Keystone Habit #3
Imagine it’s 1965 and you have $1,000 in cash burning a hole in your pocket.
You’re deciding between going to the Ford dealership to make a sizable down payment on a brand new V-8 Mustang and giving it to your cousin’s best friend, a supposed finance whiz kid named Warren, to invest. After popping by the Buffett household and meeting him face to face, he strikes you as a pretty sharp fella. Plus you’ve heard they are cooking up something special for the ’66 ‘stang so you decide to see what Warren can do.
Unfortunately, on your drive home you are T-Boned by a 1965 Ford Mustang and you develop amnesia as a side effect of a concussion. All memory of your investment with Warren vanishes into the ether.
Flash forward to present day: Life has had its ups and downs, you’ve made some money, lost some hair, developed a DadBod, then beat it into submission thanks to stumbling upon a masterfully written blog. On your drive home from work on a Tuesday evening, you are T-Boned, again, by a Ford Mustang, this time a 2018 GT!
But the upside is that the memory of your $1,000 investment comes flooding back! You wonder if there is any way to track down whether Warren knew what he was talking about. Surely your original stake is worth a few grand by now and you could use help covering the co-pays for the eight weeks of rehab and physical therapy that is staring you in the face.
After making a series of awkward phone calls and convincing a few strangers that you aren’t totally full of shit, you log in to your brand-new Berkshire Hathaway account summary to find a balance of…$18.4 million.
Once you can hear yourself think over the sound of blood rushing in your ears, you have the good sense to thank your lucky stars that Warren took Keystone Habit #3 to heart at an early age: he reads.
Keystone Habit #3: Read every day.
Warren Buffett gets asked about the secret to success hundreds of times per year. Something about being the most successful investor in the history of time has a way of drawing attention to one’s self. Through the years, he has remained remarkably consistent in his response to the question: Read. Read a shitload.
He has famously maintained a habit of reading up to 500 pages per day for the last five decades.
Action shot of Buffett squeezing out a fart and making $800,000 in the time it takes him to finish the op-ed page.
Buffett’s long-time business partner Charlie Munger (no investing slouch himself with a net worth of $1.7 billion and a recent $110 million donation to the University of Michigan) doesn’t mince words when emphasizing the importance of developing a reading habit: “In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.”
But what if other-worldly success in the field of investing isn’t your heart’s desire? There is more to life than money, right?
What about pursuing timeless truths about one’s existence and the knowledge that true wisdom is learning that we know nothing? I don’t know what that means but it sounds like something Confucius might have said after he finally took Buddha up on his offer to come over for “special cigarettes” and tacos.
Well here is something Confucius literally did say about the importance of reading: “No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”
I’m willing to entertain the idea that you’ve made it to your present level of success without spending hardly any time with your head buried in a book. Maybe, just maybe, you have enough street smarts and hustle and work ethic to make it as far as you have without reading a damn thing. But here is what I know for a fact: You would be even more successful if you took the time to read.
If you’re not sold on the importance of developing this habit for yourself, do it for your kids. If you have kids and you aren’t teaching them the importance of constantly engaging with new ideas by reading, you are setting them up to fail.
Reading fiction will help foster their creativity and strengthen their capacity to empathize. Reading non-fiction will increase their attention span and improve their ability to focus. Don’t saddle your kids with the same disadvantage you had to struggle against.
But maybe I’m preaching to the choir.
Maybe you are fully on-board with the importance of making reading a part of your daily life but something is standing in the way. Let’s talk about the most common roadblocks to developing Keystone Habit #3:
#1. I don’t have the time to read: Because you know about Keystone Habit #2, it’s a given that you’re getting eight hours of sleep per night. Your heroic 60-hour work weeks consume another huge chunk of time, as does your one-hour commute to and from work every day. Add in the hour you spend in vigorous exercise every morning plus the six hours/week you volunteer at the old folks’ home and the 90 minutes of daily meal prep time and how the hell are you supposed to squeeze out a single second to read?!?
I suggest starting with the 18 AND A HALF HOURS that remain in this hypothetically jam-packed week. 168 hours in a week, boss. That is a ton of hours. You have time to read.
#2. I can’t find anything interesting to read: I’m going to be civil because I believe that the death of civility is highly corrosive to society. So I’m going to count to ten slowly before responding to this.
OK, I’ve got my “I-statement” template in front of me, here goes: When you tell me that you can’t find anything interesting to read, I feel like you are living an entirely superficial life and I want to slap the sh…
I’m sorry. I tried but I can’t do it.
If this is your excuse for not reading, it’s a really terrible excuse and you should drop it immediately. There are more fascinating books out there than you could read in 10 lifetimes no matter what you are into and by the time you finish reading this blogpost, a few more will have been published.
Start by asking a close friend for a book recommendation. If there is one person who always seems to give you the best advice, start with him/her. If no one in your social circle is bookish, email me at destroyyourdadbod@gmail.com and I will find a great book for you to read, I promise.
#3. I’m such a slow reader: Change your tactics. Starting today, audiobooks are your new best friend. You can buy them through audible but I think an even better choice is to download or rent them from your local library. If you happen to live in the greatest city in the history of creation, Ann Arbor, Michigan, your local libraries are almost comically terrific, check them out!
You don’t lose any points because you’re listening to someone else read instead of physically picking up a book yourself. You’re still feeding your brain new ideas, giving it more fuel for future creativity, and honing your ability to direct your attention.
#4. I can’t sit still long enough to finish a book: You, my friend, are in luck. You are poised to adopt one of the most powerful habit stacks ever discovered! From here on out, you are listening to an audiobook each and every time you exercise.
If you aren’t currently exercising or reading with regularity, in all seriousness I can’t emphasize how large of a game-changing positive effect working out three times/week while listening to an audiobook will have on your life. If you can do it, it will be like adding 15 points to your IQ.
#5. I’m sick and tired of getting promotions, improving my relationships, and living a more meaningful, rewarding life: Well, I’m afraid you’ve got me here.
But maybe it’s not actually about excuses. Maybe you’re well aware of the importance of reading and you already finish two or three books per year. How much of a time commitment are we talking here?
You should read for 30 minutes per day, every single day. At a minimum.
I’m willing to grant one exception to this rule: If you, or your significant other gave birth to one or more humans in the past 12 months, use any and all baby-free time however you see fit.
Quick tangent on parenthood: My #1 all-time tip for couples with infants is for each person to cut the other one a metric shit-ton of slack. People sometimes forget that having a newborn is, at times, an exquisitely engineered form of torture. It takes a seriously committed, creative psychopath to dream up the following scheme:
Establish a foundation of sleep deprivation that limits the subject’s maximum consecutive hours of sleep to three. Occasionally wake the subject every hour on the hour.
Replace the subject’s wardrobe with identical garments that are 25%-35% smaller than the original items.
Without warning, scream directly into the subject’s face and ears at point blank range at least 15 times per day.
Administer chemical cocktail that replaces the subject’s finely tuned hormone balance with an hourly spin of an emotional Wheel-of-Fortune.
Cover subject in a film of bodily fluids, both new versions of their own and copious amounts of another individual’s.
Bend the space-time continuum in order to reduce the hours available in the subject’s day from 24 to 16.
If 30 minutes/day is a huge jump from your current reality, you don’t absolutely have to get there overnight but I encourage you to try the full 30 minutes for at least a week.
More than any of the other Keystone Habits, this one is certain to improve the quality of your thinking and, as a result, the quality of your life.
I sincerely hope you will try your hardest to make it part of your daily routine.
Remember: The first two habits you should develop are these two. After those are part of your routine, add any Keystone Habit that isn't. They combine to form a synergistic DadBod domination machine, the likes of which few have seen.