Reading good books is the most essential tool you can use for yourself to achieve anything in life.
It is the cheapest and most efficient way to absorb knowledge that you can use to support yourself in any endeavour in your life. I actually believe that BECAUSE books are so cheap, people don’t see their true value.
An awesome book can literally be like the “best of” of 50+ years of life experience of the greatest leaders in the world. It’s like an representation of their most important challenges and learnings from their whole life (!) presented to you in an easy-to-read and professionally written way. Think about it for a moment. It’s just like written one-on-one choaching!
Some successful, down-to-earth man/woman, who achieved everything he or she wanted in life, earned a fortune from nothing, maybe coming from poor background, grew to the strongest person they are capable of becoming, went through all the bullshit life threw at them, and then wrote a book about it. Furthermore, because they achieved it all, they now exactly what was helpful along their way and what was just a learning experience, so they could provide you that information too (and often they do), and you could save some huge amounts of time. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to follow the traits of other successful people.
And often times they make it very easy for you to find them. It says: “You cannot stick your hand in a pot of glue without some of that glue sticking”. The same goes with knowledge and wisdom from high-achievers.
When you read autobiographies of famous and successful people you absorb some of their knowledge. Depending on your current stage in your life some parts might resonate with you more than others. That is also the reason why you could read the same book multiple times and still get profound knowledge out of it. Success leaves glues, as Anthony Robbins says it all the time and all you have to do is model the traits of successful people. Whatever you plan to achieve in your life, there are common traits ALL of the successful people have in common. I even dare to say that, there is nobody on this earth who got successful in his career without reading A LOT of books.
Get in the habit of reading one book a month. That is maybe 10-20 pages a day. When you only read one book a month, that is 12 books a year, which is 120 books in 10 years.
Now think about all the knowledge you could absorb in that time by only spending 30 minutes a day reading about some other person’s life experiences.
It is impossible for you to not adopt some of the traits of these persons, because you are basically diving into THEIR minds for a short time. You read and feel like them for a minute. You get into their thought processes, you get into their head. It is priceless.
You see how they handle life experiences and you can adopt this knowledge for your life. You see how they make decisions and how they handle rejection and failure. You learn how they grew stronger and how you can do the same. All by just getting into the habit of reading. This is how powerful it is and you would miss out if you don’t use this tool into your advantage.
Become a reader, become a leader.
