On high-volume reading, the simple path to wealth, making your anger work for you and more
4 new ideas on better living
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I’m Thomas. My goal is to help you master the best of what great thinkers, top performers, psychologists, philosophers and behavioural scientists have already figured out. All courses and books at Perennial Learner.
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Now onto today’s post.
The most successful people are usually high-volume readers
For many of the most successful people alive, reading is not just a hobby; it’s a way of life. From business leaders and political figures to celebrities and regular Joes, the world’s most successful people are high-volume readers.
Warren Buffet spends about almost 8 hours a day reading. The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham is one of his favourite books.
Mark Cuban reads for more than three hours almost every day.
He said in his book, How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It, “To this day, I feel like if I put in enough time consuming all the information available, particularly with the internet making it so readily accessible, I can get an advantage in any technology business.”
Albert Einstein read books on maths and physics for hours every day. Abraham Lincoln was a self-learner. “All I have learned, I learned from books, he once said.
Jane Austen, Theodore Roosevelt, and Queen Elizabeth I are a few of the most famous readers of all time.
Today Barack Obama, Richard Branson, Bill Gates,
Brené Brown, Sheryl Sandberg, Oprah, Mark Zuckerberg, Reese Witherspoon, J.K. Rowling and many successful people share what they read in public. You can find some of their recommended books here.
When you think about it, reading a lot makes sense. It can be hard to become successful if you don’t know anything about other successful people.
A growing body of research shows the importance of reading for knowledge, improvement, and personal growth. Many successful people have time to read because they choose to. They don’t have to; they are voracious readers because that’s what they want to do. They love to read, and they make time for books.
They may be interested in specific topics or industries, but they tend to be avid readers in almost every area. They know that reading good books and developing a broad knowledge base is one of the most effective ways to improve their lives and careers.
Becoming a voracious reader doesn’t just make you more intelligent. It also makes you more empathetic, curious, and better able to see the world from other people’s perspectives.
Many of the most successful people you know are lifelong learners — they are cross-domain readers interested in finding knowledge that connects better. Many of them are particularly interested in improving their skills to stay ahead of stay competitive.
“The rich are voracious readers on how to improve themselves. They’re reading self-improvement books, biographies, books about successful people, things like that, says Tom Corley, the author of “Change Your Habits, Change Your Life: Strategies That Transformed 177 Average People Into Self-Made Millionaires.”
Many successful people learn from people who have come before them. They may not always remember everything they read, but they still read as much as possible to expand their knowledge and broaden their worldviews.
“Am reading a great biography of Ben Franklin by Isaacson. Highly recommended,” Elon Musk once tweeted.
Successful people are constantly learning from the masters, reading and absorbing nuggets of wisdom from the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Alva Edison, and Warren Buffett.
You see, it’s not that you don’t have any ideas about what successful people are doing or how they’re doing it.
Be intentional about building a reading habit
“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” ― Mortimer J. Adler
You’re probably just too busy or overwhelmed by the amount of information out there to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
And life and living it can also get in the way of building a better reading habit. You don’t have to read many books to build a successful reading habit in the beginning. You can start small and improve as you get better.
List some of your favourite books to get you started.
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all,” says Oscar Wilde.
Aim to read daily — it’s a better goal than aiming to read 100 books a year. Read slowly for knowledge. Read a few pages of your favourite book daily — it also trains your concentration skill.
You can build a motivating reading environment to encourage you to read daily: read every day at the same place and time. And remember to write down the best ideas for reference later.
To achieve extraordinary success, make knowledge acquisition a daily routine — a way of life. Don’t miss out on the best ideas for a better life.
Recommended Reads
How to rewild yourself [Psyche]— Have you ever felt that parts of your life work against your natural instincts? Perhaps you commute to work in heavy traffic when you’d rather be walking. Or you’d love to enjoy more time with your children after school, but your boss won’t let you adjust your office schedule.
No focus, no fights, and a bad back – 16 ways technology has ruined my life [The Guardian] — Over 20 years, I have turned over whole areas of competence, memory, authority and independence to the machines in my life. Along the way, I have become anxious about problems that didn’t used to exist, indecisive over…
You Don’t Need More How-To Advice [Tim Ferriss] — You Need a Beautiful and Painful Reckoning — If I want a better-than-average career, I can’t simply “go with the flow” and get it. Most people do just that: they wish for an outcome but make no intention-driven actions toward that outcome. If they would just do something…
7 Small but Effective Ways to Relieve Back Pain [Self] — Back pain can be incredibly frustrating. It can make even the simplest tasks—stopping to pick up a sock, for instance—feel like a knife in your back. Other times, it manifests as a constant throb that leaves you wrestling with your sheets at night, desperate to find…
How to Make Better Friends at Work [MIT Sloan] — The workplace can be fertile ground for budding friendships because of the proximity that forming friendships requires. But growing friendships at work can be problematic. The philosopher George Santayana wrote that friends are the people “with which one can be human.”
How to make your anger work for you [Vox] — Anger is misunderstood. Unjustly maligned as a wholly negative emotion, anger contains multitudes: It can be both blinding yet clarifying, suffocating yet motivating. Anger serves as an internal alarm, calling attention to an unfairness or a wrong that needs righting…
4 Ideas on Better Living
Shane Parrish (author of Clear Thinking on avoidance)
“There is nothing that gets in the way of success more than avoidance. We avoid hard conversations. We avoid certain people. We avoid hard decisions. We avoid evidence that contradicts what we think. We avoid starting a project until we're certain of the outcome. To justify our avoidance, we lie to ourselves…….Everything becomes harder until we stop avoiding what's getting in the way. The longer you wait the higher the cost.”
Dean Yeong’s very short summary of The Simple Path to Wealth
”The simple formula to financial well-being: spend less than you earn—invest the surplus—avoid debt. Your goal is to save up F-You money, generally 25x of your annual expenses, to regain your freedom. During the wealth accumulation stage, allocate 100% of your investment portfolio to Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSAX) or its ETF (VTI). When you're closer to your retirement, adjust 20-50% of your portfolio to include Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund (VBTLX) or its ETF (BND). Aim for a 3-7% withdrawal rate during your (early) retirement.”
Vicki Robin (author of Your Money or Your Life) on enough
"The new roadmap says that there is something called 'enough' … Your 'enough point' is having everything you want and need, to have a life you love and full self-expression, with nothing in excess. It’s not minimalism. It’s not less is more (because sometimes more is more), but it’s that sweet spot or Goldilocks point … Once people start to pay attention to the flow of money and stuff in their lives in this way, their consumption drops by about 20-25% naturally because that’s the amount of unconsciousness that you have in your spending. So, when you become conscious, that falls away and many people say they don’t even know what they used to spend their money on."
James Carse (author of Finite and Infinite Games) on preparing against surprise
“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education discovers an increasing richness in the past because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition. Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.”
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Thanks for reading!
Until next week,
Thomas
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