I read 1000 books by the age of 25, here are 5 lessons I learned.

00:03hello everyone and welcome to my youtube channel now in this video i'm gonna be sharing with you my experiences from reading 1000 books before the age of 25 so as a young kid i really didn't like reading at all i didn't read many books i actually basically hated it when um you know teachers who would ask me would get give us a specific list of books to read during the summer vacation i abhorred that literally because then my parents would make me read them as well and you know i just didn't like it at all now later on when i dropped out from university which is a story for another day

00:53at the age of 18 to 19 i figured i have nothing else to do now so i just decided to start reading books out of nowhere and i found out i actually basically love reading books um and i found out that the reason i didn't like it when i was a kid was mainly because i wasn't no i wasn't reading books that were interesting to me specifically so when i dropped out of university i had the freedom uh i lived alone and i had the freedom and by alone i mean i wasn't living with my parents um and i had the freedom to choose now what up to do whatever i wanted to do um and um

01:38i decided to read books and i could have i had the freedom to choose what books i wanted to read um so i found i love non-fiction never really liked fiction for some reason uh even as a kid i never really liked fiction um now as a super young kid of course everybody likes hearing tales from their mom or dad or prank parents or whatever you know those falling asleep type you know tales but i never really liked fiction and just recently well now it's three months later but recently i turned 25 years old and when i looked at the spreadsheet that i use on notion by the way

02:28on which i track every book i've i've read over the years since i started when i was since i started reading books since i quit university basically i saw that i have literally read the once out of the 1000th book literally on the day i turned 25 years old now did i plan that slightly with just some calculations but i wasn't really aiming for that um i just a long time ago had made the calculation hey if you read this many books every year you would reach 1 000 books by 25 still that wasn't a goal or something because what's more important is to understand the books but that's a topic

03:13for another day now in this video as i said i wanted to share with you the five lessons i learned from reading so many books um and yeah with that being said let's just start with the first one so um the first one is look a lot of a lot of non-fiction books are basically almost the same and you know a lot of books nowadays not a lot of books nowadays have the almost the same concept but like they that they own they prove almo almost in the same way with just sometimes they have different research or something like that so for example i know i'm probably going to get some hate for this

03:57but as much as i love atomic habits by james clear while reading it it just kept me it kept her mind reminding me of the power of habit by charles you higg and which is basically just an older book on the same topic and kind of explained in the set in the same way so if you if you don't believe me just read them both and you'll see um now the second lesson i learned is basically that every book is not created equal and what i mean by that is sadly a lot of books nowadays don't deserve your literally your full attention or require you to spend a few days um to read them cover to cover so

04:40don't spend too much time on a book if you don't really enjoy it because some books are really good and you'd want to read them thoroughly and others will be mediocre but you might enjoy reading more on the topic so you just skim them and others you won't enjoy at all so you should just literally skip them and maybe you'll come back to them later in life because you have to think about you have to think of the opportunity cost if you think that you should read a book even though you don't like it but because you've started it that you have to finish it and read it from cover to cover just

05:21because you started it you have to think about of the opportunity cost because you don't like that book you're probably not gonna learn anything because you're not enjoying reading it and secondly it's taking away time from actually reading a book that you would enjoy and that you would learn a lot from so don't spend too much time too much time on books that you don't really like enjoy and yeah just read what you like literally the third lesson um that i learned basically was that learning how to read each book is more important than most people think and what i mean by that is if every book

06:07each every book should be read in a different way now a lot of people try to save time on books by trying to read them faster or learning to speed read and while i'm not going to tell you not to learn to speed read because i i think there are some you know benefits to learning to speed read i'm i will tell you that you're doing it a bit backwards and what i mean by that is in the book um how to read a book ironically the american author and philosopher more tamar mortimer adler he he basically writes about the different ways of reading a book and you know saving on time saving time

06:55doesn't happen um when you read saving time on books happens before you read in the first place before you read in the first place and how that happens is choosing what you read and as i said a lot of non-fiction books aren't really don't really warrant you reading them from cover to cover and this is where mortimer adler basically um call this is what basically mortimer adler calls like inspection or reading now the goal of inspection of reading is to answer two questions what is this book about and what kind of book is this that's the goal of basically of inspection or reading and you can do

07:40this by skim reading and you can read the following section so um i believe he talked about the title page um he was talking about the editors um blurb or you know nowadays you could just call it introduction um the cover text uh the table of contents contents and the introductory sections and important paragraphs of like uh of chapters that interest you once you do that you'll have a pretty good understanding about those two questions what is this book about and what kind of book is this once you after you've done that you you know you you just know what the book is

08:24about and you can know whether you should you should whether it deserves your full attention now another piece of advice um i got was basically from an article i read on the harvard review and it was by a man called peter bregman peter bregman and in in the article he basically recalls a story from when he was in university and he was struggling with his like reading load and uh one day he really had to you know he went to his um to his professor um and basically his professor he told his professor hey i'm having trouble with you know with how with all these books that we should be reading

09:13and he he that was in front of the whole class or something and his professor said i hope you're not reading these books word for words um like they're fiction books and he looked around and everybody in the room was basically nodding that and saying basically admitting that they're reading these books covered to cover like their fiction books so what he said to the whole class was listen you don't need to read these books you need to understand them and that might sound simple but if you think about it it's a very profound view on how to read nonfiction books

09:56non-fiction books are not always meant to be read cover to cover you need to understand the books you need to understand their point and you don't if you do that you don't always have to read them cover to cover now the fourth lesson i learned is basically that you know classics are classics for a reason and what i mean by that is in the beginning i read mostly books that interested me um and that you know that had some marketing behind them and stuff like that and i didn't care to read the classics because i had this idea in my head why would i let other people tell me what what classics are

10:42so why can't i determine what classics are for me why do i have to listen to other people what what classics are and while i am grateful that i did that because it kind of got me into reading just reading whatever the whatever the hell i wanted basically got me into reading books while i hated them in the past you know i wish i understood while i'm happy about that i wish i understood basically why they are regarded as a classic why those books are regarded as a classic and i learned that a book is not just its contents and it's not just what it talks at what is written about um

11:22a book is like way more than that a book is the author and his personal views and his personal story the time at which it was written the year at which it was in which it was written uh what impact they had on the world then and what impact it continues to happen on the world now so many years later and you know a ton of other factors that i didn't really understand in the beginning and i thought a book was just its text and contents and what it could do for you but over time and after reading some of those classics um i i really understood that they're way more than that

12:03and the last thing the the last lesson um that i learned was basically that book books are your friends and what i mean by that is track the books you read uh and take notes on all of them even if it's just one word or just one sentence i'm grateful that when i started reading books a bit more avidly like i i decided i wanted to track every book i read on a spreadsheet and take some notes on all of them even if it was like just a sentence and the reason i did that is because so i know first off so not only so i know how many books i've read um but because also i see

12:50books as friends and what i mean by that is you don't see you don't see your best friends um you know once in a lifetime right you engage you engage with them often um and you see them often and that's how i look at books the same goes for books i track every book i read um and take some kind of notes on all of them because i basically want to be able to return to them after some time and you know reread them extract more from them and you know know more about them just like you would with friends you don't read a book once in your life especially if it was a book

13:31that really had an impact an impact on you or you learned a lot from you don't read it once in your life you have to treat it as a friend that you can engage with over and over and um i believe there was uh i think i believe it was heraclitus heracletus that said no man ever steps in the same river twice for it's not the same river and it's not the same man or something like that um and you could also say that of books no person ever reads the same book twice um and what i mean by that is you change as a person over time with the years you change as a person and

14:15what you know and you will read you read you'll be reading the book through different eyes and i can always reread my notes and see what was important to me um at that time of my life when i first wrote them and it's sometimes funny to see literally what was important to me back then and what is important to me and how different it is from what is important to me right now but then you can look at those notes and literally see your growth as a person and now i can basically now i can see you know that those notes that i took when i was 18 years old uh in the books that i read at that time

14:55how i can i can see how they helped develop me and turn me into and mold me into the person that i am today uh and i find that amazing like just it's like writing your own history through notes and books um and seeing where you where you were and where you went and how your mind was thinking at that time so basically these were my five lessons now i could i could give you some more um but let me know in the comments if you would like like me to do that and i'll make another video uh on the topic i'll give you some more lessons um but yeah i didn't want to make this too long

15:35uh so let me know in the comments and i can make another video but uh thank you for being here and this these are my five lessons i hope you enjoyed the video i hope you extracted some value with that being said please please click the like button as it helps my channel and click the subscribe button if you like these videos and you want to see more with that being said i'm going to see you in the next one