Do you know that there is one habit that the most successful people share in common?
These ultra successful people love to read and they read a lot.
Many of them even credit reading as one of the most crucial factors behind their success in one way or another.
If you are wondering how successful people read books, read on to know the reading habits of the likes of Mark Zuckerberg to Phil Knight.
Mark Zuckerberg
In a Facebook post in 2015, the CEO and founder of Facebook vowed to read a book every other week, focusing on learning about various technologies, beliefs, histories, and cultures.
According to Zuckerberg, books give you the opportunity to completely explore and discover a certain subject and immerse yourself deeper and better, something that other media can offer. He also claimed to look forward to shifting more of his media diet to reading books.
Bill Gates
Bill Gates, Microsoft’s former CEO, has stated that he reads 50 books in one year or around one book per week.
Many of these are non-fictional books that deal with business, science, engineering, disease and public health.
He also occasionally breezes through a novel and sometimes, he finishes it in a single sitting late into the night. However, the books have something to do with the keen interest of Gates in discovering more about the world he lives in.
Warren Buffett
It has been reported that the Berkshire Hathaway magnate spends 5 to 6 hours per day reading 5 different newspapers. Buffett also goes through 500 pages of financial documents and suggests to investors to develop the same habit.
According to him, this is the workings of knowledge. This increases similar to compound interest. He also said that everyone can do this but not many people are willing to do it.
Elon Musk
Even before Elon Musk became Tesla’s CEO and way before he became the cofounder of PayPal, the young Elon Musk read novels on science fiction for as much as 10 hours per day.
It was also reported that he was able to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica at just 9 years of age. He also credits his love for books for his extensive knowledge on rockets.
Oprah Winfrey
The veteran host of successful talk shows has been telling her viewers to develop reading habits since 1996 through Oprah’s Book Club. According to Winfrey, reading is like her own path to freedom.
During her acceptance speech for United Nations Humanitarian Awards in 2004, she said that books let her see a world that is well beyond the front porch of the shotgun house of her grandmother. She also added that books endowed her with the power of seeing possibilities that were way past those allowed during that time.
Phil Knight
The founder of Knight treats the library at the back of his executive office as something sacred that people who want to go inside need to bow and remove their shoes. Even after he stepped down as the CEO, Knight still kept that library because he is always learning.
Do you think you can also follow the footsteps of these successful people and how they read?