How to Become an Indistractable Reader

Nir’s Note: This guest post is by Nicholas Hutchison, founder of BookThinkers and author of Rise of the Reader.

When I was growing up, you couldn’t pay me to read a book about self-help or business. Now, I read between 60 to 80 books every year.

A good non-fiction book is the distilled knowledge of years of research and insight and costs just a few bucks. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of such a cheap, efficient way to learn lessons that could change your life without having to do the work or live the experiences the author had to bear?

The trouble with books is that, duh, you have to make time to read them. You also have to sustain your focus long enough to absorb the lessons learned.

I became a voracious reader in college. During my senior year, I took a sales internship at a local software company. My boss, Kyle, learned I was commuting an hour each way, five days a week. He recommended that instead of listening to 10 hours of music, I try listening to business podcasts. He argued that the same music every day wouldn’t change my life, but the right podcast might.

Listening to these podcasts, I heard certain book titles mentioned over and over. It was as if every successful person on the planet had read the same handful of books: Hooked by Nir Eyal, Outliers by Malcolm…