Back in January 2021, I wrote about an ugly observation that James Altucher once made:
You have maybe 1000 books left in you to read, for the rest of your life. The math checks out.
After facing this ugly realization, I started keeping track of the books I’ve read, and how many per year I’ve read.
Turns out my math is even worse because I am such a slow reader. Over the past 12 months, I managed to finish just 18 books:
1. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Wizard of Earthsea
2. Michael Masterson & John Forde’s Great Leads (re-read)
3. V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain
4. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic
5. William Shakespeare’s King Lear
6. Claude Levi-Strauss’s Myth and Meaning
7. Eric Hoffer’s True Believer
8. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
9. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, vol. 1
10. Claude Hopkins’s My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising (re-read)
11. Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons
12. Michel Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles
13. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
14. Derren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind
15. Joe Vitale’s There’s a Customer Born Every Minute
16. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything
17. John Cleese’s Creativity
18. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (re-read)
And that’s it. 12 months, hundreds of hours of daily reading, and yet, a miserable 18 books — and one of those was John Cleese’s Creativity, which weighs all of 90 pages.
At this sorry pace, I will have to live for another 56 years if I hope to reach Altuchers’ 1000 books.
Still, I better stop complaining, and I better keep my nose down and peeled to the inside of a book. I mean, what else is there?
There’s been a lot of agonizing lately whether AI is consuming the world. And it really might be.
It’s genuinely not clear to me whether anything you or I can write will be more interesting to people than what AI will produce, whether today or in a year’s time.
But one thing is clear to me:
And that’s your best shot at security.
If there is any way to prosper and profit, now and in the future, I figure it’s to think and to take action, to find or come up with new ideas, and to put those ideas into practice.
And the best way I know to prime that process is to read interesting books, to take notes of valuable things I come across, and to connect those to projects I’m working on.
Which brings me to my offer. It’s simply to sign up to my email list. I often share interesting ideas I come across in books with my newsletter readers.
Who knows, one of my emails might expose you to a new and insightful book you’d never have heard of otherwise, which might end up changing your life, or at the least, the success of your business.
In case you’d like to get my emails daily, click here, and fill out the form that appears.