It takes most non-fiction authors six months to a year to write a book. That’s in addition to the decade or more of experience authors are distilling into 200 pages.
Ten years of someone’s life into a book which takes us four to seven hours to read.
We just bought a new house and are having a four-foot tall fence installed in the front yard. For the past four days, I’ve watched the fence builders from my office window work hard in 95-degree Texas weather for ten hours a day. I’ve barely seen them take breaks. I admire their work ethic, and I feel grateful for all that I have in life.
I also wonder what it would take for one of them to become financially independent, even wealthy. Here’s the progression as I see it:
- Do one manual labor job alone
- Hire a few lower paid people to help get jobs done faster
- Supervise a team of people who do the jobs
- Build a team that supervises teams of people completing jobs
To progress to each next step, two ingredients are required: 1) risk-taking and 2) learning.
When I hired my first employee in 2009 for my first e-commerce business, my company produced $5,000 per month in profits. I gave up $3,000 of that to hire someone so I could devote more of my time to growing the business. By offloading lower-skilled tasks such as customer service, I could spend my time on higher impact work such as marketing and product development. I risked 60% of my profits to increase my productivity. It worked. I grew that business to two million dollars per year the next year.
To figure out how to grow my business with the time I freed up, I read a lot. I read every relevant book I could find on marketing, management, and product development. I supplemented my reading by taking courses and attending conferences.
16 years later, I’m still reading (around 50 to 100 books per year).
Anything you want to learn has been published and is available for you to read. You can learn entrepreneurship, marketing, investing, interior design, cooking, diet, fitness, anything.
The great thing is nobody reads! Pick up a book each day and chip away at it and you’ll pull away from your peers. While everyone else is gets dumber looking at their smart phones and social media feeds, you get smarter and wiser. You absorb hundreds of years of others’ experiences each year.
Reading is the easiest, cheapest, most reliable way to increase success. Start by reading what you’re most interested in and follow where that takes you. Then, read to accomplish specific goals. Eventually, read to fill in gaps of your understanding of how the world works. Lastly, read material from those you don’t agree with to lessen the effects of confirmation bias and living in reinforcing bubbles of ignorance (the opposite of what social media encourages).
Have fun. Pick up a book.
I’ll see you at the top.