How To Automatically Read A Book Per Week Without Taking Any Additional Time Out Of Your Day
If you’re anything like me, you probably have a whole stack of books sitting around that you’re really going to read some day. Yeah right!
Sure, it would be nice to get some more reading done, but let’s face it: there is usually something more urgent that needs to get done. And when you have to do all the urgent things, there isn’t much time left over for the non-urgent (but still important in the long run) activities like reading.
Did you know that the majority of people in the United States don’t ever read a single book after high school? In fact, if you take all the book sales in the U.S. it’s enough for about one book per person, and most of those don’t even get read. They’re sitting on some shelf like in my bedroom.
Without continuing to read, how can you stay sharp in your industry and get a raise? How can you keep your brain alert and full of new ideas? How can you master new skills and improve your hobbies?
A book is incredibly powerful because it gives you leverage. The author could have spent years of his or her life studying a subject, reading everything that had already been written, learning from the best, summarizing different theories, and simplifying complex ideas. After ten years of research, thousands of hours and millions of pages can be condensed into a concise little 200 page novel, and little old you comes along to get it for $10.
You can now plug that information right into your brain, just like you’d insert a CD-ROM into a computer. Zap! A few hours later it has been copied, and you’ve just done an amazing thing: gotten the accumulation of the best ideas that the human race has produced for all time. If you had to do it on your own, it would have taken you the ten years and millions of pages that the author went through. But instead you took a short-cut.
I mean, other animals can’t do that. A monkey can merely learn from it’s parents or other members of it’s group. It can’t learn from a monkey that lives on the other side of the world, or even over the next hill, and it certainly can’t learn from monkey’s of the past who are long gone. If the monkey wants to discover a new way to peel bananas, he’s pretty much limited to what he can come up with on his own. With each generation of monkey’s that passes on, great amounts of information as lost because they can’t store and pass on ideas to future generations.
We as humans have been given this amazing communication tool, and yet so few take advantage of it. It’s really a shame when you think about it.
So here is my long winded answer to getting more reading done that we should all take advantage of: audio books.
You see, every day you have to drive (or perhaps take the subway or public transportation). With a stack of books at home, you can always have something more important to do instead. But you aren’t going to wake up one day and say “I’m too busy to drive anywhere today”. Given the average commute to work alone, you’ll probably spend 45 minutes in the car.
Life is quite simply too short to spend time listening to Britney Spears, Snoop Dogg, and advertisements for male enhancement on the radio, and as Brian Tracy says “if you aren’t listening to books on tape, you quite simply aren’t serious about being successful in life”.
Almost every high performance person I know listens to books on tape. Probably a number of people who you respect and admire do as well, but you just don’t know it yet! It’s not the kind of thing that comes up in everyday conversation, especially since feels a little bit dorky (to be perfectly honest). But they are still doing it.
Almost every major book you can think of that comes out today is available as an audio book. You can purchase them on websites like Audible.com (the Amazon of audio books) and even get them for free at your local library. Once you start to meet other people who listen to audio books, you’ll start to swap them and get them for free that way.
Another benefit of audio books is that many people retain information better by listening than by reading. Were you the type of person in class who preferred to listen to the teacher or to read the text book on your own? Personally, I always found reading text books in school to be boring, but I have no problem listening to someone talk (especially if the topic is interesting) and tend to learn better that way. Everyone is different, but it was a big advantage for me.
With the amount of time the average person spends in the car, it’s not unreasonable to finish an additional book every week. Since you have to drive (or commute, or go to the gym, etc - there are plenty of other places besides driving), the chances of forgetting to read or not having enough time go right out the window.
How would your life be different if you read an additional 50 books per year? Do you think you might get some good ideas? Do you think you might learn a few tips that could help your life?
Get started right now by going out and purchasing an audio book.
Brian Armstrong became a financially independent business owner within one year or quitting his job. You can learn how to start your own home based business in 30 days with less than $100 at his website.
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Comments
Will says on July 19th, 2007 at 9:51 am
Crummy post. The title was misleading, and everyone knows about audio books.
Also, where’s the evidence for this:
“Did you know that the majority of people in the United States don’t ever read a single book after high school?”
Scott says on July 19th, 2007 at 10:47 am
I love audio books but listening is just not the same activity as reading. And the vast majority of books I need/want to read are not in an audio format.
They don’t make a lot of recordings of academic publications.
whatno says on July 19th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Grammar hack: if you can replace it with “his” or “her”, it’s “its”, not “it’s”, as in the sentence “A monkey can merely learn from it’s [sic] parents or other members of it’s [sic] group”.
Brian says on July 19th, 2007 at 11:34 am
Thanks for the tip Whatno
Brian
Jim Gibbon says on July 19th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
I’ve really gotten into audiobooks this year; they’re perfect for long commutes.
One alternative to Audible is Librivox, a site that offers free public domain audiobooks. I wrote about it on my website: http://jimgibbon.com/2007/06/1.....-librivox/
Anon says on July 19th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
See Also: Simply Audiobooks
Netflix for Books
William Profet :: OneJobTwoSalaries.com says on July 19th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
First time I met audio-books when I bought the “Personal Power” by Tony Robbins. They are great. I converted them in mp3 format, saved in my MP3 player and - voila. They are all the time with me.
Useful article. Thank you!
Brian says on July 19th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
I’m an audio book addict. I listen to them in the car, at the gym, and sometimes even in the shower! I sort of imagine it like attending university full time, even though it doesn’t take any additional time.
elmegil says on July 19th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
You may want to consider seriously before buying anything from audible.com. I purchased a couple of Dr. Seuss readings by famous actors from them, and they are the most god-awful recording quality of anything I’ve bought online. They’re mono, and don’t seem to be better than maybe 8kHz recordings. Never mind that I could have gone to Amazon and bought the same recordings on CD….shame on me for trying to short cut things.
The lesson: make sure you can listen to significant parts of the ACTUAL recording, not just some sample they make available. Otherwise, find another outlet.
Roger Dodger says on July 19th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Nah… There are different ways to learning which most undergrads will learn about during their first semester. People respond differently to stimuli, e.g. visual, auditory, tactile etc. You need to find out which one you respond to better and go from there…
Audio books for me after the first 10 minutes become background noise which my brain does a superb job filtering out…
Tim Haughton says on July 19th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
I do prefer aural learning as opposed to visual. But I tend to prefer more informal things like lectures in mp3 format. http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/ is pretty good.
Nicola Larosa says on July 19th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
I telecommute, you insensitive clod! ;-P
Why try to get back time, if you don’t waste it in the first place?
Sean says on July 20th, 2007 at 5:51 am
Most audio books are heavily abridged, which means you miss out a lot of the texture of the book as well as many of its more subtle ideas. Some abridgements are okay (and some books you only need to skim anyway), but many are noticeably inferior to the original text.
Also, how useful this is depends on what books you listen to. You might be better off listening to a good news radio station than you are listening to the latest bestseller.
Lisa says on July 20th, 2007 at 6:15 am
Also - use your library to get said audiobooks. You will save a great deal of cash. Even if your library doesn’t have it, there is a good chance they will be able to get it via interlibrary loan. Also, you can put that book by the bathroom. You have to go in there and sit down at least once a day. Use that time wisely.
emule says on July 20th, 2007 at 9:01 am
Use emule or edonkey to download audio books - for free.
At your own risk of course.
Meryl says on July 20th, 2007 at 9:08 am
And it won’t work for the hearing impaired and deaf.
Brian says on July 20th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Sean: just wanted to respond to what you said about the news radio station being a better alternative.
I agree with you that it is better than listening to music and ads, but unless current events are somehow part of your job (you’re a news anchor, policy maker, etc) there is far more value in audio books.
I scan the headlines to keep a basic knowledge of whats happening in the world, but knowing about a murder that happened or the precise details of the war in Iraq does zero to improve my life.
Audio books get more specific. If you have an interest in say increasing sales in your business by 20% this year, you can get some great ideas from the top people and listen to it non stop for several hours. That would improve your life in a particular area thats important to you…something the news and talk radio can’t do.
As far as abridged vs. unabridged, I just want to get the info out, it’s educational, so it doesn’t matter to me (abridged can actually be an advantage). But you’re right that perhaps for a fiction book (like the new Harry Potter), where you want to cherish the experience and subtlety of how it’s written, audio would not be a good format for that. It works best with non-fiction.
Just one perspective.
Brian
Mark says on July 23rd, 2007 at 6:51 am
I agree with Will - crummy post.
*Most people know about audio books.
*Listening ain’t ‘reading’ a book per week now is it?
*I neither drive or get the subway/bus/whatever
*Are you on commission from audible.com? How many times have you mentioned them in this blog?
Ah well, great otherwise - perhaps the title of this post could do with tweaking or changing
Mark
Shane Mitchell says on July 23rd, 2007 at 8:16 am
If you are going to promote Audible.com then you should include a warning that the audio file you download is in a proprietary format and can only be played with the Audible media player (which is only available for a limited number of platforms) or on a small number of supported portable media players.
I gave audible.com a go and purchased a learning portugesse audio file which I have not been able to use and the audible.com support were completely unhelpful.
I would not call audible.com the Amazon of audio-books by a long shot.
DP says on July 29th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
i won’t go as far as saying this was an entirely crappy post. next time try to be more precise with the title!
Spiff says on September 2nd, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I agree, I used to spend a lot of hours reading (mostly non-fiction) and in the past years I came to the conclusion that most non-fiction books could be shorter. In some cases 50% shorter, sometimes more. There is too much redundancy taking up precious time. Abridged audiobooks solve that problem, plus I can use the time while working out, driving, etc.
Listening can be indeed “like reading a book a week” if you end up obtaining the same knowledge… and I often do.
Tim says on October 1st, 2007 at 12:41 pm
I’ve tried listening to my favourite blogs as podcasts and I tend to just tune out! When I’m driving I will need to focus on the road and I won’t be able to focus on a decent novel. I like to read novels from books, I can always make time for it but I have trouble making time for anything else if I get into a good story! As for learning, I really need visuals and I need to be taking notes or I won’t retain anything.
The Intrepid Dodger says on November 16th, 2007 at 8:11 am
Or, one could simply set aside a half-hour everyday for reading books. Tangible, flip-the-pages books.
Alexis says on July 15th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Edonkey and jimgibbons ….. thanks for the tip. Another thing I like, that’s not an audio book or print book, is little pdfs. That way I get just the segment I need when I need it. My sister - who runs a retail business - and I got a lot of exercises that got both our brains going from free E-Books by Brad Sugars. His site makes them free if you register, but they’re also free with no registration at: http://www.actioncoach.com/fre.....ebooks.php
Really good stuff! The site has audio books, too, for personal development and business growth but I like the books because they’re more for people who are already entrepreneurs and need info on customer loyalty strategies, advertising and the like.