And so I wanted to share with you why great leaders really are devoted readers. Reading a book is nothing more than having a conversation with the author. You know this, but you become your conversations. There is incredible and indelible influence and imprinting going on on your philosophy and on your mind when you read a book. So you have a conversation with someone and I’m sure you’ve had a conversation, maybe it’s with a chef or a great entrepreneur or a wise human being. And that maybe it was just one conversation. But that person in that 10 minute conversation or hour long conversation said something to you that formed your philosophy that changed the rest of your life. Well, that’s what you can get in a book.
You can have a conversation tonight with Kanye. You can have a conversation the next night
with Edison. You could have a conversation two nights from now with Nelson Mandela. You can read the biography that I recently read on Elon Musk and you can read about Steve Jobs. You can read about Vincent van Gogh’s life. You can read about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life. You can read about the titans of industry and what they went through and how they innovated and how they dealt with struggles and how they dealt with wealth. You can read books on productivity from the most productive people on the planet. You can learn how people who built companies like Ikea and Red Bull, how they did it. They took a small idea and built it into an empire.
So what I’m suggesting to you with great love and respect is reading a book is nothing more than having a conversation with the author. And you can spend your evenings or mornings or afternoons or lunchtimes connecting with the greatest minds who have ever graced the planet. You cannot put a price tag on that.