Somebody once asked Warren Buffett about his secret to success. Buffett pointed to a stack of books and said: “Read 500 pages like this 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”.
Books give you the courage to travel. Books give you role models and heroes and meaning in a world where you have none. It is obvious that reading 500 pages a day or finishing 200 books a year is not easy. But the truth is, it’s not. Anybody can do it. All it takes is some simple math and the right tools.
Do not quit before you start
When one hears the advice “Read 500 pages like this every day,” his snap reaction is to say, “No way! That’s impossible!”One will then go on to make up reasons to justify his belief without doing any deep thinking at all. These might include “I’m too busy, “I’m not smart enough,” or “Books just aren’t for me.”But what if we go a little deeper? For example, what does it actually take to read 200 books a year? Two years ago, I stopped to do the simple math. Here’s what I found: Reading 200 books a year isn’t hard at all. It’s just like Buffett says. Anyone can do it, but most people won’t.
An average person spends 608 hours on social media and 1.642 hours with TV per year. We spend our 2.250 hours doing nothing at all. If we spend that time reading books, we would have finished more than one thousand books per year. According to that calculation, reading two hundred books per year does not seem impossible. However, most of us do not want to accept that we are addicted to social media or television. Making calculations is easy. The difficult part is to put it into effect. We all know the importance of reading and that we need to read more but we do not do it. However, there are some simple tips to make us start reading more.
Use environmental design
Since social media has been designed to creat addiction, we can say that staying out of social media is hard as quitting smoking cigarettes. If you want to read, make sure that you remove all distractions from your environment and make books as easy to access as possible. For example, you can upload e-book application on the main screen of your smartphone.
Read in every subject
Instead of focusing on a single subject, try to read little from everything. Read wherever you are available and remember Orhan Pamuk saying “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed”.