Reading 10 pages per day is a great habit to get into.
It only takes 20 minutes, maybe thirty minutes max if you’re a slow reader.
Imagine reading ten pages per day for a month? That’s 300 pages – maybe a book or two
Nothing earth shattering. After all, how much can one book change us?
A year? 3,650 pages, maybe 10 – 12 books, we are getting somewhere.
10 years? 36,500 pages, 100 – 120 books. What kind of difference would that have on your life?
It’s interesting because the impact could still be good or bad.
If the books are non fiction, self development, biographies of people, finances, learning new skills – well that’s extremely valuable.
What if the books were all written from someone with a skewed viewpoint and we adopted that viewpoint? Or the books we were reading were all fantasies…
Person A and person B would have extremely different lives wouldn’t they?
One is reading to learn something valuable, the other is reading for enjoyment, and the third person doesn’t read at all…
It’s not knowing what to do, but also how to do it.
Here are some of the best books i’ve come across:
- How to win friends and influence people
- 7 habits of highly effective people
- The alchemist
- Think and grow rich
- The power of positive thinking
- Unshakable
- The compound effect/ the slight edge
- Man’s search for meaning
- Mindset
- The subtle art of not giving a fuck (and the sequel, everything is fucked)
- Any Seth Godin book
- One thing
- 21 irrefutable laws of leadership
- The daily stoic
- Emotional intelligence
- Rich dad poor dad
- Born to run
- Any Tony Robbins book
- Any biographies
And when you amass a library, or your book case is maxed out: what do you do?
Clean house.
Here’s a quick one two on decluttering books: Use “Fuck Yes or absolutely No”
– If it’s a good book but just wasn’t right for me (or maybe I have extra copies) then gift or donate it to someone who could use it.
– If it’s a bad book, then throw it away. Giving a bad book to someone is net negative. Why even give someone a bad book in the first place? Maybe we don’t want to throw out something, but fuck it – it’s trash anyway, isn’t it?
Essentially, dividing the books up into different piles: keep, donate/ give, and trash.
There’s a million books published each year, do yourself a favor and make some room on that bookshelf.
It’s emptying out the old, making room for the new – and the cycle can start again.
The cycle of learning something new, valuable, or said differently – even just one thing from a random book that we pick up, and that can make all the difference for us.
Even if we heard the sentence before, we don’t cross the same river twice, as we grow and develop we become different people and certain things hit differently, for better or for worse.
Joe DiAndrea 