My Books Are My Friends

I started my 43rd book of 2015 today. It’s called “The Philosophical Breakfast Club" and is written by Laura J. Snyder. The book recounts the life and work of four friends (Charles Babbage, John Herschel, William Whewell, and Richard Jones ) who met as students at Cambridge University and went on to transform science and change the world. It was a lovely present from the folk who run the library at TED. 

I decided to read a book each week as a challenge to myself back in January when I saw that Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was setting up a book club to encourage people to read a book every two weeks. With all the travelling that I do (and by watching a little bit less TV) I thought it might actually be possible to read one book each week. I am 43 and begin today my 43rd book mindful that this is probably the only new years resolution I have ever kept in my life!

I share this small milestone not as a humblebrag but to encourage you to do something similar. We are all busy and we never seem to have enough hours in the day to do the things that we want to do, but it’s amazing how a little planning and discipline can find enough time to do something meaningful. I wanted to find time to read books, you might want to find more time to spend with your family, learn a new language, write a book or help out in your community. Finding time for yourself isn’t selfish goal by the way. It makes good business sense to be more creative and often helps relieve stress and increase productivity. In my job, I find that it makes a big difference to be well read, but don't just take my word for it...

A few years ago someone asked Tom Peters (a superb author and arguably the greatest management consult in the land) what his best piece of advice was for managers and entrepreneurs. Tom said that there are just 3 simple steps that successful people follow:

1. Hustle. Work harder than everybody else.
2. Go into each meeting better prepared than everybody else.
3. Always have a good piece of research up your sleeve.

I’ve found Tom’s advice to be spot on, and struggle to think of a more practical advice I could give to anyone else in business. It’s not been easy and has taken a bit of practice, but here are a few of the things that have worked for me:

• I took a leaf out of Elon Musk’s book by learning to read on my iPhone (I got a 6+ so the screen would be big enough).
• I make sure my air miles allow me the use of a lounge wherever I travel so I can have a comfy seat and a decent view when I read in airports.
• I always carry noise cancelling headphones in my bag with a couple of classical and chilled house playlists ready to go (offline) on spotify.
• I learned to speed read – especially useful for heavy business books. There are a few schools of thought that include only reading the right hand side, but I prefer to scan. You start only reading the middle 2” of every page and over time you train your peripheral vision to get wider and literally scan down pages in seconds like a computer scanner. (Speed reading is useful but quickly takes the fun out of reading).
• I have books on my iPad and iPhone but read them in inverted mode so they don’t make my eyes tired.
• My Microsoft bands tells me that if I read a digital screen after 10pm I don't sleep very well, so I only read 'real' books late at night.
• I only read books I enjoy. If it’s a bad book I quickly scan it but start another one. Life is too short for bad books.
• I prefer real books so I can fold over the pages, underline cool things and scribble in the columns.
• I always carry a notebook in my pocket to scribble ideas down. (I love Shinola journals and FieldNotes pocket books). 
• I photograph good pages (or screengrab if I’m reading a digital copy) and have them automatically connect to evernote or my iCloud, for easy retrieval in the future.
• I find 2 hours every week to hide in a hotel bar or nice independent coffee shop and write stuff I’ve learned from that weeks book. Reading a book quickly and then forgetting it, doesn’t do anybody much good.

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” -Henry David Thoreau

At Dreamforce in San Francisco, last year Tony Robbins gave the keynote and explained how most people only remember 20% of what they hear. But if they tweet and write down the things that mean something to them, the physical act of writing it down means that you remember 50-60% (even if you never go back to read it again).

“I don’t write it down to remember it later, I write it down to remember it now”.

As 2015 is drawing to a close, I have 10 books left in my year ~ but it has been such an enjoyable process that I plan to keep it up. Rather than focusing on all the business books I wanted to read this year, perhaps next year I’ll resort to a book every two weeks and read some older classics that need a bit more attention.

“Classic – a book which people praise and don’t read.” –Mark Twain

People ask me how I have managed to write a 100,000 word book myself, continue to read AND manage a full time job. The answer is pretty simple. When your work feels like your hobby, learning new stuff never feels like a task from a “to-do” list. My own book was inspired by many of the books I’ve read and in my mind almost wrote itself.

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” -Abraham Lincoln

Try it yourself. If like me you enjoy like marketing, business and leadership books, here’s a list of a few which I highly recommend that you might like to start with:

• Re-Imagine by Tom Peters
• Everything written by Seth Godin
• What’s the Future of Business by Brian Solis
• Lovemarks by Kevin Roberts
• Innovators by Walter Isaacson
• Greatest Business Decisions of All Time by Forbes
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
• Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
• The Social Organisation by Gartner
• The Ultimate Question 2.0 by Fred Reichheld
• Loyalty Effect by Fred Reichheld
• The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
• Today Matters by John Maxwell
• Money: Master the Game by Tony Robbins
• Audience by Jeff Rohrs
• Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff
• Things a Little Bird Told Me by Biz Stone
• Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull
• Big Bang Disruption by Larry Downes & Paul Nunes
• Give and Take by Adam Grant
• Bold by Shaun Smith & Andy Milligan
• My Philanthropy by George Soros
• Give Smart by Thomas Tierney & Joel Fleishman
• Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
• You Only Have to Be Right Once by Randall Lane
• It’s Not What You Stand For by Roy Spence
• Zero to One by Peter Thiel
• Great by Choice by Jim Collins
• How Many Friends Does One Person Need? by Robin Dunbar
• Flip the Funnel by Joseph Jaffe
• CTRL ALT Delete by Mitch Joel
• Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg
• Whatever You Think Think the Opposite by Paul Arden
• Wizard of Menlo Park by Randall Stross

“My books are my friends”. Blake Mycoskie (Founder of TOMS).