Read Every Day

I have made a habit of reading a little of a non-fiction book every day.

Sometimes it's only for 5 or 10 minutes. Sometimes when I get busy or stressed, I don't feel like reading. But once I start, I almost always enjoy it, and often want to keep reading for longer.

I used to make the excuse that I was too busy too read. I saw it as a luxury that I would do later in life when I had achieved more. This was silly.

"Go to bed smarter than when you woke up."

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, two of the wealthiest and most successful people in the world, were asked the question "If you could have one superpower, what would it be?" Their answer was to be able to read super fast.

Reading is in fact one of the easiest and most practical ways by which we can improve our own lives. Some of the greatest minds and most successful and influential people that ever lived have captured their wisdom in the form of books, which are available for a very reasonable price. Yet most of us choose to ignore them and blunder through our lives making mistakes that could've been easily avoided.

It is said that we learn from mistakes. This is true, but who said that the mistakes have to be our own? Books allow us to learn from the mistakes and experiences of others via simulation, rather than having to make those mistakes ourselves.

Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster.

I have started a couple of businesses that didn't work out. Looking back I can see a lot of things I did wrong that I would now do differently. It turns out that most of the mistakes that I made were not new or unique. They had been made by tens of thousands of people before me, are well known and well documented, and so are their solutions. Had I bothered to read a few good books on the subject, I could've literally saved myself years of effort and dramatically increased my chances of success.

I was too busy making mistakes that were well documented in books, to spend any time reading those books. Too busy cutting down trees to sharpen the saw.

I figure that each book might contain one or two valuable ideas. If I read dozens of books a year, then even if I only end up remembering half of what I read, that's a lot of good stuff going into my brain. The benefits will compound over time.

"It's like every book I read is a mentor. How many mentors do I have? 1000s."

At the very least, reading will give me more stuff to talk about at parties.