How many books should I read in a year?

Ever hear the stories about the CEO’s of some of the best companies in the world reading a book a week? Have you ever tried this? 

Personally, I’m not sure how they manage this when running a successful company but they must have developed some routines and habits to help them do this. Leaving the time available to do this to the side, how much impact would reading one book per week have on you?

Here are some of the books that I have read in the past few years;

1.     Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek.

2.     Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t by Jim Collins.

3.     The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey.

4.     Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ by Daniel Goleman.

5.     Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink.

6.     How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

7.     The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries.

8.     The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell.

9.     The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter by Michael Watkins.

10. The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard & Spencer Johnson.

11. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni.

(I took these from the compilation of ‘The 25 Best Leadership Books of All-Time’ which can be accessed by CLICKING HERE). 

Each of the books above were inspirational and from reading them I can see exactly why they are in the top 25 according to Summary.com. 

However, what I want to write about here is that now a few years have past, how much impact are they making on my life? Ok, so I’m going to say “Some”. I’m not saying that it hasn’t made any impact because I know some lessons have been learnt but actually compared to the number of books, pages and words, this “Some” is tiny. 

So what’s the alternative if we want to learn from reading books?

What about if I said instead of 50 books per year, you read 1! Select the top book, which by the way can be one you have read before. The difference here is that you will read it over and over again. You study it, learn from it, and apply it. 

Why isn’t everyone who has read the books above a leadership master? It’s because they haven’t taken in the core knowledge of the book, absorbed the examples given, and most importantly, they haven’t applied it. 

Using an example from above, let’s talk about the book called ‘The First 90 Days’. This book is about how leaders can make impact especially in a new job they have recently started. For this I would advise to read it straight away. This book should also be read as you go through your first 90 days. It should be read as an evaluation of the first 90 days in the job. I would then suggest you start the book again and look at the mistakes you had made and what improvements you could make. 

Again, read the book going through the next 90 days of your job. Can you add to the book because now you are upping your game? Make some annotations in the margins on how you could develop the strategies mentioned. You may even want to keep a journal of your progress with the ideas you have. 

This is going to make much more impact on your self-development because you are now not only reading it, you are studying it and most importantly you are applying it. 

So which book would you start with? Start reading, learning and applying today!

This article was written by Paul Martin. Head Coach at Coaching for Leverage

You can visit the website at www.coachingforleverage.com

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