What if you could read one book a week one book that’s 52 books a year without speed reading. Leaders are readers and if somebody could read fifty-two books a year, they have a huge advantage over somebody who only reads two books a year. The more you read the more you know. That’s the reason why reading is important. In fact, the average person only reads a few books a year while the other average CEO actually reads four or five a month.
So the reason why reading is so powerful is we live in this information age, where the right knowledge is not only power its profit, and I don’t just mean financial profit, that’s obvious.
There’s a divide between those who know and those who don’t know but the beautiful thing about it is we live in an age of not muscle power, it’s mind power and the quicker you can learn the quicker that you could earn.
We live in this knowledge economy but how do you learn most this knowledge. It’s still done through reading. So the challenge is if you have a book and it’s been sitting in your home or on the shelf for so long, that most people don’t get past the first chapter then it becomes shelf help instead of self-help.
If somebody has decades of experience in marketing or sales or leadership or health or relationships or whatever it happens to be and they put it into a book that means you could download decades into days. You could download it into a supercomputer, your quick brain if you will, through the software of just reading right.
Warren Buffett was once asked the key to his success and he says: He reads 500 pages every single day. That’s how knowledge works, it builds up a compound interest but I guarantee not many people will do it.
He devotes approximately 80% of his day just reading.
Most people are the same. If you spend 4 hours reading a day in processing information,
going through emails, website, perspectives, business plans and if you could improve your reading abilities and save 1 hour a day that’s 365 hours or nine 40-hour workweeks. Matching two months of productivity just saving one hour a day and that’s the power of reading.
Now let’s say you didn’t even know how to read faster.
How can you actually go through and read one book a week?
1. Keep a booklist
Every time you find a good book write it down or keep it in your smartphone. Keep an active book list of things that you’re excited about reading.
2. Test your reading speed
Count the number of lines that you read in 60 seconds and that gives you the lines per minute. If you want to test your reading speed, it’s done in words per minute. You could count the number of words in the average line. In most books it’s about 10 words per line, you would just take how many lines you read in a minute and multiply it by 10.
You’ll find that that number comes to approximately 200 to 250 words per minute.
3. Find out how much time you need reading per day
Let’s say you’re reading at about 200 words per minute for this example.
The average number of words per book according to Amazon is approximately 64,000 that
means that it if you’re reading 200 words per minute it takes about 320 minutes to finish a
book cover-to-cover. If you break that down and divide it by 7 that’s approximately 45 minutes of reading a day. That means you could finish a book in average length about
64,000 words reading about 45 minutes a day in 1 week.
4. Schedule your reading
Schedule your reading around a time where you know you could execute on it. Around your peak times, when you’re awake and you’re aware because if you’re tired, you’re not gonna be able to put as much in and you’re not gonna get as much out.
Source Jim Kwik