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I couldn’t even imagine what my life would have been like if I didn’t become a reader.

It’s not something I like spending a whole lot of time thinking about, because I know for a fact that my life would have turned out a whole lot worse.

Not just in terms of earning potential or general knowledge about the world. More like…an entire unseen universe that would have remained forever closed to me, had I not dedicated so much time to searching for and reading great books.

I know you know exactly what I’m talking about!

The author of tonight’s book, Nick Hutchison, definitely feels the same way, and his book is called Rise of the Reader. It’s full of excellent strategies for mastering your reading habits and applying what you learn, and my breakdown of the book (sampled in this newsletter) is one you can read for free in its entirety.

Premium Members of The Reading Life, however, gain access to a total of ~150 complete book breakdowns, along with a variety of other rewards/benefits that I lay out right here. 

One thing I also do is donate $1 per Premium Member to First Book, my favorite literacy charity. They help kids learn to read, and ensure they have access to books and other educational materials.

This month, because of The Reading Life, I donated an extra $32 to the cause, and I’d love it if you considered making a donation too!

Here’s more of what you’ll receive as a Premium Member:

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Before we get into Rise of the Reader, I published two more YouTube videos since the last issue of the newsletter, and one features a book that’s sure to be a top contender for my favorite book of the year.

The other video features 7 amazing quotes from a 122-year-old personal development book that I used to re-read every single year.

The same author has a follow-up book that I mention later on in the video that is not nearly as widely known, but it’s just…well, it’s just absolutely phenomenal. Both those books and more are discussed in the video.

Anyway, if you enjoy those videos and/or find them interesting, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing the video with a friend. Thanks!

Now, let’s get into Rise of the Reader, by Nick Hutchison!

📚 Instant Positivity, by Kristen Butler - I’m a big believer in the power of small, seemingly insignificant daily actions. Over a long enough period of time, they add up to staggeringly huge results, and Kristen’s new book features 365 ways to get “just” 1% better each and every day. It all adds up, it all matters, and this book is a great way to get started. I also loved her previous book, The Comfort Zone!

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This Book is For:

*Beginner readers who want to learn how to build a strong reading habit, extract the most value from the books they decide to read, and find the best books to read in the first place, all while avoiding the common mistakes that prevent many people from profiting from humanity's collective wisdom.

*More experienced, life-long learners who may have already developed a reading system of their own, yet who want to take it to that next level, and be reminded of all the life-affirming reasons why they're so powerfully drawn to reading in the first place.

*Career professionals who are looking for a competitive advantage, an edge over the other players in their field, and who know - at least on some level - that books contain the mindsets, strategies, and tactics they've been looking for this whole time.

*Anyone who may have fallen out of love with reading (perhaps because of a stifling education system that too often takes all the fun out of it), but who still feels that it might be important to reestablish that long-lost connection with the wealth of worldly wisdom from humanity's most brilliant minds.

Summary:

It's said that the person who doesn't read books has no advantage over the person who can't read them, and this one's absolutely true.

Most likely, almost every single person you look up to - those who have led great lives, accomplished magnificent things, and have elevated themselves above their initial circumstances - have credited large parts of their success to a habit of lifelong, dedicated reading, and a love of the profound ideas found in great books.

You almost literally can't read a biography, memoir, or even an article about someone influential and impressive in some way without hearing about how their parents read to them when they were younger, their teachers inspired a strong love of reading early on, or about how they were lucky enough to stumble upon that one book that "started it all."

All three of those things happened to me too.

What I'm saying is that it can't all be a coincidence. There must be something in books, something you can't find anywhere else (at least not delivered in the same way) that propels these powerfully influential people forward in life.

The author of Rise of the Reader, Nick Hutchison, feels the same way, and he's written a wonderful book that captures the magic of what it's like to have the idea hit you that, by holding a book, you're holding decades of wisdom and experience in the palm of your hand.

Every page crackles with Nick's breathless enthusiasm for reading, and his story makes it clear that books and reading are for everyone.

You don't have to be intimidated by the "Great Books," or swayed by the "100 Books You Must Read to Be Considered Well-Read" lists or anything like that, and even though there are more Starbucks than libraries, everyone is welcome in the book stacks too. Books are another kind of "Third Place" where everyone is welcome, everyone is equal, and everyone can return for as long as they want to feel inspired to keep moving forward in life.

You might be new to reading, you might be a somewhat more "advanced" reader, or you might be anywhere in between, but I've read more than 1,300+ books in the last ten plus years, and I still found a ton of value in Rise of the Reader.

The first part of the book is all about discovering (or rediscovering) what books can really do, optimizing your reading, and building on basic learning and implementation strategies that will help you move the knowledge and wisdom from the page, all the way into your actual life.

Now, remember that this book deals primarily with nonfiction. I don't believe you have to "apply" everything you read - reading for pure pleasure is actually a thing too!

So don't listen to anyone who keeps badgering you about whether you're "applying" everything you're reading. "But have you applied what you've read? What about implementation? Are you applying these ideas or just reading?"

You have my permission to just read. Not that you need my permission, but you have it.

That being said, one of the strongest parts of the book is Nick's suggestion that we have an intention behind our nonfiction reading, an idea I wholeheartedly support.

If you're reading for a result, to solve some problem you have in your life, or to achieve some goal, then yeah! You do have to apply what you're reading. It's not just going to "happen" for you because you read a Tony Robbins book. Luckily, Rise of the Reader is full of implementation strategies that are extremely effective and worth learning about.

This book could have been 10 times as long if Nick had gone more in-depth on all the topics he discusses - the compound effect, note-taking, SMART goals, NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), and on and on - but that was never his intention. It's not meant to be a "complete guide" to any of these things.

Instead, he's making you aware of all the avenues open to you for self-improvement and lifestyle optimization, and for that purpose, Rise of the Reader serves beautifully.

The last half of the book is all about health, wealth, and happiness habits, and he lists more than 100 new habits to install/improve, along with his personal experience with each one, further reading, options to explore, etc.

You could read 100 books, one for each habit, but he lays out all these habits in one place, which is nice. You're going to want to keep this book on your shelf within easy reach whenever you want to install a new beneficial, life-enhancing habit.

I won't oversell the book, but I think you may like it! It's very good, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but the real selling point is Nick's sheer enthusiasm for the reading life, and as he explains in the book, we all need to surround ourselves with people who are dedicated to growth, learning, self-expansion, and fulfillment.

Basically, he's one of us: he's a reader, a passionate developer of human potential, and this book can serve as excellent encouragement for you build and maintain your intention to become a rising reader yourself.

READ THE FULL BOOK BREAKDOWN HERE

Key Ideas:

#1: Ten Years, in Ten Hours, for Ten Dollars

Books are virtually the only way you can download ten years of someone else's experience and wisdom into your brain, in ten hours, for less than ten dollars. Where else are you going to get that kind of ROI?!

Will Smith put it best when he said that no matter what problem you're facing in your life, there is someone else out there who has faced that exact same problem; they’ve solved it, or at least made major discoveries that could help you deal with it, and they’ve written down most of what they know in a book...

That you can get pretty much for free!!!

Later on in this breakdown we'll speak about something called "the adjacent possible," but for right now, the concept of leverage is where we'll place our focus. Leverage, in basic terms, is the mechanism by which we can "accomplish much with very little."

If we invest $10,000 into a rental property that earns us $100,000 in returns over the next five years, we are leveraging that $10,000 to create an even bigger result in the future. Or if we spend one hour organizing our files and that saves us ten hours of searching for what we need later, we can say that organizing our files first was a highly leveraged activity.

Reading is also high-leverage. We can invest ten dollars and ten hours learning from a great book, and download a lifetime of someone else's knowledge and wisdom, mainlining it directly into our brains.

Contrast that with low-leverage activities like watching trash TV or hanging out with people who do nothing except whine and complain about their circumstances. You're not benefitting very much from that activity, even though you may genuinely like those people on a personal level.

Even things that used to be good uses of our time and money have turned into lower-leverage activities in recent years: things like traditional education such as is offered by universities (they don't really prepare students for the realities of the working world, or even give them the skills to land a job in the first place), a paid mastermind event (which can be quite impactful, as long as we don't simply return to our previous behaviors immediately after the session is over), and even online courses. Books remain undefeated.

Meeting and learning from the author themselves might be transformative in its own way, but that's usually not possible, for obvious reasons. The next best thing is to read their book, and even if you do end up meeting them someday...it's best if you've read their book!

It all comes back to leverage. Even spending a whole day with the author probably wouldn't teach you the same amount as reading their book. You'd learn different things, surely, but there's really no substitute for books.

With books, you have all their best ideas, highly polished, thoroughly vetted, tested in the laboratory of real life, all in one place. The ROI on that is truly insane, and it keeps paying off, over and over again, for the rest of your life.

#2: Buy Your Ticket, Take the Ride

Are you more likely to win the lottery or have your life changed by a book? Serious question. You probably already realize that the best books contain the collected wisdom of the smartest, kindest, most successful and amazing human beings who have ever been alive on this planet.

But there are also a lot of bad books out there...and I do mean a lot. What are your chances of picking up a good one?

Well, it's estimated that there were more than 158,000,000 published books in existence by 2023, with 2.2 million new titles added to our global bookshelf each year.

Full Disclosure: I don't love mathematics. So I'm just going to stick with round, easy numbers on this one. But when you consider the astronomical odds against you ever winning the lottery, I'm gonna have to go with books on this one! Especially since there are probably at least 100,000 books out there that are worth reading, maybe even more.

That's just an educated guess, and of course it all depends on which kinds of books you like to read. But your odds of having your life changed by a great book is significantly better than having your life changed by the lottery. You just have to buy a ticket! Or, get your hands on a book, as it were.

Sure, you may have to kiss a few frogs before you find a book that absolutely blows you away, but you're much more likely to stumble upon a life-changing book than you are to stumble into life-changing money by winning the lottery. Books beat lottery tickets as an "investment" every time, and it's not even close.

What's more, by reading widely and constantly, you're stacking the probabilities in your favor. You're making it much more likely to find yourself reading a fantastic book, and you won't have to visit millions of bookstores to do it either. You can just visit the library, or download any number of book apps to your phone, or have books delivered straight to your door from Amazon.

The bottom line is that you could spend $1,000 on lottery tickets and very easily end up with $0, but, if you follow the advice in this book, you're extremely unlikely to spend $1,000 on books and end up with nothing.

To Nick's point in the quote above, nothing you end up learning in a great book is going to do you any good if it never makes it into your actual life. If learning is defined as behavior change based on new information, can you even be said to have learned anything if you don't do anything differently?

#3: Finding the Time to Read

Achieving almost literally any result you want in life is actually very simple. There are really only three things you need: some extremely attractive benefit that you're moving toward, some extremely unattractive danger or loss that you're moving away from...and impulse control. That's basically it.

When it comes to finding time to read, what it comes down to is ramping up the attractiveness of what reading will give you (and repeatedly making yourself consciously aware of it), blowing up the pain (real or imagined) of not reading, and blocking out every single other thing that could possibly prevent you from reaching your desired goal of sitting down with a book and reading it.

When you consciously, repeatedly bring to mind all the benefits that reading more books more often will bring to your life, and you make yourself painfully aware of what not reading is costing you, then suddenly, reading becomes a whole lot more important. You won't even really have to discipline yourself much to do it, because you'll know, on a deep, visceral level how important it is.

Your intention will drive the habit, and your habit will bring all these benefits to life for you, and you'll naturally begin finding more and more time to read, as you keep seeing all the wonderful changes that are happening in your life because of it.

So having an intention is important for reading for several reasons: learning more effectively, and amplifying its importance for you. But what I've also found helpful is to schedule the things that are most important to me first, and then schedule everything else in my life around them. For me, I directly apply this to reading. My reading time gets a primary place in my schedule before everything else gets filled in around the edges.

Everyone has time to read, but not everyone has the same priorities. At the end of the day, you just have to be completely honest with yourself about where your priorities actually are. And if reading's not your priority right now, that's fine! It's honesty and clarity that are key here.

What's more, it doesn't actually take that long to read a 250-page book anyway. For simplicity's sake, we'll say that you want to read a book a week. Which is tremendous goal that not many people even get close to! So how possible is it?

If we divide 250 pages by 7 days, we find that we'll have to read an average of just 36 pages a day to reach our goal. That may sound like a lot, but when we simplify and say that the average page in a book contains 250 words and the average reading speed is 250 words per minute (the number of words per page is thought to be between 233-280, and reading speed between 200-250 words per minute, but for my sake - and yours - we're keeping the math super simple), then it will take you just 36 minutes of reading per day to finish 36 pages.

Of course, it will likely take you more, when you factor in coffee breaks, note-taking, inevitable distractions, etc. But it's not going to take you four hours.

Reading doesn't have to take over your life, but if the accomplishment of your biggest goals and aspirations require just 36 minutes per day of reading to give you the tools and ideas to make them happen, wouldn't you be able to find the time?

READ ALL THE KEY IDEAS HERE

Book Notes:

READ ALL THE BOOK NOTES HERE

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Action Steps:

#1: Read What You Love Until You Love to Read

It's exceptionally difficult to make yourself do something that you really don't want to do.

Maybe it's obvious, but that goes double when it comes to reading: something "boringly educational" that most people were forced to do by teachers and adults who sucked all the fun out of it.

So, one of the very first things you need to do to become a Rising Reader is to strengthen (or create from scratch) your positive associations with books and reading. Learn to love it, or remember that you used to love it, but the idea is the same: read what you love until you love to read.

It's helpful to remember here that reading isn't a "competition," and there's no "Required Reading List" when you become an adult - it's completely up to you.

You can just read the stuff that you enjoy reading. And once you do, and you start to remember how much you actually enjoy it, then reading is going to become much more enjoyable for you, and less of a chore, and so you'll end up doing it more often. A beautiful, virtuous cycle!

Just pick up a book that looks good, on a subject you find interesting, and/or by an author you like, and start reading to experience the sheer pleasure of it. You don't have to finish the book, just enjoy it. And if that particular book isn't connecting with you, simply put it down and start another one.

Take all the pressure off of yourself to "optimize" your reading routine, or stay up to date with all the latest "must read" books, and just get back to your true love of reading. Being a reader is what's important, not necessarily what you choose to read. Follow your natural curiosity and your joy.

#2: How Rising Readers Choose What to Read

Once you've strengthened the positive associations you have with reading, you can branch out and become a little more intentional about what you choose to read, if you'd like.

For me, I've found that the best book to read is usually the one that solves my current problem. So if I'm looking for a new workout plan, I'll read a fitness book. If I need more leads in my business, or I'm planning on launching a new product or service, I'll read a book about that.

There's literally a book for every single problem, challenge, or opportunity you could ever encounter in this life.

Next, you could look at what kind of goals you have, and see if there's a book out there written by someone who's achieved something similar (Spoiler Alert: there is!), or you could just read a book written by somebody that you admire. The possibilities are endless.

There are plenty of fantastic sites where people go for book recommendations too. Seriously, you won't have to go far! And I mean, you could start to look at the "Best Book" lists, or "Top 20 Books for Entrepreneurs," or whatever. Nothing wrong with those at all! Just don't start believing that you have to read every book on that list. Many of the people who make up such lists are no smarter than you are.

I'll mention quickly as well that your next book recommendation will often come from the book you're reading now! I literally couldn't even count the number of times an author I was reading has referenced another book that seemed interesting (or dozens!) that I then bought, loved, and went on to find my next favorite book in that book. Reading is a giant rabbit hole that nobody has ever been to the bottom of, and that's never going to change.

#3: Know What to Do, and Do What You Know

One of the best decisions I've ever made was to start taking notes on every book that I read, something that I've been doing since 2014. Today, I have thousands of pages of notes from the 1,300+ books that I've read, and they've served me incredibly well. I highly recommend that you do something similar.

For one thing, taking notes will help you solidify your learning, especially if you put the key ideas and concepts into your own words so that they have more relevance to you.

Direct quotes are fine - anything that I never, ever want to forget makes it into my notes - but the very act of reformulating what you've been learning into a way that you intuitively understand will work wonders.

Nick Hutchison divides his notes into action items, general notes, quotes, more research required, further reading, and miscellaneous, and I think that's a wonderful idea! I don't do this personally, but it seems to be working for him!

One thing I do is back up all of my notes in Google Drive, so that, for one thing, I never lose them, but also so that I can search my notes and find exactly what I'm looking for within minutes (or seconds), instead of running from notebook to notebook, scrambling to find whatever it is I wrote down somewhere.

All that being said, your notes exist to help you remember what you read, and in the case of many nonfiction books, to make your actual life better, so you're going to have to review your notes and come up with a system for implementing what you've learned.

What I've found most helpful is to track important habits and behaviors, then analyze them at the end of the week or month and determine whether or not they're taking me closer to the meaningful goals that I've set for myself.

What gets measured gets managed, and so you need to have some sort of system to be able to tell whether what you're doing is actually working. And if it's not, having your system and activities written down will allow you to clearly see what you're doing well and what needs to change.

Your system doesn't have to be perfect. After all, the slightly imperfect system that you actually use is always going to work better than the absolutely perfect system that you never use. So do the best you can (while realizing that your "best" is likely far greater than you could ever know), and commit to consistent, never-ending improvement over a long period of time.

Lastly, celebrate your wins! I don't do this nearly enough. I achieve so much, and then the internal dialogue is just like, "Of course I did it. It was expected." I don't give myself enough credit for the work I put in and the wins I've racked up, and so I'm suggesting instead that you, uh...not do that. Celebrate every victory! Do it for me!

Every time you conquer laziness, apathy, fear, and uncertainty represents forward momentum, and you deserve to be recognized for making the effort. Celebrate your wins. That's what Rising Readers do.

READ ALL THE ACTION STEPS HERE

This Book on Amazon:

Rise of the Reader, by Nick Hutchison

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OK, that’s it for now…

More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!

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With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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