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Good morning, Believe Nation. Today we're going to talk about why and how you can read more.

Reading.

The reason that reading is so important. There have been millions and billions and billions and gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There's no new problem you could have with your parents, with school, with a bully, with anything. There's no problem you can have that someone hasn't already solved and wrote about it in a book. So the keys to life are running and reading.

I'm more quiet. I've been quiet, but like, she just, you know, she encouraged me. Like, I'm getting older now, so she encouraged me to, you know, just speak up if like you have something to say. And, you know, And my dad, he— we're reading this book called Rich Dad Poor Dad, right? And just, you know, just that whole book, I think, like, of him just—

he—

that's— he's— it's like he's guiding me, like, throughout the whole book.

Why did you want to share that book with your son?

It's interesting that no matter how successful you get, it's really difficult to shake your mindset. And I I still have a poor person's mentality. I can't shake it. And it gets really detrimental when you can't just shake off the ideas. It's like when I go to sleep at night right now, I'm as financially nervous as I was 20 years ago.

You are?

Absolutely.

Really?

You should get— well, I mean, you did it. You're doing a little more than us.

No, no, no. No, but I don't worry. I'm not nervous about it. I'm not nervous about it. About it. But I do understand that whole thing about spending, because once you have a lot of money, I mean, who, who knows what a million dollars can really do? You know, I know what $29.99—

exactly.

Yes.

But what, what, what do you do?

Yeah.

So it's like with my kids, I just don't— I want, I want them to be able to have a, uh, financial comprehension to not be slaves to working and money The way that my mind has— I'm breaking it now, but the way that my mind has been for a really long time.

That's fantastic.

I write books because the greatest influence on my life were the books that I read. Books have formed me, who I am today, how I think, what I feel, have all been formed by what I read.

Everything that you want to do in your life will be made easier and better and more fulfilling by reading. I know that sounds kind of crazy and, well, I don't know how reading is going to relate to this or reading is going to relate to that, but everything. Because at its core, it's a way into imagining what it's like to be someone else, imagining what it would be like to have a life different from your own. It allows you to imagine possibilities for yourself and for the people around you that you otherwise can never imagine. So it just expands the map of your world, and that in turn allows you to live a life different from the one that maybe you think you're fated to.

It's really a pleasure for me to be able to talk to you about Ben Graham. I've had some lucky days in my life, but one of the luckiest was in 1949 when I was 19 years old in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I picked up a copy of The Intelligent Investor. It not only changed my investment philosophy, it really changed my whole life. I'd be a different person in a different place if I hadn't have first seen that book. I got a bedrock of investment philosophy that really hasn't changed ever since I read the book. I may embellish on it a little here and there, but it was Ben's ideas that sent me down the right path. Right path.

I'll tell you honestly, the book, the book I'm reading, uh, which I was sort of thinking, should I say this or not, but, um, it's, it's a book on Howard Hughes, um, which, um, you know, uh, maybe a cautionary tale. I mean, he's sort of an interesting fellow. Um, definitely want to make sure I don't grow my fingernails too long and start peeing in jars.

You beat me to the line. I was just about to say, why Howard Hughes?

What is it about him that you found interesting?

I've just been meaning to read a book about him for ages and I haven't. And so I'm broadly aware of his sort of the things he's done and I saw the movie The Aviator and you know and a few other things. I like biographies in general. Biographies I think are really, you know, really interesting read.

What do you learn from them?

Well, I think you learn a lot depending upon, you know, whose life you're reading about. There are lots of lessons in there. I read Isaacson's biography of Jobs which I thought was quite interesting. And I actually really liked his biography of Benjamin Franklin, who I would say is certainly one of my heroes. He seemed like a really great guy.

And you actually managed to incorporate any of this into your own strategy, your own way of doing business, your own ethos and philosophy?

Well, I think in the case of Franklin, he did what needed to be done at the time it needed to be done. So, you know, he was in different fields and he sort of thought about, OK, what's the important thing that needs to be accomplished right now, and then worked on that.

I'm gonna show you how to triple your reading speed in about 20 minutes. This was initially something I learned how to do, I'd say late high school, early college, in my neuroscience days. And it turns out most people have never been taught how to read properly. And you think of reading in a straight line, line by line. In fact, your eye jumps around. To fixation points, and each of those fixation points is usually a quarter to a half a second. And if you close one eye and cover the lid with a finger and then try to trace a straight line across a wall, say, with the other eye, you'll feel these very distinct jumps, these saccadic movements. So the fewer of those jumps you have and the shorter the fixation points, the faster you read. Also, if you look at my finger, focus on my finger, Can you see this hand? Yeah, of course you can. What about this guy? If you focus on my finger, yeah, you can. And when you're reading, you're usually eating up, I would say, a good 20% of your peripheral vision on margins. Okay, we can take advantage of that. So it's very, very straightforward to double, triple your reading speed in very short order. What I want you to do is get a before word-per-minute rate, and all you have to do to do that is grab a book. It could be any book. All you're going to do is look at full text pages like these and read, say, 10 lines, count up the total number of words, divide by 10, that's your average number of words per line, okay? Then all you need to do is look at, say, 4 or 5 pages, add up the number of lines per page, usually it's between 30 and 40 lines per page, and using these two numbers you can figure out the average number of words per page. Okay, now once you've done that, you can then read for a minute just normally as you would, not rushing, and use a stopwatch.

Boom.

Calculate things. That is your word per minute starting rate. All right, and our goal is to improve. What gets measured gets managed. So now you have your WPM, word per minute rate, as a starting point. Next, what we're gonna do is we're gonna do the same thing, and the only difference is we're going to use a pacer. All right, so you're going to underline the lines as you go. So you're going to try that, and that will probably increase your reading speed by 50 to 100%. After we do that, what we're going to do is play with peripheral vision. So let's take some sample sentences. This is: Once upon a time, I had an APAC. Those were happy days. Then Christmas came along.

Uh-oh.

All right, so look at these sentences. Now, most people if you're using a pacer, would start at once, right? This is gonna be hard for me to do because I'm doing it backwards. It would start at once and then move all the way across to the end, and then boom, come back all the way to the return here. You don't have to do that. You don't have to do that because you have this peripheral vision we were talking about. So what are we gonna do? We're actually gonna start, actually gonna start 2 or 3 words in. So your fixation point your pencil tip or your pen tip will be at upon, and then we'll end on had, and then you'll return to those, and then end on days, and then start again on came. See how that works? Alright, so you're doing the same zigzag pattern, you're just compressing it from the sides in. And one way that you can do that, you can certainly just use the pacer and you can eyeball it, so to speak, or you can take a ruler or a postcard and do this. So go down the margins cutting in 1 or 2 words. And if you wanna be conservative, just start cutting in 1 word. So once upon, right? You're gonna start on upon and go straight down. And then once you get comfortable with that, then you can, you can move it in a little bit more, a little bit more. And just using these 2 techniques, test out your word per minute reading rate again. And then the last test I would say is practice reading at twice your target speed. So practice beyond your comprehension level at 900 words per minute for 2 or 3 minutes, then go back and read for comprehension and use the pacer, indent from the sides, and you will find that that pushes you even further.

Here's what happens is so I go through the book and as I'm reading, I'm looking for the golden nuggets of information. So chances are you've probably read some great books in the past, But if I told you, what did you specifically get out of the book? You couldn't tell me. You forget about it. And so I want to make sure whenever I read a great book, I don't forget the most important parts in it. Now some people highlight it, and that's what I used to do. I used to just highlight the book, but how many times do you actually go back and reread your highlights? It's not very often. And so here's the strategy that I follow. When I'm reading, I've got the highlighter handy, and so yes, I do highlight, but then if I want to commit it to memory— see, if you highlight it, you might remember it a little bit more, but when you rewrite that point, it sinks into your mind quite a bit more. And so I actually take that and I rewrite it into my journal here. So, and then the act of writing it obviously causes me to be able to internalize it more and remember it more. And so I'm taking the most powerful part of the book and I'm putting it in these journals. Now then, once I've finished the book, I reread my notes on that and then I highlight the most important notes that I wrote. And so you can see here just from this book, you know, I mean, it goes on and on and on, but I've got my highlights in here. Now this is one of the reasons why for me it's very easy to do training. It's very easy for me to do blog posts and train on different things that can add value to people's lives.

So my reading habits in terms of how I learn, how I try to gulp, sometimes I'll read a book summary. Sometimes I'll read the whole book from front to back. I'm reading the Johnny Carson book. It really resonates with me and I'm learning a lot, so I'm reading it pretty much word for word. I tend to speed read a little bit, but not too much. There's other books that I read one chapter and I'm like, this is enough. You know, sometimes people go, oh, Ty, you're not really reading a book a day. Well, I am actually, because if I speed read one book, I'll read 4 or 5 in a day. So in terms of volume, there's all these people out there that are crazy. They spend their whole time trying to find loopholes and little inconsistencies in what people say. So there's no inconsistency with what I say. In the sense of reading, because I really do read that much, but it's not always in the same methodology, in the same modality of reading. So my recommendation to you is to try, shake it up a little bit. And one of the modalities I want to introduce in this video is you don't need to have 20 or 30 books. I'm not actually going to do this with 20 or 30. I'll probably pick a random row of books. They're all different kinds of subjects. Let's see, this one's called The Creator Code. The Attacker's Advantage, John F. Kennedy, Carl Sagan's Cosmos, The Opposite of Small, and Barefoot to Billionaire: Autobiography. So I might take that row of 5 or 6 books and I'll just pick and choose today. Like today's my mode is like gulping mode. So I'm going to read and what happens is, and this is what Bill Gates does, okay? Bill Gates, he takes a book vacation and he brings huge stacks of books that he hasn't had time to read and he tries to get through them all. And he says that's his most creative time because what happens is The idea starts, or the ideas start mixing, matching, bumping into each other. And I think it's James Altucher or somebody wrote, you know, it's like ideas having babies, right? Two people bump together, they get married or whatever, they have a kid, now there's three. So sometimes with these books you get an exponential effect. One book gives you a linear response, You know, one book, one increase in knowledge, one unit of knowledge, but you put 2 or 3 books and you don't just have 2 or 3, you have 10.

That's synergy.

So try that sometime. So if your allotted time to read for the day is 15 minutes, just skim through 3 books for 15 minutes. Remember, if that bothers you, tomorrow you can go back to the old way of reading one book at a time. Always be mixing and matching. Humans do a lot better with recipes of variety.

I think a lot of people and your students that are getting ready to go back to school have had the experience of, "I can't learn all this. There's too much here. What am I looking for?" Have you ever had that experience?

Yes, yes.

What if I told you there's only 5 things you need to know?

Go for it.

And if you learn just those 5 things, you'll get an A in anything you do, whether it's at work or school.

All right, give it to me.

The first of the 5 things is the words, the vocabulary. 80% of learning a new subject is learning the vocabulary. So what words are you looking for? They're bolded, they're italic, they're underlined, they're in strange fonts, they're in color, they might be in a table. Something is different. The writer wanted you to notice these words don't look the same as all the— guess one of these things is not like the others. Well, they did it on purpose to draw your attention. So the words are the first thing. The second thing are names. Who's in your book and what did they do? The third thing is any number, date, statistic, or formula. What is it? How do you use it? What does it mean? The fourth thing— this is very important— in most non-fiction books, there are headings and subheadings which are basically like thematic folders. They keep the information that's related to itself in a container. And what you're looking for— what are the 5 most important ideas contained in every section and subsection? And the last thing you're looking for are the questions and the answers. You ever get to the end of a chapter and there were a bunch of questions, you're like, I didn't really look at that very much. I didn't realize it was an important. What if you had read the questions first and knew what was important? Then when you saw it, you'd say, this is important. They ask questions about this. Wouldn't that make a big difference in your understanding?

Wow.

John Brooks is an unbelievable business writer. He's probably my favorite, and it's too bad so many people haven't had a chance to hear about him and the great work he did.

He loved stories with vivid characters.

Venal, bumbling, brilliant, you name it, he loved them.

He was a novelist at heart and he found a lot of good stories in Wall Street.

Warren Buffett gave me a copy of Business Adventures, feeling like with our dialogue about trying to understand the world of business that I'd enjoy it as much as he had. And in fact, it was phenomenal.

Oh, I knew he'd like it. I mean, that was written for him. It was written for me, too. If you're going to run a company, you should read The Impact of Philosophers. I mean, when you learn how really probably pretty decent people start behaving in bad ways, it's— that's fascinating.

He talks about these people in GE who would wink when they would actually say what the rule book said to do.

Now remember, you cannot talk to our competitors about this, wink, you know, which is essentially saying, go talk to them.

But he makes it come alive in a particular way. He makes it come alive as comedy because he understands that most of the time, if you look closely enough, the motives of the people involved are as short-sighted and self-seeking as all other human motives. And that's the material of comedy.

Ford Motor Company was super successful. They introduced a car called the Edsel, and they spent more money on picking the name and planning the features than had ever been spent on on any new American product, and yet it was an abysmal failure.

Ford counted on selling at least 200,000 Edsels the first year. There may be an Aborigine somewhere in a remote rainforest who hasn't yet heard that things failed to turn out that way.

I just love that line.

And yet, in a way, the Edsel wasn't so bad. It embodied much of the spirit of its time. Or at least at the time when it was designed, early in 1955. It was clumsy, powerful, dowdy, gauche, well-meaning. A de Kooning woman.

I think you can read this book today and learn a lot.

All the work of Michael Lewis comes directly from this.

I mean, he really was the Michael Lewis of his day.

The rules of running a great business, value creation, are unchanged. And Brooks took some very dramatic examples that are particularly fun and interesting and instructive.

I read a book recently by Seth Godin that really is— it's called "Lynchpin." And I'm a big fan of Seth's. He's a friend of mine. He's just— he's very poetic and he's brilliant and he takes complex things and makes them very simple but writes them in a very inspiring way. So I'd show you his book right now, but these days I read on my iPad.

IPad.

So I'd really go pick up his book. I think it's really tiny, you can read it really quick, and I think it'd give you some really nice insights. And then one other book I'd just like to recommend to you, I mean, if you just have a little bit of time here, is called The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. And I'm probably mispronouncing his name, I hope I'm not, but it's a book I read when it first came out several years ago, but it's one of the best books I've read to show you the scientific understanding of how you really experience a life of fulfillment. Because as things get more difficult, the old style of being happy that so many people used of, you know, let me just get what I want, we all know that doesn't work. But it becomes more obvious when the economy contracts. And I just, one of my missions is to make sure people are really truly fulfilled in their lives and that they, I believe that happens by contribution, by relationships, by making a difference, by having your life have meaning beyond yourself. And yes, you can get your toys and I've had the privilege of doing that, but it never fills anybody up. This book, rather than me tell you that in a few words or some silly little quote, I think it'll give you some stuff that's real food for thought. It'll move you and it'll kind of give you a little pathway to see what are the real ways to have lasting happiness and fulfillment.

You know, one of my really important colleagues on my team, one of my managers, Karen Veazey, she suggested I read the book The Alchemist and it changed my whole life. Because I realized all of the people who had conspired to get me to this place.

Oh, I love The Alchemist.

Man, that book is— it will change your life.

It's the one book.

You know why? Because it absolutely shows you that if you have the desire, the universe will rise up to meet you exactly where you are.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

Yes. You have to be unafraid to dream.

Right.

And then you have to be even more brave and gallant about blueprinting what you've envisaged.

Yes.

You got to be brave about that.

So you read The Alchemist, and then it was like clear to me.

I was like, wow.

So maybe at some point in your life you've dreamed about becoming a millionaire. Well, this book takes it to the next level. How to Become a Billionaire.

Rich! I'm rich!

This is one of the best books I've ever read on how to make money. And this guy went out and he surveyed and studied all the top billionaires. He ended up coming up with around 10 principles that you have to follow to become extra wealthy.

And let me tell you about the 3 top self-development books that have had such a great impact on me. The first one, which I stumbled across many, many years ago, was called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Now Napoleon Hill was a journalist and a writer, and he was called in to visit with Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest, most successful business magnates in the world at that time. And then Carnegie said, I want you to help me to develop a philosophy of success. I will open the doors to the 500 richest people in America so that you can interview them as many times as you need to, then take all the best information from these 500 people and put it into a series of books to help other young people to be successful much faster. But I won't pay you a penny. What do you say? And Napoleon Hill had thought this man was going to hire him and pay him an enormous amount of money to do this writing. He was shocked. And he sat there, he tells about it later, he sat there and he thought and he thought and he finally said, okay, I'll do it. And then Andrew Carnegie pulled his watch out from under the desk and he said, you had 60 seconds to give me an answer. You made your answer in 46 seconds. He then went on to open the door to every wealthy person in America, people who had started from nothing and become extraordinarily rich. And what Napoleon Hill did is he took over the years and he found that there were 17 principles that wealthy people had, qualities and behaviors. He found that no one started off with these qualities and behaviors, and he found that they were all learnable. Now my second one would be my own book, Maximum Achievement. Napoleon Hill's book was written in the '20s and '30s. My Maximum Achievement was written for the 21st century, and it shows you how to completely change the way you think, how to set goals in every area of your life, how to dramatically take control of your life in every area and eliminate the negative Emotions That Hold People Back. Now another book that I would recommend that I have always liked is The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. Norman Vincent Peale, I knew him and I worked with him before he died. He was a minister and he came up with some very, very interesting ideas about how the more positive you think, the more energy you have, the more grateful you are for the things in your life, the more things that you will have to be grateful for. Just like I teach and other people teach, you'll attract into your life people and circumstances in harmony with your dominant thoughts.

Thank you so much for watching. I made this episode of Believe Life because Spike Z2108 asked me to. So if there's a topic that you want me to cover on the next edition of Believe Life, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of the points that you heard in this video resonated the most with you, which you learned the most from, you're going to go take some action on. Leave it in the comments. I'm really curious to find out. Thank you so much for watching. Have a great day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.