I read quite a few books every year. You certainly know of people that read many more than I do, but I do alright. That said, I’m always looking to refine my process and in the past few weeks I met two people that were substantially more prolific readers that I tried to take some lessons from — but they are complete opposites of one another in terms of their reading styles.
Bill White
The first was Bill White, a pastor in California at the City Church of Long Beach. My wife and I stayed at his house for a few days, and the number of books he had around the house was staggering. Literally every room had a bookcase in it, and all of them were packed with books.
I’ve long wanted to have more books on hand at the house (despite the fact that 2/3 of my reading is from digital books), and it was very inspiring. Going all-paper seems really compelling, and Bill’s vast knowledge supports the value in that. I got a lot of reading done while we were out there.
Chris Gardner
More recently, I had lunch with Chris Gardner who has focused his life on building a legacy of giving. Like Bill, he’s very well-read and one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. As of May, he had already read 95 books for the year! In his case, they’re all on Kindle — he listens to the Audible while he reads, and it clearly works. Not only has he read 95 books, I chatted with him about a few of them and it was very clear that he did a deep read of every one of them.
He makes great use of the Readwise app (which I’ve mentioned before on here) and has a great system in place.
Two amazing men, two voracious readers, and two very different approaches. I think the lesson here is that you don’t need to follow what someone else is doing and just dig in on your own. It’s similar to Seth Godin’s story of Stephen King’s pencil, found here, which essentially is this:
When Stephen King attends a writer’s conference, as he often does, someone invariably asks him “What kind of pencil do you use to write your books?” The answer, of course, is completely irrelevant.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t get tips from those that go before you, as I frequently get ideas from others on how to streamline my process — just don’t forget to make it your own process.
In my case, those encounters along with some other conversations have lead to a few tweaks in my reading processes:
- For paper books, I’ll now start scanning my highlights with Readwise rather than trying to type them in. The Readwise mobile app has a great feature that lets you take a photo of a paper book, and then highlight the words as if they were digital. It’s pretty slick!
- Readwise has some neat AI tools in there to let you ask it questions about your highlights, which becomes more useful the more highlights you load in there. Being able to ask about specific things that you’ve read in the past is pretty awesome.
Bill and Chris both have amazing processes to be able to consume what they do, and while I won’t be copying either of them directly, I’m thankful for their inspiration and the little adjustments they’ve helped me to make.
What does your reading process look like?
