Brian Tracy reads three hours a day and recommends Thinking Fast and Slow, The Checklist Manifesto, and The Sermon on the Mount. He explains why each matters: slow thinking beats impulse, checklists prevent mistakes, and spiritual practice guides your life.
One of the lines that I read as a young man was that reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body. I have become a lifelong reader. I read an average of three hours every day. I read almost every business, personal, political, economic magazine that is published. And I'm always reading new books that I've either had recommendations on or that I've seen or that somebody has told me is a good book. So people ask me, what books am I reading? Let me give you a couple of recommendations. One of the books that was very important to me this year was a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. And what this book does is it says that most people spend all of their life in fast thinking, like driving through traffic. But the most important decisions in life require slow thinking. And the most successful people are the ones who slow down and think carefully before they make important decisions that are going to have a long term effect on their lives. The research in this book by Daniel Kahneman is Nobel Prize winning. It's written for the average person. And the whole idea of thinking fast and slow changes your whole attitude toward thinking. Now, another book that I read recently is called the Checklist Manifesto. And this book was written by a doctor. And he shows how the most successful and effective people write down a checklist of every step in a process before they begin. And then they're constantly refining the checklist to make sure that every single detail is covered. He then goes on to show, not only in medicine, in emergency care, but in building skyscrapers, flying jet planes, even in finance and investment. The most successful people have a checklist because it forces them to think about every single step so they don't make a mistake. Now, if you combine that idea with thinking fast and slow, what you have is tools to help you to become really excellent about thinking really well about the most important things in your life. You know, we say that your most important skill is thinking. And you realize that almost all of the mistakes that you've made in life, especially financial mistakes, are because you didn't think it through clearly enough in advance. Other books that I read are spiritual books. I think the very best spiritual book ever written is a book written by a man named Emmet Fox who died in 1941. And it's called the Sermon on the Mount. And what he does is he takes each of the lines in the Sermon on the Mount considering to be the greatest summary of spiritual principles ever explained at one time, and he explains what they really mean for your life and my life. I have recommended this book to people who are Jewish and Catholic and Hindu and many other religions. And they all say it's a perfectly wonderful book at Christmas time. It's a wonderful book to read and rejuvenate your thinking. Other than that, read book reviews. Go on to Amazon. Make a decision to try to read a book a week, 30 to 60 minutes each day. Because reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body. If you want to be mentally fit, you need to read on a regular basis. Have a wonderful year.
