how to read more

May 2022

We all know we should read more, yet few of us do it.

Reading for just an hour every day will easily put you in the top 1%.

I’ll explain how I went from hating reading as a kid to ripping through 47 books last year.

Hating reading

When I was younger, I hated reading. I knew it was something smart kids did, and I wanted to be smart, so part of me wanted to read. But I thought it was boring. Maybe you can relate?

I blame school for this. Kids get prescribed books and spend class psycho-analysing authors rather than developing a love for reading. There’s no freedom for discovery. Everything gets dictated by stale curriculums.

For kids to enjoy reading, we need to release the shackles. We need to lose the intellectual snobbery that looks down on certain content as trash. It doesn’t matter what kids are reading, just that they are. As Naval says, eventually, we get bored of the lower-level stuff and find our way to quality. But we’ll never get there if we don’t create the habit.

If I’d stayed on the same path, I’d probably have never read any books, and that’s really sad!

Finding reading

The summer of my college graduation, I was flirting with going into investment banking.

While down the Google rabbit hole, I found a great (now defunct) blog from a senior banker who wrote about the lessons he’d got from books and how they’d helped him in his career. For the first time, I saw what reading could do for me and picked up some of his recommendations.

Great things happen when you start doing what you’re supposed to do. When you’re standing on the sidelines, it’s impossible to predict what will come by starting, but once you begin moving in the right direction, life opens up for you.

I found role models I respected and wanted to emulate. I started seeing the importance of self-education - that if I didn’t make a conscious effort to learn, I’d never get everything I wanted out of life.

It’s trite but inescapable: successful people read a lot. Yes, there are other ways of learning, but there’s something special about reading. This old Charlie Munger line has always stuck with me: 

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time—none. Zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads—and how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”

Reading is a flywheel. As you read, you’ll discover more books you want to read, and your antilibrary of unread books will grow. People who don’t read can easily live under the illusion they’ve got it all figured out. Reading continually reminds you how little you know.

Loving reading

Once I’d grokked the power of reading, I wanted to make it a core part of my life.

The most important thing for building a reading habit is consistency. Early on, I found some advice from Shane Parrish to read just 25 pages a day. That seemed achievable, so I committed to it.

Back to Uncle Charlie: there’s a great story about as a junior lawyer, he sold himself the best hour of the day to read and work on himself. When I heard this, I was in law school and decided to emulate him by getting up an hour early to chomp through 25 pages.

As Shane says, setting the bar at 25 pages works because it’s enough to make meaningful progress, and once you’re in the rhythm, you won’t want to stop. But if you do, it doesn’t matter because you’ve hit your target. This can sound a bit formulaic. Surely it saps the fun out of reading… now it’s a “task”? Not at all. When you’re building the habit from scratch, you need this sort of constraint.

Little and often done consistently over a long time horizon leads to compounding results. 25 pages every day translates to dozens of books a year.

If you don’t read right now, you’re probably thinking: “wow, where’s the hack?... this will never work!” The reality is that you need to keep it simple. To build a reading habit, you just have to read, and you should focus on the minimum effective dose - the smallest amount possible to give you momentum, without feeling like a chore. 25 pages is a decent marker for this. It’s all about building reading into your identity, so you start seeing yourself as the type of person who reads, and your brain will want to stay consistent with that.

Choose books that speak to you and what you care about. Be intentional, and don’t worry about what other people think of your choices. Reading is for you, not for anyone else.

When you’re a noob, aim to finish books. Early success is important for constructing habits, and jumping between half-finished books won’t instil confidence. I’m not saying to suffer through books you don’t enjoy, so pick carefully, then commit to seeing them through.

This all changes once you’ve built your reading habit (which takes months by the way!) as by that point, you have a licence to quit books any time you want. Once you’re a seasoned reader, the opportunity cost of reading suboptimal books is way too high.

After a few months of drilling the habit, I was reading for at least 2 hours every day, and many more on weekends.

A couple of other things that helped me: buying lots of books and always reading a few at the same time.

Buy more books. It sounds silly, but it’s super powerful. Humans are path-dependent creatures and suckers for sunk costs, so if you buy books, you’re more likely to read them and avoid throwing money down the drain. I have a policy of buying any book immediately if someone I respect recommends it. Spending £10 on a book is an asymmetric bet as one book can change your life.

Make your environment more conducive to reading. Patrick Collison talks about leaving books around your home to make it easy for yourself. Even if you’re reading on a device, put it somewhere visible where you’ll run across it often.

I also like reading multiple books together. I have a couple of challenging, deep-thinking books, and I keep some lighter ones on the go, so if I’m not in the mood for one, there’s always something else and no excuse for not reading. You can be tired of reading one book, then engage a totally different part of your brain by picking up another.

The less your reading habit feels like school, the better - that means you’re doing it right.

It’s never too late to invest in reading and the payoff is huge. 

Always open to book recommendations :)