digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Read one book a week (52 books a year) by scheduling about 45 minutes of reading a day, without relying on speed reading. Jim Kwik argues that reading is how leaders gain knowledge, and that a daily block of focused reading makes a book-a-week habit realistic for busy people. He adds that a speed reading program can cut that daily time further.
Key Points
- Reading is framed as a major advantage in a knowledge economy: Kwik says leaders are readers and that one book a week far outpaces someone reading two books a year.
- The math behind the claim: at about 200 words per minute, a median-length book of roughly 64,000 words (per Amazon) takes about 320 minutes, or roughly 45 minutes a day over seven days.
- Kwik says Warren Buffett was once asked the key to his success and answered that he reads 500 pages a day and devotes about 80% of his day to reading; Kwik says knowledge builds up like compound interest.
- Saving time matters: he calculates that if speed reading programs double your effectiveness you could save two hours a day (730 hours a year), or even saving one hour a day adds up to 365 hours a year, about nine 40-hour work weeks.
- Reading is presented as mental exercise, and Kwik says it should be scheduled the way other self-care is.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Keep an active book list. Maintain separate to-read and to-learn lists (and a not-to-do list), and add books from recommendations to a device or app such as Evernote.
- Test your reading speed: set a 60-second timer, read normally, and count the lines you finish. Multiply lines per minute by about 10 words per line to estimate words per minute. Kwik says most people land around 200 to 250 words per minute.
- Calculate your target: divide the book's word count by your words-per-minute rate to get total minutes, then divide by seven for the daily time needed to finish a book in a week. Kwik's example is a 64,000-word book at 200 wpm, about 45 minutes a day.
- Schedule the reading as a fixed appointment, treating it like a meeting with your boss or an investor, and do not cancel it.
- Schedule reading during your peak alert hours, based on whether you are a morning person, afternoon, or night owl (Kwik references chronotypes).
- If you want to go faster, Kwik suggests a speed reading program. At triple the speed, the 45 minutes a day becomes about 15 minutes; at 800 wpm, a 64,000-word book takes about 80 minutes.
- Retention matters more than raw speed: Kwik says faster reading only helps if you understand and retain what you read.
- Kwik says note-taking will be covered in a future episode and that he will explain whole-brain note-taking.
Bottom Line
A book a week is achievable for a busy person with about 45 minutes of focused, scheduled daily reading at a typical speed, and Kwik says that time shrinks further with speed reading and by applying and teaching what you read.
