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Tag: how to read

Too much to read 4

Too much to read 4

Published March 12, 2021

So here’s the last of a series of thoughts on reading. This one involves a little bit of math, but is very simple – just so it drives home the point.

How much should we read? 1000 pages like Warren Buffet? That would be nice, but it would also mean that we would need to pursue reading as a full time job. Nice as it may sound, I’ve never come across such a job description!

A simpler way, is to target just 25 pages a day. This should take about half an hour. Not much at all. If we assume we sleep 8 hours and work 8 hours, we still have 8 hours left in the day. Half an hour in these eight hours is less than 10% of the time spent reading.

The magic happens as the reading practice compounds along. 25 pages a day, is 175 a week – which means roughly one book every 2 weeks, and ~26 books or ~10,000 pages a year – an incredible achievement for anyone who wasn’t reading much to begin with!

One important and final tip – do not count searching for the right book as part of your reading time – otherwise you can lose hours just searching for the right material. All the perfect books may not present themselves to you on day 1 itself – but I keep searching Amazon Books for new and upcoming releases periodically, and keep adding those to a wishlist/readlist. Works well. Put the posts ‘Too much to read 1-2-3-4’ together, and this should help us kickstart our reading journeys. Hope you liked it!

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Too much to read 3

Too much to read 3

Published March 11, 2021

A few more thoughts on reading as one of the best habits one can have. I was super lucky because my parents introduced me to reading very early in life, and holidays meant hitting the local libraries and devouring whatever books I could find my hands on. Initially, I used to read only fiction, but eventually I realized that non-fiction is where all the learning and development happens.

But it wasn’t easy – books weren’t available as easily three decades ago as it is today. Certainly not at the click of a button and delivered wirelessly over ‘whispernet’. However, there weren’t as many distractions as today either – perhaps making the act of reading itself more sustainable.

Technology does have a very good flip side though. Not only can we store 1000s of books in a flat e-reader, but we can also look up instant dictionaries, highlight items for future reference, make notes, export key paragraphs and more. And finding specific mentions across books was never easier. Tech is also awesome because of other formats like audio books, podcasts, and so on.

As my Guru says, the way to read a book, is to go in with full reverence to the author. To imagine that the author is himself/herself speaking to you through the pages, and personally sharing with you, decades of inimitable experience, all within just 300 pages! Such an amazing way to think about reading, isn’t it?

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Too much to read 2

Too much to read 2

Published March 10, 2021

Continuing on from yesterday, there is too much to read, but not enough time, isn’t it?

Yesterday’s takeaway was to focus on finding high-quality sources of information in just two categories:
a) your niche
b) general knowledge about how the world really works”

Point ‘a’ we probably are bombarded with inputs (emails, reports, whitepapers etc.) anyway from work. Even if not, we can look for specific books written on these topics (I like to keep looking at new and upcoming releases on Amazon and add them to my wishlist), or blogs that we can subscribe to.

Point ‘b’ most people probably do not focus on much, and this in my view can help each one of us build a serious edge – especially if it can be combined with ‘a’. How can we do this? One way is to read all your childhood textbooks – from grade 1 to grade 12, and then beyond. The wealth of knowledge in them is just outstanding – although we have mostly forgotten everything.

Point ‘c’, which is not mentioned above, is to actively reject all materials that do not fall under ‘a’ or ‘b’. This is very hard to do, as I’ve seen from personal experience. A link from a friend or family member, on to social media posts can lead us unto a clickthrough journey to nowhere.

Point ‘d’ (loosely subsumed under point ‘b’), is to also include reading one post on spirituality, spending just 30 seconds a day. This blog is one way to do that! šŸ™‚

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Too much to read 1

Too much to read 1

Published March 9, 2021

We all know that reading is a good habit. Most hyper-successful people in fact suggest that they got to where they are only because they read a lot. A few hours a day at least. Warren Buffet for instance reads between 600 and 1000 pages – nope not in a month or a year, but every single day! He dedicates 80% of his day to reading.

Which got me thinking. A lot of us read a lot too – nowhere near Mr. Buffet perhaps, but we do get plenty of links on Whatsapp and LinkedIn and we read the news everyday – and there is just so much of information (mostly nonsense). Does that count as reading? What about fiction novels – does that count as reading? We probably know deep down that reading Harry Potter, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys or Mills & Boon don’t count as very productive reading – at least not in the material world as adults – unless we are budding authors.

So what should we read then? Here’s a nice tweet by Shane Parrish I came across, which addresses this:

"While information continues to compound, our ability to digest it is limited. We need to filter. But how?
Invest an abnormal amount of time finding high-quality sources of information in two categories:
a) your niche
b) general knowledge about how the world really works"

How can we apply this? More tomorrow…

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