This Is How I Read a Book Every Week For One Year

My “reading hack”, favourite titles, and should you do it, too?

Less than two months from now millions of people will set New Year’s resolutions. About this time last year I already had mine written down, and despite the title of this post — I was not set to read a book every week. Instead, this reading marathon sparked from a question I was debating with a friend over beer:

What’s the closest thing to the Limitless pill in real life?

We quickly agreed that a real-time brain-internet connection is not yet possible, and sitting down asking questions to all our heroes is not practical (especially since some people we want to talk to may be dead for a long time). One round of beers later, it hit us: what if there was a way to plug into the minds of some of the most successful people on the planet and understand their principles and techniques. You see where I’m going with this, right? As Carl Sagan framed it “what an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person.”

A Book A Day?

While my friend agreed at a conceptual level that books are important, he did not feel the excitement to change his routine for reading. I, on the other hand, placed quite a significant book order on Amazon after heading back from the pub - this is an important detail I’m mentioning here. Important because a few days later when my package arrived to my sober-self I had to wonder: how much is it even possible to read while running an organisation, maintaining relationships, and keeping everything else in balance? A book a day, a week, a month?

Fortunately, Internet-wisdom to the rescue:

The average CEO reads 60 books a year. — Someone on the Internet

The quote above was the subject line of a pitch email for some book summary service, and to this day I did not check whether it is true. It gave me the inspiration to set the bar: one book a week (or 52 a year) is what I was aiming for. If all these (obviously non-fictitious) busy people could do it, then so could I.

Except I Couldn’t

I was not even halfway through my first book by the end of the first week. That book, by the way, was Moonwalking with Einstein. A book promising the secrets of super-human memory, because I was going to need to remember everything I learn ahead— Limitless style. But if I was ever going to get remotely close to my goal, something fundamental had to change in my approach.

The Breakthrough Formula

I will spare you a lot of different techniques and routines I tried to accelerate my reading speed and consistency to uphold my one book a week goal. Although for the sake of entertainment I might write a different piece on that. Instead, what follows is the approach I use today, it kept me on track ever since I started using it. This is the “How To” part that you can apply in your daily routine. Give it a try and let me know how it feels to read a book a week.

1. Create the Routine — Reading Time

The first step is something intuitive but an absolute must. As the saying goes “a journey of a thousand miles (52 books?) begins with a single step”. That step is to set a clear time in your day that you will invest for reading, no matter what. It’s easy to say “I’ll see how the day goes and fit reading somewhere along”. I tried that, it does not work. Lock the same time in your calendar. Consistency is key (you can read more on creating long-lasting habits in The Power of Habit).

If your day looks anything like mine (that is, it involves a lot of unpredictability, traveling, and meetings), read first thing in the morning. In my case 7 — 8 AM is my daily reading time, no matter how urgent and busy my day is, I always stick to my 60 minutes of reading. Other people I discussed this with prefer reading before going to bed. Whatever your personal preference, be consistent.

2. A Hybrid Approach — Audio books? Hard copies?

From the first few books I realised that getting information on a single medium was not the best way to retain the core ideas and keep up the rhythm. Stay with me, this is counterintuitive.

When reading physical books I frequently got distracted. For example, I would read an idea about myths of primal societies in Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth and start thinking of the parallels with the ideas in Sapiens, and to the stories I was told as a kid, and 10 minutes later I’m on the same page thinking about how could my mother remember so many stories (maybe a memory palace?). You get the point.

As a popular alternative you have the audio books. Just download Audible (the de-facto Amazon monopoly) and you have access to the vast majority of physical books narrated with adjustable speed. That proved handy. My reading time and focus really increased since I was now following the voice in my headphones that was setting the pace (listening 1.5x normal speed, ~8 hours of listening to finish an average book). I also started listening a lot of audiobooks on commute or while travelling.

Yet, after listening to 4–5 audio books I noticed I did not retain as much of the content of the book as conventional reading. Since the purpose of this was to get as much information as possible from these books, that seemed impractical.

What to do, come to terms with the imperfect world we all live in? Combine them.

What?

I now order the physical book and the audio book together. I then go ahead and play the audiobook while reading at the same pace from the hard copy. This changed everything. It’s like watching a movie, you hear and see the content, so you retain more.

I played a lot with the speed of the narration in the Audible app, and I found 2.0 times the normal speed, while reading from the hard copy, to be the sweet spot in terms of retention of information vs words per minute. Important: The first 10 minutes of trying this will sound crazy fast, give it a try and stay with it for at least 50 pages, your brain will adapt and will become crystal clear. Apparently, our brains have an incredible ability to adapt the speed at which we are able to distinguish and comprehend words.

What follows from combining the two mediums forms a couple of powerful advantages, and one main disadvantage: cost. Probably a small price to pay for our DIY Limitless pill.

• Speed: Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow would take 20 hours to listen to at normal speed (add a few more if you read the physical copy), but only 10 combining the mediums at twice the speed (or 1.5 hrs a day for a week)
• Retention and Understanding: I found this to be the best compromise between how much I am able to comprehend from a book and the time I spend trying to understand that topic. This is not a perfect method. For example, I had to stop multiple times during Algorithms to Live By — a book applying Computer Science ideas to everyday tasks, because I was not familiar with all the concepts.
• Fun Factor: I am not one of these people who enjoys reading books solely for the purpose of reading. What I enjoy most about this process are things books allow me to see that I couldn’t see before. Identifying with the examples, laughing at my own mistakes that I now see through a different lens, uncovering patterns across books. My purpose is practical: to learn as much as I can from each book in the shortest amount of time. This hybrid approach gives me a different experience in extracting content from a book, and I personally find that fun, or more exciting than either medium offers alone.

3. The Big Picture — Put It All Together

After wrapping up a book, and hearing the oddly satisfying “Audible hopes you’ve enjoyed this program”, I never start a new title until I read a one-page summary of the book. It helps me to tie everything back together and look at the big picture, the principles I learned, and what actionable points I want to set for myself as a result. I recommend Blinkist or just going to YouTube and writing the name of the book + summary. Don’t jump over this step, it’s little extra time commitment and it pays off big time.

That’s it. 51 more books to go.

I hope you enjoyed momentarily jumping on my mind and behind my system for reading. So what now?

Personally, I will continue at the same pace and with the same system described above, I have quite a long list I want to go through before the end of the year. This is important to mention: have something you’re looking forward to read to keep momentum. Create a short list, just write down titles on a piece of paper or your notes app and cross them as you move along. Don’t think too far ahead: 4–5 titles are enough.

Looking back at the question that started this article: is this the closest we can get to the effects of the Limitless pill? Of course that’s silly a question.

This is much better.

I’d love to hear what your reading routine looks like or how this system worked for you. This may not not work for all people at all times, but it worked wonders for me. It’s something I wanted to share with all of you.

I’ve shared a draft of this post with my team and I got some good questions I will answer here for others to be able to see, too.

Favourite 5 books?

I chose the titles below for the impact they had in my life. However, they influenced me in very different ways. There are a number of really good books (Sapiens and Homo Deus, for example) from which I learned a lot and deeply enjoyed reading, but I feel these 5 titles affected the way I look at the world and the actions I took most significantly. My top 5, not in a particular order:

• Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning
• Robert Cialdini’s Influence
• Nancy Duarte’s Resonate
• Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Ray Dalio’s Principles

How do you select your books?

Gut instinct mostly. My original Amazon order was made up with books that I always wanted to read but never had time and they were sitting idle in my Wish List or in my head. Other book titles came along from reading, for example in Ray Dalio’s and Yuval Noah Harari’s books the bibliography section is a gold mine.

I want to say one thing here. Do not read books because you hear other people say it’s an important topic or title, no matter who these people are. Consider what other people are reading and ask why, for example I kept an eye on Mark Zuckerberg’s A Year of Books and Bill Gates’ Best Books I Read This Year (both explain what they enjoyed about the books on their lists), but I never read a book that I was not personally excited about.

Can you share the full list of books that you read the past year?

Here you go.

Did you ever slip and fall behind your schedule?

Yes! More than a few times I would pick from my list of books the shorter one so I could catch up. Actually as I am writing these answers on a Monday, I still have to finish my book from last week. But I try really hard to not fall more than one week behind, and I always keep to my reading routine, no matter what.

I forget a lot of the ideas I read just a few days after finishing a book. I cannot remember much more than main ideas. Do you have the same?

Yes! The best compromise (time vs retention) is the hybrid method I explain above. And I actually encountered a good essay on this topic from Paul Graham (link) he answers this much better than I could.

On top of everything, I do go back and read some of my favourites a couple of times over. In all honesty: the first time I read a book I just get the big picture (what you call “main ideas”), it takes 2–3 reads to really understand it deeply enough to apply it in my life. This applies to both light reads (Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people, which I read at least 5 times thanks to the Curriculum at Restart Network) and more dense books that require some thinking of the context discussed and how does it apply in my life (for example, Robert Cialdini’s Influence).

You can also leave other questions in comments. If it applies to others, I will add my answer above.