I Read Like Warren Buffett for 5 Days... Was it Worth it?

Key Takeaways

did you know that most CEOs read more than 60 books per year well that's why today I'm going to show you what it was like reading like Warren Buffett for five entire days it was truly a life-changing experience but there were a few downsides that I wasn't expecting now watch this entire video to see if reading like Warren Buffett is worth it so usually I'm geeking out about SEO and marketing but today I'm going to give you guys something completely different so in five days I ended up reading five books thirty articles and taking 23 pages of notes because I wanted to see what it was like to actually read like Warren Buffett and what I discovered will change the way I operate forever but before I jump into it I need to cover two things number one if you're not subscribed please subscribe because I published a new content like this every week number two I'm going to give you something incredible when you watch all the way until the end and I'll explain what it is soon but it's 100% free so if you don't know who Warren Buffett is he's often referred to as the Oracle of Omaha because of his impressive investing track record in fact from 1965 to 2017 Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway has generated a twenty percent annual return compared to the S&P 500's nine point nine percent return so beating the market is the holy grail of investing because it's nearly impossible to do over the long term not only that Buffett is also worth eighty two billion dollars which makes him the third richest person in the world as of 2019 but this video isn't about investing or business it's about one of Warren Buffett's daily habits Buffett is said on several occasions that he spent 80 percent of his working hours reading and thinking so that's exactly what I decided to do for five days I read for six hours every single day to see how it would impact my mind productivity and business now you probably have one big question why am I even doing this well here's why I wanted to take reading to the extreme and I wanted to see what it was like to read like Warren Buffett for example is it beneficial to read 80% of your day or are there diminishing returns well here are the things I learned reading like Warren Buffett for an entire week so number one intentional reading isn't fast so there are many people out that say they read a book a day and there's a lot of people pushing that particular agenda but the truth is it's super hard to read an entire book in a day and get everything you can out of it so the goal of reading shouldn't be to see how many you can finish the goal of reading should be to understand and truly be able to take information out of that book and be able to implement that information into your life and so the only way to do that is to use intentional reading and so what do I mean by intentional reading you need to be highlighting you need to be writing notes in the margins you need to be using tabs and most importantly what I do that's probably a little extreme is I will take my highlights and I'll actually transcribe those onto a note and Google Drive and I just want to have documentation of all these things and that that process of reading highlighting and then actually taking your notes and writing them out it starts to leave a footprint in your mind you really start to retain that information so that's the first thing I learned as an intentional reading is definitely not fast but it's a necessary piece of the puzzle so number two books are better than articles and the reason for that is because books are the product of a ton of work a ton of research a ton of editing and revising and there's just so much work that goes into actually developing a book and getting it published and so you can see the stark difference between a book and just an article you find on a blog even my own blog because the amount of editorial guidelines that go into a book are so extreme and when you compare that to an article where anyone can just write an article and they don't have to edit it or anything and they can publish it there's gonna be a substantial difference so if you're really trying to learn a particular topic books are always going to dominate articles except for one exception and that's if you're in a industry where it's moving fast and it changes quickly like SEO it does help to get access to articles where people are constantly publishing new information about what's going on on that particular industry but to really get the fundamentals of marketing or business or anything else books are going to be the way to go so the third thing I learned was that tasks take much longer than I estimate so because I had to read for six hours I only had two hours to complete my work and I have a massive amount of work that I have to get done on a weekly basis so what I had to do is I had to Ferro one of the most important tasks to focus on since I only have two hours and that's exactly what I did and oftentimes I would schedule more stuff than I had enough time to do and it was a good lesson to realize that you should give yourself a nice buffer when you schedule out your tasks because in most cases your tasks are gonna take longer than you think so number four was the biggest realization I had in this entire process and it's that the more you read the more time you save because you make less mistakes and you'll also get results faster because you bypass the mistakes and you piggyback off of other people's knowledge and experience now this is by far the biggest points I hope you take this away that reading helps you avoid mistakes and that is so critical because if you can avoid mistakes you're going to save time and you're gonna be able to get results faster and more efficiently and that's so critical because it's easy to fall in this trap to think that well I should be taking action right now I should be doing work and the problem with that is if you just constantly work you constantly take action is you never get a chance to actually step back and see look on the outside of what you're doing and reflect on what you're doing and most importantly when you pick up a book if you pick up a book like this you're picking up someone's years and years and years of knowledge and you're basically putting that into your mind and there is no other way that you'd be able to get that experience without reading a book and if you did you'd have to spend years and years and years in that particular field to make enough mistakes and to get enough experience be able to figure it out and that is just there's just not enough time in this life to be able to do that so books help you accelerate your knowledge accelerate your skills and so I cannot stress it enough that it actually saves you time when you read and it doesn't feel that way when you're reading it like man I'm just reading here but in reality when you actually think about it it is actually saving you time in the long run now number five which goes along with the previous point is I had a burning desire to work and act on what I was learning and so that was by far the hardest part because I was learning so much and I was learning so many new things that I just wanted to take it and immediately go act on it but I simply just didn't have enough time in the day to be able to do that so obviously it's not super practical for me to be reading six hours a day because I just wouldn't be able to get probably enough done in only two hours it was a really good lesson to focus on the tasks are gonna have the highest impact on your life and in your business so number six is I think that we should all make time for guilt-free reading so this was also another huge revelation that I had during this process is that I realized that at the end of every quarter I'm either going to take a trip or I'm going to do a reading vacation or both since I usually read on when I travel so the purpose of doing this is designed to recharge your batteries because if you just constantly work you never take a break you are going to get diminishing returns on your work and so you need time to step away start to process everything that you've done and most importantly start picking up a book and injecting new knowledge into your mind so you can take all that newfound knowledge and go hard on your business as soon as you come back but everyone needs to take some time off from work and I'm really talking to people who are aggressive action takers if you're someone who never takes action and obviously this is really stupid advice but if you're someone who is constantly working constantly work on your business and you have an entrepreneur mindset then you need to schedule time off to recharge your batteries and one thing that I'm going to start doing is taking reading vacations and I know that Bill Gates does that and I think it is a there's a ton of value in that and I've really started to realize how huge it is after this whole experiment so the last big takeaway is that information overload is real and from the last day of this experiment I had the hardest time reading I had the hardest time retaining information and I had super low energy and I knew that was about the end of this experiment for me and so what I realized is that I was probably overtraining my mind so it became very difficult for me to retain information and so that was an important lesson because it shows that you can actually over train just like how you can over train a muscle you can over train your mind so you don't want to go too crazy and trying to dump so much information into your mind because then you're not going to actually be able to retain it you're not gonna be able to actually use it in the real world so as I mentioned in the beginning of the video I read five books thirty articles and took 23 pages of notes now there's no way I could share everything I learned in this video however I'm going to do two things so number one I'm going to share some stuff that I believe can have a huge impact on your life and can truly change the way that you operate in the number two I'm going to share my 23 pages of notes 100% free and I'll have a link in my bio so you can download them so here are the top things I learned while reading like Warren Buffett so the first thing I learned is that there really are only a few core skills that you need to master if you want to have a successful career and those are productivity writing psychology persuasion and personal finance so if you can master those skills and develop those skills your life is going to be substantially better because it really affects all aspects of your life so next thing I learned is to eat more organical foods and you've heard this a million times you need eat health you need be natural foods I'm not gonna get into that but that was one thing I learned from a very long article about nutrition if I were to sum up this enormous article it's that you should be eating more organic Whole Foods and eating less processed foods and you'll generally be healthier and you'll probably lose weight and be able to put on muscle easier so the third thing I learned is to read more books I didn't actually learn this but it was a good reminder that you should be reading more books and that's what this video is all about so I hope that after this video you start reading more books because they truly can change your life for the better and I also learned what triskaidekaphobia means which is the fear of the number 13 now I was really in a rabbit hole at this point I was reading some pretty strange stuff but that is a word I've never seen before but now you know so there are people who are afraid of number 13 it is a real thing so you just really need to retain them because that's gonna really be a life changing fact they're you know Louis this movie has helped me understand a lot of things like that foreign guy at work who helped me understand sarcasm nice day we're having nice day but I just thought it was a super fun thing and that was really a bizarre thing that I discovered so next thing I learned is something you've probably heard 5 billion times but you need to exercise more and so for me I was working on about three days a week until I got my Apple watch and I will tell you that getting this Apple watch was one of the best decisions I've ever made because now I've exercised 30 days in a row since getting it and the reason why it's so effective is because it's just accountability you need a way to be accountable and so for me personally this has led to so much accountability and so every day when I see those rings aren't closed I know okay I need to go home even if it's 11 o'clock at night I need to close these rings I need to do my exercise so it really is a great accountability mechanism so if you're looking for a way to get more accountability and you're looking for a way to exercise more then definitely consider getting an Apple watch so those are a couple things I learned during this experiment if you enjoyed this video please like it and subscribe to my channel and now I have one question for you do you think reading like Warren Buffett is a good use of time leave your answer in the comment section and don't forget you can get access to 23 pages of notes 100% free just click the link in the description thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video