How To Read a Book — How Successful People Read Books

Reading books is as good for your brain as eating healthy food for your body. Reading helps to improve memory, upgrade your thinking capabilities, reduce stress, improve knowledge, vocabulary, focus along with many other benefits. In fact, every successful person has one trait in common and that is their habit of reading books.

Warren Buffet reads 4–5 hours in a day, Bill Gates reads 50 books in a year, Mark Zuckerberg says I read daily to learn more about the world and different cultures. The list doesn’t end here and I am sure you must have come across celebrity book recommendations too on YouTube or Instagram.

However, did anyone tell you how to read a book?

Let me be very honest in this article. I will tell you exactly how I read and how many other successful people read books.

How Successful People Read Books:

1. Don’t read a bestselling book: I have asked 20 people how they choose books? And the answer was either they pick a bestselling book or they just see on Instagram if any book is popular among book bloggers. This is one of the biggest mistakes every beginner makes. First, you pick a bestselling book because you heard the book is great and reading helps in numerous ways then you find the book boring and dump the idea of reading altogether.

All the successful first ask themselves “What subject/topic they would like to know more about” and then they pick a book accordingly. If you are reading a book just because it’s a bestseller but has nothing to do with the problem you face in your life then you are just wasting your time and money.

For example: Let’s say you have stage fright but you want to master the art of public speaking and communication skills. In such a case, if you are reading Atomic Habits, Eat That Frog or any such book then you are simply wasting your time because these books don’t address the solution of your problem. On the other hand, if you read “How to Win Friends and Influence People” then you will not only get the solution but your enthusiasm and focus will increase