“The life of the heart is knowledge; so preserve it,
The death of the heart is ignorance; so avoid it.
Your best provision is true devotion; so provide it.
This advice of mine is enough for you; so heed it.”
-[Imam al-Ghazâlî]
“The Secret of Leading is Reading.” Someone once suggested. I adopted that advice, and became an avid reader – I must say, it turned out to be the best advice I ever received! This is what I believe, “You will be the same person – as you are – right now. Except for the people you meet and the books you read.” You should read that again: “You will be the same person – as you are – right now. Except for the people you meet and the books you read.” Books and your surrounding are the two major determining factors of how your life turns around.
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
― Dr Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!
The only common denominator of all the “incredibly” successful people across the globe is this – “They are ‘avid’ readers”. Starting from Warren Buffet to Richard Branson. Each one of them were voracious readers. In fact, when Warren Buffett was once asked about the key to success, he pointed to a stack of nearby 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 do it.”
Buffett takes this habit to the extreme — he read between 600 and 1000 pages per day when he was beginning his investing career, and still devotes about 80 percent of each day to reading.
And he’s not alone. Here are just a few top business leaders and entrepreneurs who make reading a major part of their daily lifestyle:
- Bill Gates reads about 50 books per year, which breaks down to 1 per week.
In a recent Forbes interview, Bill Gates’ dad reveals what the Microsoft billionaire was like growing up.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the young Gates was an extreme bookworm:
His dad says, “Just about every kind of book interested him – encyclopaedias, science fiction, you name it. I was thrilled that my child was such an avid reader, but he read so much that Bill’s mother and I had to institute a rule: no books at the dinner table.”
Bill explains, “This is one of the things I love about reading, Each book opens up new avenues of knowledge to explore.”
- Mark Cuban reads more than 3 hours every day
- Elon Musk is an avid reader and when asked how he learned to build rockets, he said “I read books.”
- Oprah Winfrey selects one of her favourite books every month for her Book Club members to read and discuss
And these aren’t just isolated examples. A study of 1,200 wealthy people found that they all have reading as a pastime in common. If you want to thrive in any area of your life – there are books available for that. They can help you achieve the result much faster than you might have possibly expected.
No matter what you are pursuing, there are only two ways of mastering any craft. Either you can do it by trial and error method, which means finding out the best way to succeed by trying, failing, learning and improvising your approach to see if you can make it the next time. The second approach is by studying people who have already achieved the kind of results that you are seeking for. By learning from their mistakes so that you don’t have to make them all by yourself. This way, you can cut through a good deal of mistakes and accelerate your success. No matter what you are trying to accomplish, there is always someone who has achieved the kind of success that you are seeking for. What you have to do is simply find out what they did – and model their approach! That’s it. The best way to model anyone’s approach and learn from them is by reading their books!
There are more than 130 million books out there on our planet to help you achieve your goals and accelerate your success. Why not try one?
