Ever wanted to read a lot of books? But never got to it? I’ve read around 250 books in the last 4 years, how about I help you get going?
One of the major reason’s is a lack of motivation. It doesn’t mean you’re a lazy person or procrastinate a lot. You may be a high performer in your chosen field. You put in your fair share of driven dedicated work every day but when it comes to books you feel like you’ve switched time-zones to midnight? Somehow CEO’s of the largest companies, Innovators and even Olympic athletes are able to push through this. Reading is one of the most common habits of the people at the top of their field.So it definitely is a habit you want to acquire but you’ve been having trouble with it.
Here are some proposed solutions :
Reading is difficult / Takes too much time?
Ever waited in line at your local store to checkout and the person slowly takes out change and exchanges items in his cart, for what seems an eternity? What if I told you that was all the time you need to read as many books in the image below:
There’s no catch here. The solution here is visualization and consistency.
Consistency : read at a rate of 10 pages a day
Visualization : Seeing how many books you will be able to read vs if you don’t. The knowledge, the perspectives, the life changing attitudes you’ll miss out or probably find out late in life with your own experience.
10 pages a day rule
Here’s something you’ll have to do at your end to figure out how much time you’ll need to read 10 pages. You’ll need to know how fast you read, don’t worry that speed goes up over time. Set a timer for 1 minute on your phone/ watch, Pick up a book that you’ve got near you(or scroll up to the top of this article). Start the timer and start reading.
At the end of the minute see how many lines you’ve completed. The average book page has 25 lines. So all you have to do is count the number of lines you’ve completed and divide 250 by that number.
Suppose you were able to read 5 lines in 1 minute. So 250/5 = 50. You’ll need 50 minutes a day to finish 10 pages. If you read over 10 lines It’ll take you less than 25 minutes, or about as long as it takes for everyone to finish saying “can you hear my voice” on a zoom call.
Most people never read a book after graduating! On average that comes out to about 1 book every 2 years. Shocking but that’s not very hard to believe, right.
So the first way to read a lot of books and get value from them is consistency of 10 pages a day. Just doing that for a year adds up to 3650 pages or about 15 books!
It also means that you can now think with 15 different perspectives. Your knowledge about things you really wanted to know has grown in 15 dimensions and what does it take? For most people it will be less than the average 22 minute sitcom episode?
Visualization of reading vs not reading.
Lets assume you work in IT right now but you were also really passionate about writing poetry. But you didn’t pursue that because of whatever reason. Now imagine you start reading one of the most established Poet’s biography for motivation. Then a guide book to improve your writing.
With no stress, just doing 10 pages a day. Small enough for you to absorb all the content and large enough that you would have learnt something you can practice.
At the end of the year you would have read 15 books worth. That, in most cases puts you in the top 50% of most skills. In a few years you would have reached 50+ books. Implementing what you’ve learnt and the huge amount of information that only the top 5% in world have in that field. That is more than twice the amount of books the average person will read in his life after graduation. 100% ahead of the crowd.
By the end of the decade you would have finished 150 and by the time you spend a career’s worth of years; doing this on the side. Remember, at just 10 pages a day you would have finished as many books as you can see in the below image possibly more.
This makes you an expert, the 0.01% of your field. You’ll might even write some books on the topic yourself. Even in a quarter of that time you would be knowledgeable enough to make money with your passion that you have so much knowledge that your expertise would be required. All that, possible with not 18 hour work days, but by spending only 20 minutes of your day, less than many people take to shower, to read 10 pages a day. If you learn’t that much about rockets you might actually be consultant helping land the first manned mission to MARS!
What happens if you remain like the average person, and finish 1 book every two years like the average person. At the end of your life the total number of books that you read will amount to 25, what does that look like in comparison?
Just scroll up to the previous image of the enormous bookshelf, look for a highlighted box, that it!
If you like charts here’s the above visualized in a bar chart.
A few tactical points that’ll help you especially if you’re starting out:
- Pick a book about something you’re very interested in
- Don’t read more than one book at a time to cover up
- Try to read at the same time every day (e.g 30 mins as soon as you wake up)
- Checkout reviews of the book to make sure its about what you really think it is (like reviews over here : Down The Book Lane Reviews)
- Share what you learn so you can have conversations about and concretize the topic in your mind.
What are some other reasons for why you/or someone you know couldn’t read that many books, I’d like to hear them and possibly help address those.
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