I shoot to read about an hour a day. Falling short perhaps half of week days and often reading for multiple hours per weekend day. At any given time, I’m probably actively reading 5 books, with maybe an additional 5 cast aside. There are seemingly cultural and aesthetic reasons I endeavor to read this much, but really I read 7-10 hours per week, starting 20 books and finishing 5-10 per month because I currently believe:
- Reading books is the most efficient way to seem a lot smarter (both crystallized and fluid intelligence)
- There aren’t easy ways to separate seeming smart from being smart
- Being smart is beneficial in a knowledge economy
- So seeming smarter (than you are) is beneficial economically
If the above is true, then what is the optimal amount of reading a knowledge worker should do?
The largest returns will clearly go to someone who jumps from 0 books per month to 1 book per month. Carefully curated (acclaimed overviews of scientific fields, historical eras, groundbreaking economic texts, etc), 12 books a year would make you seem a whole lot smarter, able to make cross-disciplinary connections, and generally more engaged with the world. Choosing the initial 12 would also be quite easy to select because classic texts are relatively obvious.
Increasing your pace to 2-4 books per month will likely accelerate returns as you can more quickly build up a corpus of knowledge AND make connections between fields of knowledge faster. At 4 books per month (almost 50 books per year!) you will seem considerably smarter than you did before.
After perhaps 4 books per month, curation begins to be more challenging and in reality is difficult to sustain. I think this is the point of diminishing marginal returns and that each book over 4 increases “output” minimally.
I expect the economic returns of reading 2-4 books per month will be highest for people in client-facing or persuasive roles (sales, commercial banking, wealth management, business/corp development, fundraising, etc) and fields that value analytical horsepower (law, consulting, finance (IB, PE, HF) and tech/engineering), but should generally flow to any knowledge worker reading this much.
Ok, so read 2-4 books per month. Easy, right?
I’ll follow up with a post on approximating the economic return on reading, why people don’t read what seems to be the optimal amount, and whether I need to update my belief that the above argument is correct.
Also published on Medium.