There is a notion that an average CEO reads 52 books a year, this means one book per week. It’s fascinating how someone has time and is able to read so much a year. Most of the successful people out there read a lot, hundreds of books have gone past their hands and page by page they flipped through the bank of words making it a habit in their everyday life. Surely if it was of no benefit they would have stopped the habit at some point, but they haven’t, meaning it’s a worthwhile endeavour, an investment, a self-improvement activity. Below are some of the three reasons you should read.

🧠 Gain Valuable Knowledge

The number one and most obvious reason for reading is that the reader gains valuable knowledge, one gains valuable information about the subject s/he is reading. Books are a unique way of preserving and sharing information and the only way for one to get to that information is through reading the book. When an author is writing a book the ultimate goal is to transfer knowledge in form of words to other people who must read the work s\he has written. – in an interview Elon Musk one of the richest men, an innovator and entrepreneur, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company, was asked how did he learn to build rockets his answer was I read books. Now he is an expert in aerospace because of that.

On that note, different authors write out of their experiences, usually, they are experts of the subject they write about. They compress and fit all their life knowledge into one book or series of books. The benefit is that all the people who have lived before us or who are still alive have something to share. That information is readily available to us in form of books, if we read the book we are learning something that took someone years to learn and we are learning that in a few hours. how good is that?

📝 Increase Your Writing and Vocabulary

The other reason to read is that it improves one’s writing skills and vocabulary. There is a way of learning where one learns from seeing how it is done. I remember this was the method my O level mathematics teacher used, he would come then write a math problem on the blackboard then solves it, after the third problem you could have understood what was going on and how to solve such kind of math problems. Somehow it makes it easy to learn because you have somewhere to refer to. When it comes to writing, reading is like that math teacher solving math problems on the blackboard, reading is an example of how it’s done which is why reading improves your writing.

Research has it that those who read widely have better vocabulary. The reason is the same as the one above in the sense that, reading exposes you to a lot of words used correctly by many different authors and they use different writing styles hence the reader has a lot of examples to refer to, of how words are used therefore that improves one’s vocabulary than someone who does not read.

👍🏼You Become a Better Leader

As highlighted above, most CEOs are readers. There are things that are expected from leaders, especially by those that they lead. One of the expectations is that they have to answer certain questions when the time comes. The benefit of reading to a leader an activity that makes him\her a better leader is that s\he knows enough of different subject areas in order to make decisions for the people s\he is leading. Imagine going to one of your bosses at work and you propose an idea to adopt cryptocurrency as a payment method in your organization and he tells you what is cryptocurrency? Then you go to that same boss and ask him what are his thought ongoing digital so as to improve revenue by tapping into different markets and he tells you I know nothing about the digital business. Chances are you are going to begin to doubt his credibility as a leader, isn’t it? So reading gives one the chance to explore new topics that can benefit business or way of life that is how reading makes you a better leader.

Conclusion

If the worlds top CEOs read an average of 52 books a year yet we have the same 24hrs days, the question is how can you too do it. like I have said before if it’s not worth it, they would have stopped reading as many books as they read and start doing something else with that spare time. At least have one reason from the three above that motivates you to be a reader you never know it might just change your life.