My 24 Rules for Reading

These have been invaluable for me—maybe they will help you too.

Long ago, I made a decision to devote time every day to reading books. I didn’t do this for job skills or entertainment. I didn’t do this to earn a credential or for research. And I certainly didn’t do it to show off—the so-called performative reading now a meme on social media.

In fact, I never discussed any of this publicly until I finally wrote about my “lifetime reading plan” in 2023—more than fifty years after I first embarked on this program. I hardly even mentioned it privately. Only my family members knew how much I read, and the intense focus I put into my intellectual development via books.

So why do I read all these books?

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I decided at age 13 that I would read books to attain wisdom—and I’ve kept it up ever since. Maybe that sounds absurd when mentioned so baldly. So go ahead and laugh if you want.

But here’s the strange thing. I got all those other benefits—job skills, entertainment, etc.—along the way. Even more interesting, I gained a powerful but intangible benefit from these tens of thousands of hours devoted to good books.

As I explained back in 2023:

Once I got into my forties, with all this deep learning behind me, it somehow gave me an aura of gravitas I’d never possessed before. People started treating me differently—and not because I made any demands. Not in the least. I’m not the kind of person to make demands.

And it wasn’t like I was quoting Shakespeare and Plato all the time. I tended to keep this literary education hidden from view, except when it was absolutely relevant to the situation at hand—at least hidden from direct view. But the nature of this kind of training is that it still shows up indirectly. And that’s what happened in my case.

In some ways, I was the last person to figure this out. But I saw the changes reflected in the other people I dealt with. It took me a long time to connect all this to the books I’d read.

But what else could explain it?

When I spoke before an audience, this behind-the-scenes project seemed to give my words an authority and resonance I hadn’t possessed in my youth. People were now trying to hire me for all sorts of crazy projects—pitching to venture capitalists, negotiating million-dollar deals, etc.—because of this aura.

I couldn’t even begin to tell you all the wild and crazy ways this changed my life.

Since writing that essay on my lifetime reading plan, many people have asked for more details. How do I pick the books I read? How do I retain what I read? Etc.

With that in mind, I’m sharing some of my rules for reading. Below I list 24 of them.