Reading Time: 10 minutes
In 2020, the blogger Mark Manson read 81 books. And before COVID-19, he’d average around 50-60 per year. If you look at other top readers’ habits, they too average about 50 books per year. That’s between four and five books per month. Even though, for many of them, it’s their full-time job to read and publish content, that’s pretty insane given that most Americans read only around 4 books a year according to a study by the Pew research center.
Over the past couple years, I’ve been studying what these people do to hit such high numbers. After applying some of the best strategies I learned from history and today’s most prolific readers, I increased my reading from an average of 10-12 books per year to 26 books in 2020. And this wasn’t because of the pandemic.
I did this with everything else in my life still in place and unchanged (working full time, exercising regularly, family time, errands, etc.). So something worked, and I did it by making a few simple adjustments.
Here are some of the best strategies I learned and applied to double my reading.
1. Know why you’re reading
People often associate reading with intelligence and success, especially on social media nowadays. When you hear how some of the most successful people attribute their accomplishments to reading, it can become formulaic for many of us⸺a means to an end. Although reading can change your life depending on what you learn, it’s so much more than that. We can’t be reading just to get rich or sound smart. We need a stronger “why”.
Reading also has many other powerful benefits: it reduces stress, builds your vocabulary, improves your communication skills, and boosts brain function. As one strengthens the body with tension, so does one strengthen the mind with reading. Most importantly, it teaches you how much you don’t know about the world.
So always ask yourself, “Why am I reading this? What do I want to get out of this?” Did you pick up that book to learn a skill, to become informed about a theory or historical event, to be a better person, or for pure pleasure? The answer to these questions are what will keep you going back to the book.
2. Build confidence with small wins
The mere thought of starting a book can be daunting and discouraging. After all, you’ll spend an average of two to three weeks on just one. But you can build momentum by reading short books.
Whether a book is 30 pages or 600, a book’s a book. It’s length is not a prerequisite for quality. Some of my all-time favorites are The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (128 pages), On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (105 pages), and Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon (160 pages, super big font).
Short and powerful books are like diving boards that propel you into something wider and deeper. The momentum you build from finishing them will help carry you into bigger 400 or 500-plus page works you’ve been putting off.
3. Always have a book in your hand
In an article from the Harvard Business Review, Neil Pasricha recounts a story his friend told him about a time when he was waiting in line at a movie theater and noticed Stephen King also waiting in the same line. While standing there, King was reading a book. When they sat down and the lights dimmed, he was still reading. When the lights turned back on, he popped his book open and started reading again, even as he was walking out.
In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear points out that one pillar of establishing a good habit is to make it very easy to do. With reading, you can do this by always having a book in your hand. Just like King, you can find brief glimpses of opportunities to crack it open throughout the day: waiting in line at a grocery store, while commuting or taking public transportation, when you take a break at work, or while you eat.
Just keep your book in your hand and don’t put it away. Over time, I guarantee you’ll be surprised at how much extra reading you can cash in.
4. Read what interests you
Reading boring stuff is one of the best ways to kill a reading habit. You look at the book each day with a heavy sigh. “I have to finish this”, you tell yourself. Why? What’s the point of reading something if you’re not coming away with something valuable or interesting? This isn’t school. Your time to read is an investment, and there are too many good books out there to squander it on something that doesn’t grab your attention.
Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th century writer, philosopher, and early feminist, criticized women for reading novels because she considered it a waste of time and intellect. Still, she didn’t get too mad at them. She said, “Any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement, and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers.”
Reading something, even if it doesn’t stimulate the intellect, is so much better than nothing. Your reading interests may also push you into different genres or make you switch from fiction to nonfiction. I know I didn’t get into philosophy or history right off the bat. It was a long process to get there, but it started with just reading stuff I liked.
My rule of thumb is that if I’m not hooked within the first three chapters or 50 pages, I drop it and move on to the next book. I used to feel guilty, but now I feel relief and excitement when I stop a book because I get to start the next one I’ve been dying to get to.
5. Vandalize your book
I don’t like to rent books from the library because they don’t let you write in them. Yes, I know. Duh. But it’s a shame because this simple thing is the difference between grasping the content and forgetting about it. Whenever I find a memorable quote or passage, I underline it, earmark the page, circle it, whatever. Anything to let me know I stumbled into something good.
And what do I do with all these markings? I put them in a notecard system⸺something I learned from Ryan Holiday. It’s a collection of all my favorite notes and passages (or marginalia) from my reading. This process keeps me engaged, it allows me to remember so much more, and it helps me build a powerful source of references that I can use in my articles or any problems I’m facing in life.
Does this get expensive? It can, but it’s worth the cost if you find something that flips the table on your way of thinking. You can find used copies of almost any book for a few bucks either online or a thrift store. It’s rare that I buy a brand new book. And even if I do, I remember something the philosopher Erasmus said that resonates with me: “When I get a little money, I buy books; if any is left, I buy food and clothes.”
6. Trace what you read
On a podcast from 2017, a guy named Jim Kwik talked about methods for reading faster. One of his most intriguing tricks was to trace what you read with your finger (or a pen) and use it to set the pace. This is also known as the pointer method. It was first introduced by the Utah school teacher Evelyn Nielsen Wood in the 1950s who claimed to read 2,700 words per minute by using her finger. According to Kwik, your brain can process information faster than you speak. If you vocalize or subvocalize (under your breath or in your mind) when you read, you slow down your ability to grasp what’s being said, and the likelihood of regression (or rereading) increases.
Before this, I haven’t used the pointer method since Mrs. Allen’s class from first grade. I was never too big on speed reading but this is solid advice. When I started tracing, I noticed a significant difference in both my reading speed and comprehension. I stopped regressing often, too.
You don’t need to read every letter in a word to understand what’s being said. Just like how you can raed tihs snetecne and sltil konw waht I am tkalnig aobut. Tracing is simple, but it takes some getting used to. Try it out for a few days and see what happens.
7. Talk about what you read
I like to post on social media and talk to people about what I’m reading. I don’t do this to be a snob. In Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, he talks about how people who make bets on horse races are much more confident in their pick after placing their bet. Weird, right?
Cialdini says that this is due to “our nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done.” The same goes with reading.
When you make a public commitment, you feel compelled to finish what you started. You don’t want to let people down, right? What if they ask you about it later? It’s a subtle but powerful mental pressure.
In my experience, talking about what I’ve read not only pushes me to continue reading, but it also improves my retention. The way I explain what I read tells me how well I’m understanding the material. If I can’t describe what I’ve just read, then I probably need to go back.
8. Schedule your reading time
We’re all busy as hell. But amid work, errands, and other endless obligations, we somehow still mark events in our calendars, stay updated on our Netflix shows, create a never-ending wish list on Amazon, and spend hours scrolling through social media. But how do we have no time to read?
If you look at your life, you’ll find that you actually have lots of time. And reading doesn’t require much of it. Just fifteen minutes a day can add up to almost eight hours of reading in a month!
You can read in small chunks like Stephen King, but I’ve found that the best way to get in my reading time is to do it in the morning before the day starts. After I dress, I set a timer for fifteen minutes and read until it goes off. Doing it early gets it out of the way and starts your day off with a win. The time also flies by. If you try to schedule it in the middle or end of the day, you probably won’t get to it.
It’s not about scheduling your reading into your day. It’s the opposite: molding your day around your reading. I talked about this in my last article on focus. I think the problem with reading is that people think it’s an enormous task that requires lots of time and effort, or it’s just not important to them. Because if it was important, they’d make it work. We do that with everything else in life.
Less is More
This list is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other strategies you can find online to read more books. These eight are just the ones that work best for me. If you use just a few of these strategies, I guarantee you’ll see your reading habits and comprehension improve significantly.
But don’t get caught up in the number of books you, me, or Mark Manson reads. To get the most of it, there must be a balance between quantity and quality: to read enough books to learn lots of new things but slow enough so that what you learn sticks with you. It’s much better to take the time to understand the subject of one book and use what you learn than to read ten books and forget about them within days. So start small, start slow, and work from there.
