YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON

*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.

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.

#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: The Power of Intention

Ironically, setting a reading intention is something I only started doing unconsciously, but it's something that Nick Hutchison does extraordinarily well.

In the front of each book he starts, Nick writes an intention, a purpose for his reading that will direct his thoughts and guide him to pick up the information he's looking for and see how to apply it to his life and work. This is a practice worth adopting by all of us.

Most of us aren't in school anymore. No one is telling us what to read and why; our reading lives are completely up to us, and our reasons are our own. We can choose what to read based on our unique situation, preferences, and ambitions, and setting a reading intention serves to clarify all this and give us a focal point.

I should also say here that there's nothing "wrong" with reading for fun. Reading is fun, or at least it can be most of the time, and if your "intention" is just to enjoy a good story, you probably don't need to write that in the front of a book. But if we're talking about non-fiction (and some fiction, sure), then we want a result, and setting an intention helps us achieve that result.

It helps you identify what you will do with this information you're absorbing, this knowledge and wisdom you're exposing yourself to. Coordinated, massive action is truly the secret to most of the success we all seek. It's also most often the answer to all our problems, as summed up in the words of Nikos Kazantzakis: "Action, action! No other salvation exists!"

In a very real sense, we see what we're looking for, and there's a specific network of nerve pathways in the brain called the reticular activation system that's responsible for this. Its job is to filter out irrelevant information, and it's performing this function for you every moment of every day, as your brain works full-time, seeking out information that's going to lead you to the accomplishment of your survival goals and ignoring everything else.

This also goes a long way toward explaining why re-reading is so important. If you've ever returned to a book you've read years ago and found that it was completely different, you might instead consider that the book is exactly the same, but it's you who have changed. You're a completely different person since you first read it, with a multitude of various new life experiences, and maybe even totally different goals. It's almost like a stranger read that book all those years ago!

Because you have new goals, re-reading will allow your reticular activating system to pick up on information from that book that simply wasn't relevant before. It was always there, but because it didn't apply to you, you don't remember reading it.

Returning to that book with your renewed intention, you turn the laser focus of your RAS onto the accomplishment of your new goals, and you consciously seek out information from the book that's going to help you get there. Your next, practical step will be informed by your reading, and as long as you have an intention, every step you take will be in the right direction.

#4: 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?

#5: The Adjacent Possible

The adjacent possible is one of the most exciting, possibility-laden concepts that I've ever discovered in my entire life, and that is not an exaggeration in the slightest.

Very briefly, if you think of where you are in your life right now as being inside one giant room, you can think of every choice you have available to you in this moment as a door leading you into a different room. Inside each “room,” you'll find yourself in a new moment, faced with completely different choices than you have currently.

Move through the "door" of sending that job application, for example, and you may find yourself in a different room, where you now face the choice of accepting a particular job offer, or holding out for something better. Move through the door of speaking to that attractive stranger, and you may later face the choice of whether or not to agree to a second date with that person.

The examples I could give are virtually endless, but you needed to send the application to receive the job offer, and you needed to ask that person out to get that first date.

But the really exciting part in all of this is that you can never, ever predict the kinds of choices that will stand before you in the future if you never exit that first room in the first place! Hell, I mean even staying in that first room is a choice!

In the example of the job offer, if you do accept, maybe you'll end up working for that company for three years, after which they'll offer you the chance to head up an international division in, say, Cambodia. How did you end up in Cambodia?!

But it doesn't even stop there...

Once you find yourself in Cambodia, maybe you're faced with the choice of taking one apartment as opposed to another. You choose one, for whatever reason. There's a fire, and you're faced with the choice of re-entering the burning building and trying to save one of the other tenants who's trapped inside. You save them. You end up becoming close friends, you start hanging out, and they introduce you to their favorite sport, which is, oh I don’t know…soccer. You've never played before, but you end up becoming really good at it and decide to start coaching an amateur team in your spare time.

Okay, I'll stop now…

But you see the wild set of unfolding choices that guided you from where you were initially - in that first "room" - all the way to coaching a soccer team in Cambodia! Admittedly, that's kind of a random example, but that's exactly the point. There's no way you could have predicted that your life would end up that way.

The really wild part? This is your exact situation right now, in literally every single moment of your life.

You can't escape it, you can't opt out, you can't avoid choosing - you can only move forward through time, and by making one choice, you are cutting off virtually every single other choice that you could possibly make about your future, who you will become, and what your one and only life will look like.

There are possible future versions of you that will never exist (and that's probably a good thing!), but there are also possible future versions of you that must exist: versions of you where you are living at max capacity, versions of you where you’re showing up in the world as your highest self, making the grandest possible contribution to the world with the skills, abilities, and resources you have available to you.

Well guess what? Each new book you read is a door too. Every new idea you encounter is like opening a door and revealing an entirely new room, full of possibilities and potential.

To unlock these new futures, however, you have to become a Rising Reader. You have to be in motion. There’s a silly phrase that I actually love, and it goes like this: "Doors of opportunity will open for you, but you have to be moving down the hallway."

#6: The Great Irony of Gaining an Education

Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life. That's the choice.

What we're going to discuss here also ties into the idea of the adjacent possible explained above. We're always opening or closing doors - possible futures, versions of ourselves, etc. - and the same is true whenever we choose "entertainment" over education.

Educating yourself with a fantastic book is going to open up all these options that you never would have had if you had opted for watching a Netflix series instead.

Nothing against Netflix (I have a membership!), but if that's all you do, then eventually your life is going to get much more boring, as you'll find yourself with nothing to talk about besides the latest episode of whatever drama you're filling your mind with, and you'll forfeit the time you could have spent chasing down opportunities for building an actually exciting life in the real world.

More to the point, getting drunk every weekend is "entertaining" for some people, but if that's all you do, eventually your friends are going to start gaining promotions, going on trips, starting families, etc., and your life will start to get much more boring, as you limit your own choices and alienate yourself from the opportunities you would have had to improve your life in ways that didn't involve drunk tanks and pounding headaches.

Eventually, you'll be too broke and out of shape to have the energy or free time to do anything except work to make enough money for your next weekend at the bar to forget all the pain and frustration of having to work torturous hours to pay for your next bar tab.

If that sounds extreme, that's actually how some people live, and I can't imagine it's very fulfilling. They'll get no judgement from me (I don't think that anyone is "better" than them or anything), but would I really want to trade places with them?!

The alternative is to get an education. Read books. Listen to audiobooks. Watch podcasts and educational YouTube videos. Spend time with people who have exciting visions for their future. Absorb their ideas, add your own, learn from them, teach them what you know, and start building a more genuinely entertaining life, full of self-discovery, self-expansion, and self-love.

#7: The Sixth Millionaire

There are literally thousands of new millionaires being created every day, and there's no reason why you can't eventually become one of them - if that's your deepest, strongest, most unwavering intention.

There are people out there who are way dumber and lazier than you or I, and yet they're still raking in the cash, while people with all the advantages in the world are just struggling to get by. So what makes the difference?

Well, a lot of things, and I won't sit here and try to tell you that luck doesn't play a huge part in all of this. I am a passionate proponent of personal responsibility and agency, and yet even I realize that bad things happen to good people, and those good people don't always get what they deserve. However...

Every one of us can stack the probabilities significantly in our favor by making a conscious, determined commitment to surround ourselves with people who are headed in that direction.

The cultural gravity that exists around us can serve to bring our hopes and aspirations crashing back down to earth, or it can elevate us to levels of achievement and uncommon success far beyond our current imagination.

It's literally impossible not to be profoundly influenced and impacted by your environment, and this is true whether you're aware of it or not.

There's just something powerfully transformative about a group of hard-charging, high-achieving people, all gathered together (in person or online), working flat-out to make their inner visions real in the external world, and just by being around those people you'll be inspired to push harder and achieve more than you ever thought possible. It's true, because I have lived this reality, both through the books I've read, and the real, living people I surround myself with each and every day. It works.

It all matters, and it's all available to you! As long as you have an internet connection, a library card, and an earnest desire to be a productive, valuable member of your chosen high-powered group, avenues are available to you for breaking out of your current cultural gravity and taking everything you've ever wanted in this life.

That might mean earning more money or receiving some prestigious award, but it doesn't have to. For literally any and every worthwhile pursuit in this life, there's a strong, warm, cohesive group of individuals sharing ideas about their common love and ideals, helping each other succeed and get better...and you're welcome to join them.

It's all about making the group better and stronger. If you show up with enthusiasm, an honest desire to help and to be of service, and a willingness to learn, you will be welcome wherever you go. There's just this one very important thing to keep in mind, and for this I'll give the last word to Nick:

I’ve been taking detailed notes from every single book I’ve ever read since 2014, and they’re all here on my Patreon for just $1.

They’re updated monthly (sometimes twice a month), and by supporting me on Patreon you’ll also be able to keep up with everything I’m reading and learning, and get my best notes, takeaways, and summaries from every book that I finish.

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