When Warren Buffett was once asked about the key to success, he pointed to a stack of nearby books and said, “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”
Buffett devotes 80% of his day to read between 600 and 1000 pages per day.
Bill Gates reads about one book a week, which is about 50 books per year.
Mark Cuban reads more than 3 hours per day.
Elon Musk, when asked how he built rockets, said that he reads books. Musk read 2 books a day, 10 hours a day, and had a book in his hand all the time when he was just a young boy. He buried himself into all the bookstore and library wherever he went.
Mark Zuckerburg read a book every two weeks in 2015.
Warren Bennis, a pioneer of leadership studies, said that one of the marvelous things about life is that any gaps in your education can be filled, whatever your age or situation, by reading, and thinking about what you read.
Books to read if you want to get rich in 2018 (source: CNBC):
- Think and grow rich by Napoleon Hill
- Business Adventure by John Brooks
- Your money or your life by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, and Monique Tilford
- Unshakable by Tony Robbins
- The little book of common sense investing by John C. Bogle
Here are some of the books billionaires read:
- “Business Adventures” by John Brooks
- “String Theory” by David Foster Wallace
- “Shoe Dog” by Phil Knight
- “The Myth of the Strong Leader” by Archie Brown
- “The Grid” by Gretchen Bakke
- “A Full Life” by Jimmy Carter
- “Born a Crime” by Trevor Noah
- “Portfolios of the Poor” by Daryl Collins
- “Creativity, Inc.” by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
- “The Idea Factory” by Jon Gertner
- “Dealing with China” by Henry M. Paulson
- “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro
- “Built to Last” by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras
- “Creation” by Steve Grand
- “Good to Great” by Jim Collins
- “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen
- “Sam Walton: Made in America” by Sam Walton
- “Lean Thinking” by James Womanck and Daniel Jones
- “Memos from the Chairman” by Alan Greenberg
- “The Mythical Man-Month” by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
- “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt, Jeff Cox and David Whitford
- “Data-Driven Marketing” by Mark Jeffery
- “Structures” by J.E. Gordon
- “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” by Walter Isaacson
- “Einstein: His Life and Universe” by Walter Isaacson
- “Superintelligence” by Nick Bostrom
- “Merchants of Doubt” by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes
- “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
- “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
- The “Foundation” trilogy by Isaac Asimov
- “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
- “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley
- “Now, Discover Your Strengths” by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton
- “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway
- “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman
- “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- “The Four Agreements” by Miguel Ruiz
- “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande
- “The Score Takes Care of Itself” by Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison and Craig Walsh
- “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell
- “Crush It!” by Gary Vaynerchuk
- “Peak” by Chip Conley
- “The $100 Startup” by Chris Guillebeau
- “The Charisma Myth” by Olivia Fox Cabane
- “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman
- “The American Challenge” by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
- “The Great Illusion” by Norman Angell
- “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe
- “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World” by Rene Girard, Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer
Books that teach you how to be rich:
- “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill
- “The Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham
- “Your Money or Your Life” by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, and Monique Tilford
- “How Rich People Think” by Steve Siebold
- “The Richest Man in Babylon” by George S. Clason
- “The Automatic Millionaire” by David Bach
- “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki
- “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” by John C. Bogle
- “Rich Habits” by Thomas Corley
- “Born Rich” by Bob Proctor
And my favorite list, which Warren Buffett recommended in his annual letters:
- The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham
- Security Analysis, by Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd
- Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, by Philip Fisher
- Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, by Tim Geithner
- The Essays of Warren Buffett, by Warren Buffett
- Jack: Straight from the Gut, by Jack Welch
- The Outsiders, by William Thorndike Jr.
- The Clash of the Cultures, by John Bogle
- Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales From the World of Wall Street, by John Brooks
- Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? by Fred Schwed
- Essays in Persuasion, by John Maynard Keynes
- The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, by Jack Bogle
- Poor Charlie’s Almanack, edited by Peter Kaufman
- The Most Important Thing Illuminated, by Howard Marks
- Dream Big, by Cristiane Correa
- First a Dream, by Jim Clayton and Bill Retherford
- Take on the Street, by Arthur Levitt
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