Why reading is the secret of highly successful people

Why Reading Is the Habit of the Highly Successful

Published on January 31, 2019
By: Vincent Carlos

We Have a Problem

There is something completely wrong with society today. We live in a world where we have an abundance of information; We have sites like Google, Bing, and YouTube at our fingertips; We have countless free eBooks and audiobooks that we can download and learn from; We have millions of great books that we can check out at the local library or read at a Barnes and Noble.

We have all this knowledge for us to use, but it seems like no one is really getting any more educated as a result of it.

“We are drowned in information, but starved for knowledge.”
One of the biggest reasons for this is because education has turned so many people off from learning, especially when it comes to reading books.

After years of being forced to read books and give reports and presentations on them, students, by the time they graduate, never want to pick up another book ever again. In fact, 42% of college graduates never read another book for the rest of their life!

This is a shame because if you study all the greats, such as Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, or Charlie Munger, you’ll find that they are all voracious readers.

This is because reading is, and always has been, the habit of the highly successful.

It's not a coincidence that the billionaire investor Warren Buffett reads eight hours a day. "The more you learn, the more you earn,” Buffett says.

Bill Gates is another great who is well known for reading. Gates will actually take reading vacations for weeks at a time.

If you look at CEOs in the world, the average CEO reads one book a week. That’s 50+ books a year!

Now, just imagine what your life would be like if you also read one book a week for the next 10 years of your life.

Given that you read the right books, you couldn’t help but be healthier, happier, and financially more successful as a result of just reading more.

This is something that all highly successful people know - that if they can get the right book in their hands, then the rest will naturally flow their way.

Luckily for us, books will do more for you than just give you the knowledge they provide. Books have the ability to cut the learning curve by months, years, even decades for you.

This is because so many people have gone ahead of you in life, which means you can learn from them. You don't need to learn everything the hard way through trial and error.

As Will Smith once said,

“There have been gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There's no new problem you could have - with your parents, with school, with a bully. There's no new problem that someone hasn't already had and written about it in a book.”
This is…

The Key To Making Fewer Mistakes In Life

For the next 10 seconds, just imagine if you could avoid making all life-changing mistakes in your life. Mistakes like investing years of your life into dating the wrong person only to have it end with breakup, failing in business and going bankrupt, or being a runner and getting a knee injury that would cause you to never run again.

Some people think it's noble to make mistakes because it “builds character,” but this is a myth.

Making mistakes isn't bad; in fact, they're essential for growth. But some mistakes are fatal and making certain mistakes over and over again is time consuming and unnecessary.

In the book "The Selfish Gene,” Richard Dawkins, who is an evolutionary biologist and author, says,

"Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster."
This means your ability to simulate is what will give you a competitive advantage in the game of life.

Many of you may want to start your own business, climb the corporate ladder, or find the love of your life someday, and as you strive towards these goals, you'll inevitably approach many forks in the road where you will have to make certain decisions. But keep in mind that every decision you make is, in a sense, a gamble.

Most people give no thought to this. Most people just make a decision they predict to be the right choice and then go down that path to see if they were right. After time, if they see that it wasn't the right path, they turn back and take the other path.

They'll repeat this process until they find the road that eventually takes them to where they want to go, but this is ineffective and is the least efficient way to start a business, to enter a relationship, or to achieve your goals.

The way to solve this problem of making decisions that could be mistakes is to become a learning machine. If you want to improve your ability to simulate then you need to simply do one thing: You need to read more.

Reading books about other people’s experiences and their advice on what you should do will provide you with a proper framework on what has worked for others and what hasn’t. By doing this, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and effort.

So, Which Road Are You Traveling?

Understand, whatever your goals are in life, there are two ways of achieving them: There’s the long conventional path and the short less conventional path.

The long conventional path is what happens when you think you don’t have to read about other successful people in your field or listen to the advice of those who are 20, 30 years down your same path.

Unfortunately, this is the path most people choose. Most people skip the shorter path, which is learning from other people's success and failures.

Don't do that.

Instead, "Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for," as Socrates once said.

Warren Buffett said something similar, "People learn from mistakes, but it doesn't have to be their mistakes."

This is why I’m writing this manifesto. I’m writing this manifesto because I don’t want you to waste your time making time consuming and unnecessary mistakes as you navigate through life.

No matter what your goals are, whether it’s health, love or financial success, making mistakes will be an inevitable part of your learning process. The goal, however, is to minimize the number of mistakes you actually make.

This is why we all need to read the advice that other successful people have laid out in their books to help guide us in the right direction.