My friends and colleagues often ask me how I manage to find so much time for reading while having a full-time job and managing my household chores.
For starters, I hardly watch television. I don’t even have a cable television connection. I get all my desired content on Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime. I watch only those select few movies, documentaries, and shows that truly pique my interest. I ensure that I don’t spend a lot of time commuting to my workplace. I live in an area where I can walk to the grocery store, finish my purchases, and return home in less than twenty minutes. I have fully automated the monthly payments online for my phone, electricity, Internet, utilities, and meal plan bills.
All these choices are deliberate.
If you assume that the average person spends two hours a day watching television, an hour for commuting, and another two hours a week shopping, that adds up to twenty-three hours a week.
Twenty-three hours. That is 1,380 minutes. That is a lot of time. If you read a page in two minutes, that’s almost seven hundred pages a week. Do seven hundred pages a week sound like too much for you? Well, how about just twenty-five pages a day? Shane Parrish writes:
While most of us don’t have the time to read a whole book in one sitting, we do have the time to read 25 pages a day. Reading the right books, even if it’s a few pages a day, is one of the best ways to ensure that you go to bed a little smarter than you woke up.
Twenty-five pages a day doesn’t sound like much, but this commitment adds up over time. Let’s say that two days out of each month, you probably won’t have time to read. Plus Christmas. That gives you 340 days a year of solid reading time. If you read 25 pages a day for 340 days, that’s 8,500 pages. 8,500. What I have also found is that when I commit to a minimum of 25 pages, I almost always read more. So let’s call the 8,500 pages 10,000. (I only need to extend the daily 25 pages into 30 to get there.)
With 10,000 pages a year, at a general pace of 25/day, what can we get done?
Well, The Power Broker is 1,100 pages. The four LBJ books written by Robert Caro are collectively 3,552 pages. Tolstoy’s two masterpieces—War and Peace, and Anna Karenina—come in at a combined 2,160. Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is six volumes and runs to about 3,660 pages. That’s 10,472 pages.
That means, in about one year, at a modest pace of 25 pages a day, you’d have knocked out 13 masterful works and learned an enormous amount about the history of the world. In one year!
That leaves the following year to read Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1,280), Carl Sandburg’s Six Volumes on Lincoln (2,000), Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations unabridged (1,200), and Boswell’s Johnson (1,300), with plenty of pages left to read something else.
This is how the great works get read: day by day, 25 pages at a time. No excuses…
The point of assigning yourself a certain amount of reading every day is to create a deeply held habit. The 25-pages-a-day thing is a habit-former!…
…Read what seems awesome and interesting to you now and let your curiosities grow organically. A lifelong interest in truth, reality, and knowledge will lead you down so many paths, you should never need to force yourself to read anything unless there is a very, very specific reason. (Perhaps to learn a specific skill for a job.)
Not only is this approach way more fun, but it works really, really well. It keeps you reading. It keeps you interested. And in the words of Nassim Taleb, “Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction; magnified by attempts to satisfy it.”
Thus, paradoxically, as you read more books, your pile of unread books will get larger, not smaller. That’s because your curiosity will grow with every great read.
This is the path of the lifelong learner.5
This is compounding wisdom in action. This is how you become smarter. You must value your time very highly.
You’ve got to keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.
—Warren Buffett
A Passion for Reading and Learning
The purpose of reading is not just raw knowledge. It’s that it is part of the human experience. It helps you find meaning, understand yourself, and make your life better.
—Ryan Holiday
I read to increase knowledge. I read to find meaning. I read for a better understanding of others and myself. I read to discover. I read to make my life better. I read to make fewer mistakes.
To paraphrase David Ogilvy, reading and learning is “a priceless opportunity to furnish our mind and enrich the quality of our life.”
Wherever I go, a book is not far behind. It might be on my phone or a physical copy, but a book is always close by. (I love printed books. I just find something so calming and peaceful about reading a paperback or hardcover book.) During my initial years in America, when I had to commute long distances to reach my workplace, I used to read books on my seat in the bus to ensure that not a single minute was wasted during my learning and development phase.
Finding time to read is easier than you might think. Waiting for a bus? Stop staring down the street and read. Waiting for a taxi? Read. On the train? Read. On the plane? Read. Waiting at the airport for your flight? Read.
Reading alone, however, isn’t enough to improve your knowledge. Learning something insightful requires work. You have to read something above your current level. You need to find writers who are more knowledgeable on a particular subject than you are. This is how you become more intelligent. Reach out to and associate with people better than you and you cannot help but improve.
A lot of people confuse knowing the name of something with understanding it.
This is a good heuristic: Anything effortlessly digested means that you are reading for information. For example, the job of the news media is to inform us about day-to-day events, to entertain us, to reflect the public moods and sentiments of the moment, and to print stories that will interest us today and that we will want to read.
But that’s exactly what creates problems for readers, who often succumb to the recency and availability biases that “news” creates. The same applies to social media. The feeds we take in are characterized by recency bias. Most of what we consume is less than twenty-four hours old. Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about what we consume: Is this important? Is this going to stand the test of time for even a year?
As you grow older and become more mature, you realize that not everything deserves a response. This truth applies to most things in life and almost everything in the news.
We’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.
—Nicholas Carr
The true scarce commodity of the near future will be human attention.
—Satya Nadella
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
—Herbert Simon
In my view, studying old newspapers is a far more productive exercise than reading today’s newspaper. (Buffett likes to call it “instructive art.”) Morgan Housel writes:
Every piece of financial news you read should be filtered by asking the question, “Will I still care about this in a year? Five years? Ten years?” The goal of information should be to help you make better decisions