Why Great Leaders Are Devoted Readers | Robin Sharma

Hi, it's Robin Sharma, author of the Leader who Had no Title, founder of the Titan Academy, and welcome to this mastery session. This mastery session is called why Great Leaders Are Devoted Readers. One of the great blessings of my life has been have amazing parents. And my mother is absolutely awesome. She was a teacher and, and my father has had a great influence on my life as well. And for 52 years he was a family doctor. And as I was growing up, my father always would buy us books. And I believe a home filled with books is a beautiful home. And even to this day, I am always downloading books, I am always reading books. My home is full of books. And with my loved ones, we spend a lot of time reading together. When I was raising my kids, when they were younger, we would do reading nights and when we would do family outings, a lot of times we would actually go to the bookstore and we would leave with, you know, these armloads of books back when those terrestrial books were even more popular than they now are. And I see a world right now where we love the quick fix, where we love quick videos, where we love instant bytes of information, but yet there's great value in the devotion of taking a 200 page book and reading it. It builds rigor, it builds focus, and it builds depth. You know, I mean, there's something about the process of going through a 200 page book in terms of the depth of insight. It gives you the ability to go deep in a world where we want a 10 second video to fuel our quick hit. So I wanted to share with you three reasons why great leaders and the ones I've worked with, you know, many of the Fortune 500 CEOs, billionaires, titans of industry, why great leaders really are devoted readers. And the first one, reading a book, is nothing more than having a conversation with the author. You know this. But you become your conversations. There is incredible and indelible influence and imprinting going on, on your philosophy and on your mind when you read a book. So you have a conversation with someone and I'm sure you've had a conversation, maybe it's with a chef or a great entrepreneur or a wise human being and that maybe it was just one conversation, but that person in that 10 minute conversation or hour long conversation said something to you that formed your philosophy that changed the rest of your life. Well, that's what you can get in a book. You can have a conversation tonight with Kanye, you can have a conversation the next night with Edison, you can have a conversation two nights from now with Nelson. Mandela. You can read the biography that I recently read of Elon Musk. You can read about Steve Jobs. You can read about Vincent Van Gogh's life. You can read about.

Martin Luther King Jr. S life. You can read about the titans of industry and what they went through and how they innovated and how they dealt with struggles and how they dealt with wealth. You can read books on productivity from the most productive people on the planet. You can learn how people who built companies like Ikea and Red Bull, how they did it, they took a small idea and built it into an empire. So what I'm suggesting to you, with great love and respect, as I always do in these mastery sessions, is reading a book is nothing more than having a conversation with the author. And you can spend your evenings or mornings or afternoons or lunchtimes.

Connecting with the greatest minds who have ever graced the planet. You cannot put a price tag on that. And before I get to point number two, please remember the power of audiobooks. I mean, if you commute, and a lot of us commute, or you go to grocery shops to buy your groceries, or when you're doing so called downtime, just waiting while the victim is addicted to entertainment, you can be in love with education through the power of audiobooks. You can be reading while you're walking, driving and running. Which brings me to the second reason why great leaders are devoted readers. It collapses the timeline. So let's say you're a business builder. Let's say you have a startup, okay? It could take you 20 years to figure it all out. It could take you five hours of going through a book by someone who has done it to go, oh, here's the strategy, here are the tactics. Here's how you birth a great product out into the world. Here's how you hire an A team. Here's how you really do it. Here's how you manage when you fall down. Here's how you manage when you get dismissed by the cynics. You can get all of that in, in one book. So you can collapse literally what would normally take you 10 years to build a A level company or a great life or a great family. Or it might take you years to really dial in how to get fit like the professional athletes do, because you're, you know, trying to figure it on your own, the nutrition and the rest cycles. But if you read the right books, you literally can collapse what has taken most people years to do into a very short period of time. And related to that, when you are reading a 50 page book or 100 page book or a 200 page book by an icon of business or science or creativity or humanity or fitness, they are summarizing the best information they've learned over a lifetime of their rise to world class. In their book. You really do collapse the timeline and you really do save tremendous amounts of effort that you would have otherwise had to expend. And then the final reason why great leaders are devoted readers is it sustains hope. You know, I think you're a lot like me. And every single day as we pursue our mighty mission, as we walk out into the world and chase our brave ambition, we face adversity, we stumble, we get misunderstood. A lot of times we doubt ourselves. Can I really do it? We lose energy because life has all these distractions. But when I read, because I read the right books, I read the books of brave leaders. I read books that fuel my joy. I read books that sustain me. And what I'm trying to suggest to you on this final point, when you read books of great leaders, when you read books on productivity, when you read books on leadership, when you read books on lives legendarily lived, it sustains your hope. It reminds you that life is full of ups and downs. It reminds you that the very journey of being human has these unexpected twists. And I don't know about you, but education feedback fuels my energy. I can be having a day where, you know what, I'm not on the top of my game and I just make the time to read a book and it gives me this burst of fire in the belly to give me another two or three hours of creativity or productivity. But more than anything else, when I read books, it reminds me of the best of life. It reminds me, you know what, there are no extra people on the planet. It reminds me, you know what make your I can larger than your I can. And it reminds me that every single one of us does have this lofty ambition and this hidden greatness within this that is our birthright to live every day. So I hope this mastery session has been valuable to you more than anything else. Do what I've shared because ideas with that execution hollow victories. So take one of the three tactics I've shared with you and execute on them with a lot of passion before you go to sleep tonight. Because then you start the process of going from where you now are to where you and I both know you deserve to be. I'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much for following these mastery sessions and sharing them with your friends and your teammates. And I'll see you next time. Hi, this is Robin Sharma. I hope you received great value from this mastery session. If you'd like to receive potent training videos, blog posts, learning tools and information on my two live events, Personal Mastery Academy and my flagship four day experience, the Titan Summit, go ahead and visit robincharmer. Com.