How Many Self Help Books Should You Read a Year?

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” ― Oscar Wilde

Thousands of self help books and articles are published every year, promising everything from a tip to the entire success formula.

Some are redundant paraphrases, stitched together from five other similar works. Others provide a golden nugget hidden somewhere between an overdrawn introduction and an overpromising conclusion. Yet some contain that golden nugget that would change our lives if we actually implemented it.

What do most of us do instead?

We get lured into a false sense of accomplishment as we blaze through the pages, feeling inspired and motivated for about as long as long as it takes us to pick up the next one. This consistent consumption without application results in spiritual bypassing. Instead of applying our knowledge and transforming it into wisdom, we just acquire more knowledge.

We become addicts of content, juicing up on motivation, but doing nothing with it. Stuck in a loop of procrastinating behavior, we avoid facing issues and actually doing the work. We may have read 126 self help books in the last 6 months, but how many changes have we made?

3 Phases of Learning

In order to make real change happen, we need to reach a higher level of learningthrough application. Below are the three phases that information needs to pass through in order to make a lasting impact on our lives.

Knowledge: The collection of facts and initial awareness of information, which can be acquired from reading, observing, experiencing, etc. Unless this knowledge is continuously applied, it never makes it into our long-term memory and is usually forgotten. Anyone that has ever crammed the night before for an exam and then forgot everything the next day can attest to this.

Wisdom: This is created when we judge the knowledge we have acquired. We vet it for truth and weigh it against our existing perspectives about life. This type of learning is typically deeper because it’s where we understand why something is, not just what it is. Usually, this is also accompanied by emotional associations as the information becomes grounded in new beliefs.

Insight: The highest state of knowing. When we have insight, we immediately grasp the big picture and underlying essence of what, why, and how something is. At this stage, it becomes an automated part of our mental programming. When similar situations occur if life, we will always use insight as a point of reference and a tool for decision making.

Moving successfully through these phases is impossible if we read self help books like novels. If a book has truly impacted our perspective, we should read it again. Although this time, read it slower while taking notes or highlighting.

It is important to remember that no one cares how many self help books we read. Those that read only one book, but can apply at least 80% of it are already miles ahead of those that read a thousand. While the revenue of the self help industry would shrink, how would our lives expand if we went ALL IN?

The All in Method

The ALL IN method simply the practice of not moving onto the next book, chapter, or page until we implement everything on the one before.

Simple? Yes.

Easy? No.

It may take ten times longer to get through a book, but instead of merely consuming it, we’ll actually live it. While we all read personal development content for different reasons, the impact of the ALL IN method is universal for all. When we begin living ALL IN, we learn to experiment and test our ideas instead of dwelling on them endlessly, taking absolutely no action.

This is the single greatest difference between society’s innovators and high achievers versus everyone else. Over a long enough time frame, more experiments lead to more lessons, more mistakes, and ultimately, more results. The compounding effect of all these micro decisions is what will build the pillars on which our success will rest.

Unlock Your Potential

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