I Read A Book A Week (Here's What Happened)

for the better half of the last century we've experienced a number of life-altering technological advances which have improved not only our ability to communicate and learn but it's changed the way in which we consume information as a whole with more than 7.5 billion humans 6.8 billion phones and more than 180 billion text messages sent every month it seems as though it's difficult for us to focus on any one thing especially sitting down stopping and reading a book in 2020 it's just something that a lot of us find to be very difficult to manage so in this video i want to share with you not only some of the benefits that i've received from reading hundreds of books in my lifetime but some of the strategies that i've developed to retain more information to increase my human capital which i believe has had an immeasurable impact on my life now currently reading is at an all-time low with less than 20 of americans reading for personal interest on a given day and i don't know about you but during my childhood i read quite a few books there's no other way to describe it other than just being a bookworm i would tear through the harry potter series multiple times i would rip through the percy jackson series pretty much any series of books that kids would read i was reading them i didn't have a lot of friends i would just read books all the time and when talking to some of my friends today i realized that many of us seem to actually be in the same boat with this we would read a lot when we were younger and today as we got older we just don't seem to read as much and when thinking about the possibilities for why we read less today versus when we were younger i came to two possible conclusions or factors that could have had an effect on this and the first one is that we just have become too busy we have too many obligations too many distractions as we grow older we have new obligations that come on maybe we have children we have school we have work and life just gets a whole lot more busy than what it might have been when we were 10 years old tearing through the harry potter series multiple times over because we just had nothing else to do when we were that age but the other factor that i think has played an effect into this and the reason why i would read a lot of books when i was younger and then sort of phased it out and by the end of high school early college i was really not reading any books whatsoever is due to technology so if i have my phone sitting on a table and next to it i have a book and i choose one option which one am i most likely to choose well in a lot of cases we just go for the path of least resistance which tends to be our phones social media scrolling through our phones i absolutely love technology but i think in today's world we have so many distractions that it's just become so much more difficult to sit down and read a book thoroughly without being distracted without getting messages without getting phone calls and notifications from your phone and other devices so understanding some of these ideas i want to hopefully present to you a way that you can still read a lot of books and gain a lot of knowledge from this because if we look at some of the most successful quote-unquote successful people in the world like bill gates or warren buffett they tend to read a lot of books in fact i think warren buffett said that he reads between five and six hours per day bill gates claims that he reads about 50 books per years but you don't have to be very intelligent to understand a pretty common trend among many successful people in many different areas of life that they like to read they tend to be avid readers among most successful people and it's not to say that just because successful people read that we should also be reading but if you've been following me for some time you'll know that one of my favorite things to do is to study people who are succeeding in life and try to find an understanding for why they're succeeding and one of those i believe is reading books so let me share with you some of my strategies or tactics that i use uh to read as many books as possible and to get the most out of it alright so the first tip to prioritize reading and to get the most out of it is to focus on limiting distractions now this is going to include turning off your phone putting it in airplane mode turning off your computer turning off the tv and sort of isolating yourself from other people i find that the best way for me to read when i read best is either on a plane when there's no wi-fi and i have only my book or when i go off into the woods somewhere or i go to a park and i'm by myself maybe in a hammock somewhere just enjoying life and not distracted by other people or by technology or by anything else this is one of the best ways to do it but i think in a lot of cases our attention spans over the past couple of decades have also declined quite a bit a great example of this is just a few weeks ago i noticed when i was trying to watch the movie rocky you know with the boxer in philadelphia and it's one of the greatest movies of all time according to many critics and trying to watch this movie i found it very difficult to focus or pay attention because my attention span as a 22 year old has just not as good or as long as somebody who might be 50 or 60 years old and there's actually some quite some evidence to back this up but watching this movie there were just scenes where there's just somebody walking down the street for five minutes just nothing else there's no action there's no michael bay explosions there's nothing else there's just somebody walking down a street and back in the 70s when this movie was created this was just normal this was a normal movie they were a lot slower paced and it seems as though we just have lower attention spans today as what we did previously so limiting those distractions can be very beneficial and my next tip is to find a way to establish some type of small consequences if you aren't able to read a book per week let's say that you set a goal for anything in life it doesn't even have to be books but let's say you want to read a book per week or maybe you want to read four books per month or 50 books per year what you can do is establish some consequences if you do not reach those goals now in any a way of reaching a goal there's two different factors that are going to affect this there's pain and there's pleasure and from the pain side of it you can establish some type of consequences for example this could be something very simple like if you do not finish a book per week then you don't allow yourself to go out on the weekends with your friends or maybe you don't allow yourself to go get some ice cream somewhere something very simple you don't want to make the consequences too harsh like if you don't read a book per week then you have to dump your your girlfriend or something that would just not that be a little bit of a harsh consequence there and speaking of dumping don't be afraid to dump a book if you find that it's not worth your time this could be for any variety of reasons but maybe a book that you're reading it's just not very good the author just doesn't seem like they know what they're talking about or maybe in some cases the book's just way too far over your head this happens to me from time to time i'll be 30 or 40 pages into a book and i'll realize that i've been reading the words they've been going into my mind but they haven't really been processing and and sometimes this just happens when you're reading a book that just it's too far over your head don't be afraid to just stop reading the book maybe find a new book or you're going to have to pick up a journal or a notebook or a highlighter which is another tip that i can have for getting the most out of reading is to highlight things to circle things in books obviously don't do it if it's not your own book but especially when it comes to nonfiction books like business books for example or psychology i will mark those up quite a bit i mean i'll highlight i'll write things down and every few chapters i'll tend to pull out my notebook and i'll write down some key ideas that i've learned from it and it just helps me sort of digest the information that i've learned so i can keep it for a longer period of time now i did watch a few other videos that talked about their reading process and how they read as many books as possible and a key theme that i kind of noticed among a lot of these different people whether it be tim ferriss or a couple of others who have made videos like this is they recommend skim reading or skipping certain chapters or kind of just glancing over pages i don't recommend doing this i don't like doing that i just feel like i'm not getting the whole idea when i'm skimming over things so i read every single word of a book it takes me a little bit more time but it's still something i think is important rather than skimming through books maybe it works for some but it doesn't work for me and then the final tip that i can have for really getting the most out of your reading is to find some type of reading partner or even a book club book clubs are wonderful for kind of keeping some accountability there but also getting more out of the books that you're reading so what i like to do with my brother is we'll tend to read books at the same time we don't always do this it doesn't always work out but when we can we'll like to read books at the same time and then we can call each other up and sort of reflect on the ideas from the book that we learned and then bounce those ideas off of each other to get more out of it but also to hold ourselves accountable to make sure that we're actually getting these books finished okay now to be honest with you i don't actually read a book per week i listen to probably about 40 of them and then the other 60 i do actually read so in any given month uh physical actual paper books i probably only read maybe two per month and then the other two to three books tend to be audio books and i think this combination is really the best way to get the most out of reading and consuming content in this year and so my favorite thing to do is find these little small pockets of time that most others will spend sort of scrolling through instagram you know liking all of my instagram photos which of course you know i would appreciate uh but instead of doing that i'll tend to just pull out my phone and listen to an audio book whether i'm i'm doing the dishes doing laundry working out or or hiking or driving somewhere or let's say you're sitting at the dmv you're waiting for your new driver's license but you know how long those dmv lines can be it can be an hour long so instead of just sitting there scrolling through instagram scrolling through random weird facebook posts that always pop up instead of doing that just pull out an audio book or pull out a book have it on with you and that is going to be one of the best ways to accomplish reading as much as possible now what i do is i allot 30 minutes per day to read and i always do this 30 minutes regardless of what else is going on in my schedule sometimes it can get very very packed with different things that i need to do i always find the time to read and i try to do this towards the end of the day but not right before bed i found that i tried to read right before bed within within five minutes after reading i would turn off the lights and try to go to sleep and i'd find that in a lot of cases my mind would just be racing too much and i would be thinking about these different ideas especially when i would read business books or inspirational books where you just can't sleep after you read some of those books so what i like to do is read these at least a few hours before bed but still sometime in the afternoon i will allow a 30 minute span to read books and that is my best tip for you to a lot some time find what is the equilibrium for you maybe it's 20 minutes per day maybe it's 15 minutes per day but find something that you can do that's reasonable and make it a point to do it every single day and it's going to have an impact on your life so maybe i'll list some of the books down below that i think were really impactful for me some of the most helpful ones but if you found this video to be helpful i would appreciate if you dropped a like subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already and i'll see everybody in next week's video

Channel: Nate O'Brien

Views: 428,738

Rating: 4.9420605 out of 5

Keywords: read a book a week, a book a week, how to read more books, reading a book a week is changing my life, a book a week challenge, life changing books, how to read a book a week, reading a book a week, reading benefits, read books, books to read, personal development, how to read more, how to read faster

Id: OeZAn0GcUow

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020