How to Read a Book Per Week (My Unbelievably Simple System!)

On this episode of the personal finance podcast, we're going to talk about how to read a book per week. It's my unbelievably simple system. What's up, everybody? Welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of dollar after dollar.com. And today, on the personal finance podcast, we're gonna be talking about how to read a book per week. And this is my unbelievably simple system. And the reason why we're talking about how to read a book per week, if you don't have the knowledge of personal finance, and you're taking the first step by listening to this podcast, but you know, if you don't have some sort of knowledge and background in personal finance, how do you ever expect to achieve any result at all, if you don't actually try to educate yourself, and listen to the personal finance podcast is your biggest first step, because I'm going to cover as many topics as possible on this podcast. But expanding your knowledge in in depth book reviews, and reading books is going to allow you to build true wealth through your knowledge. Because after you start reading enough, all of a sudden, you're just going to have reading the compound. And over time, it's going to be something that's going to make a significant difference for you. So today, what we're going to talk about is we're going to go through my simple system. And we're going to go through the different ways that you can implement this system and why I created this system in the first place. So let's get into it. So one of the biggest questions that's going to come up is why would you want to read this many books, and there's a book that came out called rich habits, and it's by a guy named Tom Corley. And if you haven't read the book, add it to your reading list for a book per week. But what he found out was that most wealthy people, the majority of wealthy people, make sure that they read every single day. And here's some of the stats that he talked about in the middle of his book. 63% of them listen to audiobooks during their commute. So 63% of people who were wealthy who were millionaires who had rich habits, were those who listen to audiobooks and learned on their way to work. 79% read educational or career related material, so they were increasing their knowledge in their career, so they could increase their income moving forward. 55% read for personal development, so they were increasing their personal development. And in turn, if you increase your personal development, it's going to trickle down to every part of your life, including your health, your wealth, your wisdom, all of those pieces. 58% read biographies of successful people. And what that means is, they're trying to get motivation, and they're learning from other people's mistakes, and learning from other people's successes. So they can mimic those as well. 94% read current events. And this is important as well, for a lot of different reasons. Now, I'm not saying to ingrain yourself into politics, but reading current events, about things like the stock market, or things that are going to happen with the economy, those are going to help your bottom line PR in your personal finance, and then 51% read about history. Now here's the telling fact, only 11% of people who are extremely wealthy over a million dollar net worth only 11% of them read nonfiction material. This is extremely telling because what this study shows is that reading nonfiction books has a correlation to success. A recent study found out that most CEOs read at least 60 books per year. So if you want to get ahead in your career, if you want to increase your income, if you want to build true wealth, then reading has to be a habit that you start to ingrain in your life. Because if you read, you're going to be ingrained in these habits, and it's knowledge that you can use to build wealth for the rest of your life. Once you have that knowledge, you can use it for forever. So here's the challenge today, I suggest that you increase your book account, because think about this, if you read a book per week, it's going to compound tremendously. So let's think about this for a second over the time. If you read one book per week, that's 520 books per decade, 520 books every 10 years, if you read one book per week, imagine the amount of knowledge that you're gonna have, if you read 520 books, that's gonna be way more than at college education can ever give you if you read 520 books. Even if you break it down to bi weekly, maybe you don't think you can read a book per week. That's 260 books per decade, that's still a massive amount, a book per month is 120 bucks per decade. So see the massive difference if you only read one book per month, compared to one book per week. The difference is massive. It's 520 books for one book per week, or 120 books for one book per month, per decade. And then one book per year is only 10 books. So that's why I decided that I'm going to read one book per week to compound my knowledge to increase my net worth and increase my bottom line. Now there's a number of different ways that you can implement this system. It doesn't have to be just physical books. Now physical books are one way to read. It's the way I prefer to read Because it's the way that I can remember the material more, because I use a highlighter and things like that to be able to recognize pieces. So I can go back and look at those books and say, Where are the important parts, I'm just going to read the highlights, because a lot of times, you're not going to remember the most of the things that you you read in the first place. So that's why I like to physically read books and highlight it. But you can use audio books, and audio books are a tremendous tool that we have nowadays, because audiobooks are ingrained in every single book. Now almost every big book that's out there, there's an audio book for it. And it allows you to listen to books at work, listen to books while you're working out, listen to books on your commute. And this is a different way, if you're a big podcast listener, if you like podcasts, obviously you do if you're listening to this podcast, then audiobooks are a fantastic way to get some books up, get your book count upon me. And then lastly, there's digital books. So things like Kindle, and Kindles are rapidly increasing as well. And I don't mind reading books on Kindle, I just find that I read the material almost too fast. Like I read it, like I'm scrolling through social media, and I don't remember the material as much, that's just me personally, for you, it may be fantastic for you, and you remember the material as much as possible. But for me, personally, I just like physical books, but do whatever is going to make you motivated enough. Maybe you want digital copies, because you can read books anywhere, when you have five minutes here or there, you can read it on your phone. And apps like scribed, which I've talked about before, is an app that you can add a bunch of books for like nine bucks a month. So that's a great tool to use as well or you can listen to audiobooks on Audible or things like that. But there's a bunch of tools out there that are going to allow you to be successful in this system. So let's get into my unbelievably simple system to read one book per week. So before I started this project, to read one book per week, I had a few criteria that I wanted to meet. The first one was it had to be easy, because I wanted to make sure that I was consistently thinking about how I could read a book per week, I did not want some complex system that required me to need all kinds of cumbersome notes and things like that to keep track of, I want it to be simple, and I want it to be easy. And you're gonna see how amazingly easy it is here in a second. The second one is it needed to be forgiving, because I know myself better than anybody else, I'm gonna miss days, there's days that I'm just not going to read, I'm going to get too busy or I just don't feel like it. And we all have those days, we all have those days, we just don't feel like doing something. But the key to building habits. And the key to putting together systems that create success for yourself is to make sure that you pad in forgiveness into that habit, because you're going to have off days, there's going to be days that you're not going to accomplish your goal. But if you go ahead and put that padding in, it's going to allow you to keep pressing forward and forgive yourself. Because what happens is a lot of people fail and they quit. But if you have that that cushion there, you're going to fail and just move on the next day, the key is not missing two days in a row, if you want to keep maintain a habit, say every single day. Or you can set up a system where you only do this six days a week or five days a week. And I'm gonna show you how to do that. And the last criteria, obviously it needed to it needed to meet my book per week goal, I needed to be able to read one book every single week. So those were the three main criteria for me. And those are the three main pieces that I need to accomplish, to be able to read one book per week. So you need three things for this incredibly simple system, you need two sticky notes, I'll tell you what, that that's four in a second, you need like a Notes app or something to keep track of the books you read, and you can use your phone or whatever for that. And then you need a book, those are the three things that you need. Now, here's what you do. Once you have these items ready, you pick up your book and go to the very last page. So before you start reading the book, you're going to go to the very last page of that book, then you're going to get the the amount of pages that's in that book. And what you're going to do is you're going to divide that number by seven. Now see what I'm doing here. You see what I got going on here, you're taking those pages and dividing it by seven, there's seven days in a week, what that's going to tell you is how many pages of that book you need to read every single day. So let's say for example, that the book is 244 pages, if you divide 244 by seven, that's 35 pages per day that you need to read. Now there's a lot of books that have a lot less pages in that there's a lot of books that have a lot more pages than that. And if you're really struggling to build this habit, you want to early on, give yourself some short term wins. And pick books that have less pages, let's just be real, pick up books that have less pages, because if you start accomplishing this goal, and once you get into the habit, then it becomes a lot easier. At first, it's kind of hard if you don't read at all, it's pretty hard to kind of it's pretty hard to read 35 pages per day. But if you pick books that are, say 150 pages, it's going to significantly significantly reduce the amount of workload that you have when you have to read a book each time, then it gets easier and easier. And all of a sudden it becomes enjoyable, but it takes practice that you have to push through to be able to do it. Step three, start reading the number of pages that you selected. Now if you don't want to divide it by seven, let's say you want to take a break day every single week, you can divide it by six, you can divide it by five if you only want to do Monday through Friday, but figure out that number that's going to work for you so that you're able to accomplish it. And then once you hit your daily goal, you're going to use the first sticky note as a bookmark then you're going to so let's say you On page 35, so you're gonna put a sticky note on page 35, then you're going to take your second sticky note. And you're going to put it on page 70. So you see what I'm doing there, you're adding the next day's goal. So now all you have to do is open up the book to page 35. And start reading till you hit the next sticky note, once you hit that next sticky note, then you're you've accomplished your goal for that day. And that's the key is being able to accomplish that goal each and every time and knowing exactly where you are, then all you're going to do is step five is you're going to repeat, and you will finish that book in seven days. It's incredibly simple, but most people just don't think about it systematically like this. And it's so easy, it's not like you have to do all of these steps, you just have to be able to make sure you know where you need to start. And when you need to finish. And once you finish it, you're automatically going to read a book per week, every single week. Step six, write down the book that you read and keep a list because what you want to do is if you're highlighting or keeping notes or anything you want to see, you know, hey, what date did I read that book, maybe I should want to read it again, maybe Oh, man, it's been seven or eight years, I'm gonna think I'm gonna read that book again, just to remember what I was talking about that you can go through the highlights or things like that. And that's it. That's the system. That's how unbelievably simple the system is. It's that easy. And that's exactly what I do. every single week, I've gone towards reading a lot more physical books, and I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks lately, especially when I'm busy. I listen to a lot of audiobooks that way. And you can do the same thing with audiobooks. If they're seven hours of audiobooks, you get to listen to one hour every single day. And it's the same system that's going to work for each and every medium that you use to read. The last thing I want to do before we wrap this episode up, is I want to give you a few personal finance book recommendations so that you can get your reading list started. And I'm going to give you these recommendations in order of my favorites. So I'm going to give you five of them to start off with and these five books, if you read these five books, you're going to have yourself a fantastic financial baseline for yourself. And I'm gonna throw in a bonus one if you have debt or anything like that as well. The first one is the Millionaire Next Door. And what the Millionaire Next Door does is it teaches you how to think about money. And it teaches you how wealthy people actually use their money. It's not to buy Lamborghinis and Ferraris. It's not to buy fancy houses, a lot of times, most of the millionaires that you know, are right next door, you're never going to know it. They're plain old Jane people. And that's what the Millionaire Next Door will show you. But you have to see some of the data that they put in that book. It's one of the best personal finance books that everyone should read. The second one is Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And Rich Dad, Poor Dad is going to teach you how to think about money, and how to think about using your money so that you can create wealth and freedom because it talks about assets. And it talks about liabilities, and what it goes through is exactly how to invest your money to create more wealth for yourself. And it uses the example in that book of real estate. But you can use the same examples for other asset classes as well like index funds, or stocks or things like that. The third book I would recommend is the simple path to wealth. And what the simple path of wealth is, is a book that teaches you literally how you can invest your money in majority of it as an index funds, and how you can do it without even having to think about it. And the author lays out some amazing pieces of advice, and goes through each part of personal finance that truly will walk you through each step. And if you if you digest that information in that book, and you use the information in that book, you're gonna have zero financial problems for the rest of your life if you utilize and implement that book. It is one of the best books out there that a lot of people don't know of yet. But I think it's going to become a very popular personal finance book in the future. Another one is and this book is great for automating your finances. It's also great for a lot of other pieces. But it's I will teach you to be rich by raw meat safety. And that book is one of the best books for teaching you how to make your money stress free how to automate your finances so you don't have to think about it, how to put together a system that allows you to just let your money work itself and how to create tremendous wealth while doing it. And then another one if you really want to learn more about index funds or how to invest your money in the stock market is the Bogle heads guide to investing is what that's going to do is going to teach you all about index funds. And john Bogle, who was the founder of the index fund is the grandfather of the index fund is what they call him. He has this whole following he just passed away recently, but he has this whole following of folks called Bogle heads and index funds are my primary vehicle of investing along with real estate. And they're the way that I love to invest. But if you want to learn more about index funds, because you hear me talking about index funds all the time, that is a great book to look at the Bogle heads guide to investing. And then if you're in debt, here's a bonus book if you're in debt, I would look at the total money makeover by Dave Ramsey. I don't think his system is the most efficient way to pay down debt. Because what he talks about is you need to start with your smallest balance of debt and pay that down first to get that quick win and then just go in order that way. But I do think that so many people have had success with his system that I would definitely read that book if you are in debt. And I would implement that system if you are in debt if you want something that is really truly going to work in the head. has worked for a lot of people. And I don't agree with his investment advice, but I do agree with his debt, paying down methods for people that need that extra, that extra push to pay down that debt. And those are the books I would start with on dollar after dollar.com. We have a bunch of book recommendations. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start putting together book lists, so that you guys have an idea of what books are out there that are fantastic that I've already read. And I can put together what I'm currently reading and things like that as well so that you guys can see that as well. So check out dollar after dollar.com to see those book lists as well. Thank you guys so much for listening. And if this is your first time listening, consider subscribing so you never miss an episode and share this episode with a friend. And don't forget to leave a rating and review on iTunes as well because our goal is to bring as much value to you as possible. And we're trying to spread this message that money can buy freedom, that's what money is there to do is to buy more freedom. So thank you again so much for listening and I hope you have a great day.