Read 📖 200 Books 📚 a Year

• Planted  🌱 02 June 2024…
• books,
• learning

According the Quartz, you can regain the time to get through 200 books each year, by reading instead of being on life-wasting social media. Sounds simple 🤔 but …

Investor Warren Buffett says the secret to his (financial) success is reading 500 (non-fiction) pages every day …

That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will. Warren Buffet, investor icon.

OK, so here's the breakdown …

Just start 🫵

Most people don't even consider reading 500 pages per day — the mere thought of it dismisses the idea. But if you actually start … 🙂

Do the maths 🫵

The average Australian reads at a rate of 220 words per minute with 60% comprehension but, apparently, some can read 400 or more words per minute. And the average non-fiction book has ~50,000 words. So …

• 200 books times 50,000 words per book is 10 million words a year.
• 10 million words divided by 400 words per minute is 25,020 minutes.
• 25,020 minutes divided by 60 (minutes in an hour) is 417 hours.
• 417 hours divided by 365 days is about 1.15 hours per day, reading. So …

But who can read 500 pages in an hour? Something is very wrong with this calculation.

Make the time 🫵

Your average skippy 🦘 spends almost two hours per day on social media. And if you cut that in half … there's your annual reading time — or more!

Set up for success 🫵

• Remove distractions.
• Have reading material ready — at hand, effortless!
• Use print, phone, Kindle etc.
• Make it habitual — step by step.

NB: We're not advocating reading hundreds of books each year to make you obscenely wealthy (like Warren Buffet). The point is the method — the commitment — the habit — the discipline and mindset that it takes to do it and improve yourself via the imbibed knowledge from reading books.

And, finally, drilling into the original Quartz article, under ‘multi-medium’ it says to be using things like ‘audio books’ — a huge cheat. So we call 🐂 💩 on the ‘200 per’ bit but at least start reading books more than social media and you'll read heaps more over the year and maybe learn some something! 👍

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