The One Habit Billionaires Do Every Day
Now let's begin: there are many secrets behind success. There are rigid morning routines, productivity tricks, and all kinds of motivational exercises. But what if the world's most successful people boiled their success down to one core habit? So what's the one thing that separates successful people from the rest of the world?
According to billionaires like Bill Gates, there's one quality that every billionaire must have, and that quality is curiosity. Curiosity is a desire to learn new things. Curiosity drives you to explore new subjects and expand your horizons. Curiosity may be the reason you clicked on this video, but why is it such an essential quality and how does curiosity unlock the secret to success?
Curiosity: The Key to Success
Curiosity is a natural force that pushes you forward. It's like an empty gas tank begging to be filled. Instead of gas, you fuel your curiosity with knowledge and perspective. Now, according to Bill Gates, every billionaire is curious to a fault. They always want more; they're always in pursuit of the next best thing. In other words, a curious person is never satisfied.
You never stop learning because you know how much knowledge is waiting to be uncovered. Billionaires are some of the most curious people on the planet, and their curiosity motivates one habit which they do every single day. This one habit indulges your curiosity; it feeds your brain a never-ending stream of knowledge. For billionaires like Bill Gates, it's the single most important habit for your success, and that habit is reading.
Reading: The Daily Habit of Billionaires
How often do most people read? According to surveys by the Pew Research Center, 72% of people have read at least one book in the last 12 months. That means almost one-third of the population hasn't read anything in over a year. Inside more educated communities, that number does increase. The average high school graduate reads about seven books every year, while the average college graduate reads about 17. Now, if you aren't much of a bookworm, this may sound like a lot of reading. But these numbers pale in comparison to those of successful entrepreneurs.
Statistics on Billionaires' Reading Habits
| Name | Books Read per Year | Daily Pages |
|---|---|---|
| Bill Gates | 50 | - |
| Warren Buffett | - | 500 |
| Mark Cuban | 200 | - |
Bill Gates, for example, reads an average of 50 books every year. Warren Buffett reads over 500 pages every day. Mark Cuban spends over 1,000 hours reading. That's around 200 books per year. The list of well-read billionaires goes on and on. These successful people read way more than the rest of the population, and all of these billionaires will tell you reading is the secret to their success.
Why Reading is Essential for Success
But hey, why is reading so important? Why do these billionaires give reading so much credit? Well, for starters, books facilitate and expand your curiosity. If you're a curious person like Bill Gates, you discover new interests on a daily basis. You're always searching for answers to something, and reading gives you those answers. When you read, you're opening new doors and embarking into unknown territory. To a curious mind, that's fascinating.
Reading, in many ways, is a never-ending cycle of learning. You're curious, so you read, but as you read, you grow more curious, and your curiosity encourages you to read some more. As the cycle repeats, you, like many billionaires, will develop a stronger craving for knowledge. You're training your mind to explore every potential avenue while gathering mountains of knowledge. As you strive for success, your knowledge will be your greatest ally.
The Impact of Knowledge on Innovation
Knowledge fosters an innovative spirit. It supports you through challenges and pushes you over obstacles. By reading every day, your knowledge puts you one step ahead of the competition and launches you to the top of your field. But knowledge is not the only advantage of reading each day.
Billionaires like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Warren Buffett have named many, many more. Elon Musk, for example, credits all his success to his bookshelf. Why? Well, because reading taught him to use his imagination. Elon Musk is an engineer, an entrepreneur, and an icon of the tech industry, but he started as a bookworm. This billionaire explains how sci-fi and fantasy novels created his active imagination and sculpted his vision for the future.
Imagination is a skill that many of us take for granted. All of us can close our eyes and imagine a castle, for example. Alright, maybe you see a drawbridge, a moat, and a spire. Maybe you envision knights on the castle walls, but only a select few people can bring these mental images to life. Successful people use their imaginations to change the world, and you can too. Now, it may sound impossible to build such a powerful imagination, but there's no better place to start than the pages of a good book.
Every second you spend reading develops your imagination. It challenges your brain to turn words into images and characters. Great writers can paint vivid pictures for their readers, but it takes a creative reader to envision a story for themselves. As you read more and more, your imagination will get stronger. Your detailed vision will invigorate and inspire your goals. Whether you want to start a business or write a novel, reading can help you bring your ideas to life.
Communication is another skill that avid readers develop in spades. Reading is, at its core, one person communicating with another. A writer will record events, explain concepts, and tell stories to you, the reader. By understanding how that message is communicated, you can incorporate their methods into your life. Storytelling, for example, is an invaluable skill no matter what career path you've taken. If you know how to tell a good story, you can capture anyone's attention. You can deliver good news and bad. You can sell ideas, products, and visions because a good story develops interest, emotion, and momentum. Now all of these things give power to you, the storyteller, the power to communicate, and the power to create change.
By reading on a regular basis, billionaires become masters of communication. They learn how to tell stories, but they also learn how to explain their ideas, how to appeal to different groups of people, how to read between the lines, and how to build strong relationships. It's hard to imagine all of this stems from one daily habit, but it does.
