The greatest investor of the 20th century, Warren Buffett, has a table in front of 165 Columbia University students looking at him wide-eyed. One of them raised his hand and asked Buffett how best to prepare for an investment career. After thinking for a second, Buffett took out a stack of papers and trading reports he had brought with him and said, “Read 500 pages every day. That’s how knowledge works. It develops as a hard-to-reach interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee that many of you won’t.” Buffett says that 80% of his work time is spent reading or thinking.
Ask yourself: “Am I reading enough books?” If your honest answer is no, then there is a simple and smart system to help you read more than 30 books a year, which will later help increase this number and get you closer to Warren Buffett.
If you know how to read, then the process is relatively simple. You just need to have time to read and not put it off until later. Easier said than done, of course. However, look at your reading habits: they are mostly reactive, but not active. We read articles on links on Facebook or Vkontakte, posts on Instagram, interviews in magazines, believing that we draw interesting ideas from them. But think about it: they are just exposed to our eyes, we do not need to analyze, think and create. This means that all our new ideas cannot be innovative. They already were.
As a result, most of the reading of a modern person falls on online resources. Yes, we agree, there are many excellent articles on the Internet, but, as a rule, they are not as good in quality as books. In terms of learning and gaining knowledge, it’s better to invest your time in books rather than spending it on sometimes questionable online content.
Imagine a typical picture: you sat down with a book in the evening, turned off the TV, decided to finally go headlong into reading, but suddenly a message comes to your phone, you took it and after half an hour realized that you were already sitting in some public VK. It’s late, it’s time for bed. You have too many distractions. It’s time to change something.
20 pages per day
Believe me, everyone can do it. Read 20 pages a day and gradually increase this number. You may not even notice it yourself, but your brain will want more information, more “food”.
20 is not 500. Most people can read those 20 pages in 30 minutes. You gradually realize that the speed of reading has increased, and in the same 30 minutes you are already reading 25-30 pages. It is ideal to read in the morning if you have time, because then you will not think about it during the day and end up putting the book away for tomorrow.
Realize how much time you are wasting: on social networks, watching TV, even on extraneous thoughts that you can’t get out of your head. Realize it! And you will understand that it is more expedient to spend it with benefit. Do not find excuses for yourself in the form of fatigue. Believe me, a book is the best rest.
So, reading 20 pages every day, you will notice that in 10 weeks you will study about 36 books per year (of course, the number depends on the number of pages in each). Not bad, right?
First hour
How do you spend the first hour of your day?
Most spend it on crazy work fees. And what would happen if you woke up an hour earlier and spent at least half an hour reading, and the rest of the time was not leisurely gathering? How much better will you feel at work, in communication with colleagues and loved ones? Perhaps this is another incentive to finally develop a daily routine. Try to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier.
Before moving on to your regular daily routine, invest in yourself. Before your day turns into a whirlwind of hustle and bustle, read as much as you can. Like most habits that can make a big difference in your life, the benefits of reading won’t become apparent overnight. But this is important, because in this case you will work for yourself, taking small steps towards self-development.
Yes friends. All you need is 20 pages a day. Further more. Tomorrow is better.