Why I read 1 book a day... and why you should too.

The average reading speed is about 200wpm (words per minute).

The average speaking speed is about 150wpm.

A documentary of 100mn will get you 15,000 words (technically a lot less than that because of the conversational pauses, images...) but for the sake of calculation, let’s say 15,000 words. Imagine a 90% retention rate (which is high, but inflated due to the amount of images) that gives you the retention of 13,500 words.

With more practice in improving your reading speed, you can easily grow your rate to 300wpm, making it twice as fast as you usually hear. For the same 100mn time spent watching a documentary, by reading, you will therefore assimilate twice as many words (30,000). To retain the same amount of words (13,500) you will need a minimum retention rate of 45% only! Now, at this speed your retention will be much higher than that, believe me. On top of this, many words and even images in documentaries are useless in terms of information related to understanding the topic (you see a blue sky, you see animals walking around in vast planes...) same as in books; a lot of information such as stories are just in there to fill in pages.

You’ll have to intentionally look for the information in the book that is relevant to what you want to learn; you can go back and forth, jump chapters, spend more time on graphs and bullet points... which you cannot really do with a documentary. While you identify the nuggets of information that is relevant to you and useful to retain... and apply, with purposeful reading you will increase your speed 2-fold at least, while keeping the retention rate high.

A note about video learning material: online tutorials are much more dry than documentaries and the information received is for the vast majority communicated only orally (hardly any pictures) which increases the content that can be applied but reduces the attention span and therefore retention rate greatly.

Having said that, even if you do retain the same amount of information in a learning tutorial as in a documentary say, in words 13,500 for a 100mn video, the amount of applicable information available for you to apply in a book is vastly superior due to the much higher reading speed (than listening speed).

 When I read a book, especially a business book that is very structured, it is easy to spot the important information at a glance: bullet points, bold letters, "remember" notes & tips, graphs, conclusions, actionable points, summaries... and many other pointers that give you the nuggets of the book straight away! By the way: the back of the book and the table of content will already point you in the right direction ;)

 This is just logic that makes me conclude that reading is far superior in learning speed than watching videos and this is why I read 1 book a day.

It is said that the average CEO reads on average 50 books per year... this is only 1 book per week!!!

 Successful business-men and women invest in themselves in money: on average 20% of their monthly salary with a mentor, a coach, going to seminars, taking classes, buying books..., and in time: at least 1 hour per day reading articles, trends, books. So I’m curious to know: How much do you invest in yourself to acquire these tools? for you to succeed?

 Knowledge is powerful, yet what is it that Google does not know? the how-to. Apply the knowledge you acquire, practice the skills you learn and you will surpass any Googler by a mile. Then your knowledge will be more than powerful... it will become Power.

 It is precisely by asking myself these questions at every step of my career that I have taken on myself to design a simple toolkit for people who want to succeed, like me, like you. https://strategicfootstepsbook.strikingly.com/

Stay centered

Xavier