time to read for a few hours a week adds value in more ways than one.
To begin with, readers are better speakers.
Any new idea is nothing more than a new combination of old elements and the ability to make new combinations depends on your ability to see relationships.
Get better at spotting those connections.
Read.
The more dots you'll have to connect, the more creative your ideas will be.
Another benefit is that books stimulate your mind and offer a unique perspective.
When you "get lost in a great book" you get transported to a different place where you can have a conversation with the finest minds of this world.
Walking in their shoes makes you wonder, "What would I have done in that situation?".
The biggest benefit, in case you've missed it, is that books are a valuable form of condensed knowledge.
In walks ROI.
I know, "ROI, what the hell?"
OK, let’s back up for a second.
Return on investment is a measure used to evaluate the return on a given investment relative to its cost.
Reading requires your two most important resources - your time and your attention.
You're on a tight schedule, I get it.
HOWEVER...
And this is a big however, as illustrated in all caps above.
I came across this passage in the book "The Art of Impossible" by the one and only Steven Kotler.
Steve is typing now:
People tell me they don’t read books anymore. Sometimes they read magazine articles. Often blogs. “A book is too much of a commitment” is one comment, frequently heard.
Fair enough, but let’s talk about what you’re getting in return for that commitment. There’s a value proposition at work here. You give an author your time in exchange for their ideas. So let’s break down the exact nature of this trade. We’ll start with blogs. The average adult reading speed is about 250 words per minute.
The average blog post is about 800 words long. This means that most of us read the average blog post in three and a half minutes. So what do you get for those minutes?
Well, in my case, about three days’ worth of effort.
For a typical blog, I usually spend about a day and a half researching a topic and an equal amount of time writing. The research mainly involves reading books and articles. I also talk to experts. If the topic is in my wheelhouse, usually one or two conversations suffice. Outside my wheelhouse kicks that up to three or four. The writing usually requires some more reading and an extra conversation or two and the hard work of putting words together in a straight line.
That’s the value exchange. Your three and a half minutes in exchange for me digesting fifty to one hundred pages’ worth of material, then spending three to five hours talking about it, then spending another day and a half adding in my new ideas and restructuring the whole result into something to read.
Now, let’s look at a long-form magazine article, the kind you would find in Wired or the Atlantic Monthly. These articles are usually about 5,000 words long, meaning it takes the average person twenty minutes to read. So, again, what do you get in return for your twenty minutes?
In my case, you get about a month of research before the actual reporting starts, another six weeks spent reporting, and another six weeks of writing and editing. So, in return for you agreeing to give my words about twenty minutes of your time, you’re getting access to about four months of my brain power, labor, whatever.
I think, if you look at it this way, you’ll see the average magazine article makes for a fairly good trade. Your time as a reader quintuples, but my time as an author has increased thirtyfold—and that’s a fairly incredible bargain. But a book is an entirely different ball game.
Let’s take The Rise of Superman, my book on flow and the science of ultimate human performance. The book is around 75,000 words long, so it takes the average reader about five hours’ worth of effort. So what do you get for your five hours? In the case of Rise, about fifteen years’ worth of my life. Look at these figures listed below: Blogs: Three minutes gets you three days. Articles: Twenty minutes gets you four months. Books: Five hours gets you fifteen years.
So why is it better to read books than blogs? Condensed knowledge. If you go on a blog bender and spend five hours reading my blogs, at three and a half minutes per blog, you’ll manage to slog through about eighty-six of them—thus you’re trading those five hours for 257 days’ worth of my effort.
Meanwhile, if you had spent those same five hours reading Rise, you would have gotten 5,475 days. Books are the most radically condensed form of knowledge on the planet. Every hour you spend with Rise is actually about three years of my life. You just can’t beat numbers like that.
Now you start to see why everyone from tech titans like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to cultural icons like Barack Obama, LeBron James, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Cuban and Warren Buffett credit their success to their incredible passion for books.
Books are where they keep their secrets.
By reading great books, you too, will have a front-row seat to those who transformed the world we live in.
If you’ve read some of my older rants, you know I’m a sucker for reading.
It truly is one of those habits that can yank you up from the depths of ignorance.
At best, it changes your entire life.
P.S. Like what you’re reading here? Well, you have three choices really.
1. Get more stories straight to your inbox. Subscribe in the page footer below.
3. When you are ready to level up, hire me.
Comentarios