For the last few months I've been focusing a lot on reading more and managed to work up to comfortably reading 3 books a week. Why reading? First off I used to hate reading, never was a big fan and it definitely was something outside of my comfort zone when I started. One of the goals I've set for myself was to seek these things that are uncomfortable and work my ass off until they become second nature. This has now happened with reading, the second reason for challenging myself to read was the fact that I had to surround myself with quality thoughts and mentors.

Books you read are your mentors, all the smartest, greatest people in the history have written down their knowledge in books to be passed on to future generations. At the time being it's not possible for us to sit down and talk with the likes of Seneca, Napoleon Hill or Stephen Covey, these people are no longer alive but what we can do is access their wisdom and knowledge through books.

“Thousands of grapes are pressed to fill one jar with wine, and the grapes skin and pulp are tossed to the birds. So it is with these grapes of wisdom from the ages. Much has been filtered and tossed to the wind. Only the pure truth lies distilled in the words to come.”

The same as with wine happens with books, the authors have millions of ideas and thoughts which all get distilled into what is most important for you to know. By reading you are learning valuable lessons from lifetime of experiences, failures and successes. This opens your eyes to new perspectives and increases your understanding of the world around you. Simply put you have to realize that you have limited time on this planet, it's not possible to gather all these experiences in one life time and the next best thing is to read about them.

I know some might argue that this experience isn't as good as first hand but no one can deny that the reason why we humans evolved so much was the fact that we can draw lessons from others and their experience. This was one of the turning points for us as a species, and the primary reason the first writings emerged was to allow us to pass on important knowledge more effectively to future generations, and we can witness today how this compounded to a rapid growth that we had in the last few thousands of years.

5 Lesson from Reading on Average 3 Books A Week

So without going too deep into the why here's my top 5 lessons I learned in the last few months from reading on average 3 book a week:

How To Read More: Beside actually reading more the best way I found is to use Audiobooks. Apply this while cooking, shopping, walking, cleaning, commuting… In essence you wanna use every little piece of time you have to listen to a high quality book on your phone or mp3 player. All these small sessions will compound into over an hour a day of reading and in 5 days that's an extra book. Listening to audiobooks is perfect for every task that doesn't require your full attention, think of just how much time you spent waiting for a train to arrive, if you spent all this time reading you might have for example read a finance book that would've doubled your income by now. Most people don't realize the miracle of compounding small things into a big change, everything adds up and soon you have built an amazing habit that will make you a more successful person. Your brain never rests, you're either building a good habit or a bad habit with your actions. Remember as Ed Foreman says: “Bad habits are easy to form, but hard to live with, whereas good habits are hard to form, but easy to live with.” How To Retain More While Reading: While reading or listening to a book if you're not thinking in an open loop “How can this improve my business/life?” you're not gonna get much from it. You have to try to relate the content to your life to get the most out of it. With this you'll remember a lot more and almost always manage to get 2-3 good tips from a book. This is the goal, the purpose of reading is not to memorize the book, it is to get valuable lessons that you can apply in your life. Reading the same book again works as well because at another time you might find something in the book that you couldn't relate to before. How To Retain More After Reading: When you finish a book what I found helps me is to read all the summaries of the book I can find. This 30 minutes of extra reading alone helps me summarize the entire book in my thoughts and in case I missed something I'll be reminded here plus it just makes everything more solid. Ideally you want to have at least one major lessons from a book, if you don't have this then you're not focused and you're wasting your time. Read Books That Engage You: It's OK to leave the book and come back to it once your brain is in a state of Buy-In for that particular content. If the book is not engaging to you chances of getting something out of it are low so this same time is better spent on another book that will engage you more. The goal of reading a book is to get a few good pointers out of it, not to brag how much read or just to go through the book. Reading Is a Skill, Your Capacity is Built Over Time. I started with 1 book per month, moved to 1 book per week, then increased to 2 and 3. Now I'm moving to 4 books per week. I did it gradually and I added more books only when I felt like I could. There's no reason to force yourself to add more, and it will also be counterproductive as you might burn out. I can see now how guys like Tai Lopez can read a book a day. It's definitely possible with a proper build up. The question to ask yourself is how much can you actually implement if you get so many lessons so keep this in mind, every book has the power to change your life but this won't happen unless you act on the information. Instead of going for quantity of lessons acquired go for quality and implementation. Without taking action using the lessons you've learned what is the point of reading ?

My Top 10 Recommended Books As Of This Moment

PS. You can see my full book list at https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/18944510

Hope you enjoyed reading this quick article, if you have suggestions for books leave them in the comments below. I'm always looking for new ones to read! 🙂