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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. I have got a great show for you today.

Today, I am going to teach you how to read a book. Yes, I am going to teach you how to read a book. And this show, perhaps more than any show that I have done in almost 700 episodes of Radical Personal Finance, this show could be your key to financial success.

This could be your key to financial freedom in 10 years or less. When we think of that old aphorism, "Give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and he'll have food for a lifetime," that applies best in this area more than anything, because I am going to teach you how to achieve your goals and solve your problems, even if you don't have somebody close to you to help you, somebody close to you to mentor you.

For the first five minutes, I am going to try to change your view of reading. Between minutes 5 to 10, I am going to give you some ideas about books and reading that I think will fundamentally change how you read for the rest of your life. And then towards the end of the show, I am going to talk to you and share with you how you can get a copy of my recommended reading list.

So stay tuned for that towards the end. We begin today with books. Why books? Why are books important? I am going to give you a five-minute sales pitch here on books, because in the modern world, when so many of us know how to read, it seems that fewer and fewer of us are actually reading.

And I myself, as a lifelong reader, have found it challenging to stay a lifelong reader in today's world. You, I am sure, know how to decode the text of a book. But man, books are not nearly as fun and as exciting as a really well-done YouTube video, as a really well-done social media session, right?

That stuff is so shiny and flashy, and it engages us. It often feels difficult to sit down and read. It feels boring to sit down and read, even to the best of us. And yet it shouldn't feel that way. It should not feel that way, because books are some of the most valuable tools to help you achieve what you want to achieve in your life.

And so they should be an absolute priority for us in our lives. If you sit around and passively consume entertainment, be it in the form of beautifully well-done movies, beautifully well-done videos, beautiful social media arguments all day long, wonderful, inspiring information, if you just simply sit around and absorb that, you will spend your entire life as simply a consumer, and you will never start to make the progress in your life that you're hoping for.

And you'll get fat and lazy and just consume, consume, consume, consume more, because it's so hard to gain wisdom in those ways. Now, I'm not against using those tools. They have a place. The most recent show I did, I talked about the value of the multimedia, et cetera. But books are so much more important for you to achieve your goals faster.

Books, here's why, five reasons. Number one, books are the most synthesized information that you can possibly get. Books are researched, they're edited, and they're pithy. More time and effort goes into the writing of a book by an author than any other form of media. Way more than a good video.

Way, way, way, way, way more than a good podcast. Way more than anything else. Books are researched. That process takes at minimum months, usually years and frequently a lifetime. Books are researched carefully. They are wrestled over where an author says, "I only need to put the most important ideas in here, and how do I restate these ideas in the most impactful way?" Then they're carefully edited where all the extraneous fluff is pulled out, and you are left with a pithy, concentrated repository of information and ideas, all in the space of a few hundred pages.

Books are the most carefully researched and edited information that you can get. Number two, books are timeless. You can't go and listen to Ben Franklin's podcast, but you can read his words. And by the way, there's a podcast idea for one of you. Somebody should probably take all his books and turn them into podcast form.

The free business idea. I'm not going to do it, but you might. You can't go and engage with the audio that Ben Franklin recorded. You can't go and have a video chat with Julius Caesar, but you can read their words. And this is the thing that makes books so incredibly valuable.

Books are the most timeless form of communication that we have. Since the invention of the written word, we have a connection to millennia of human history. That is amazing. And you can access it with the skills that you already have. Many people are frequently complimentary to me about the breadth of knowledge that I've developed, perhaps some of the points of wisdom that I work to share with you.

There are many reasons for that. First, I believe that the fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom. That is the single thing that sets everything else in an intellectual life aright. But then as you go and you accumulate experience, you don't have to be stuck accumulating your own experience in your own life.

Rather, you can accumulate the experience of the lives of others. So you can take a book written by a man who's 85 years old, who sits down at the end of his life and shares carefully the lessons that he learned across those 85 years with you. And you, in the course of three days to read the book, you can gain the benefit of those 85 years of wisdom.

And when you do that over and over and over and over and over again, it matures your thinking, it matures your ideas, it matures your perspective, it matures your wisdom in a way that nothing else can. Books are timeless. And that is so valuable because then it allows you to pull out from the arc of history.

And instead of being stuck in the current world saying, "Well, this is the way things are and this is the way things always have been," you can see the trends and the flows and have a grasp of history that minimum is basically go to about 4,000 years of recorded human history and have a pretty good idea of the last 4,000 years.

Now as you look forward over the next couple dozen years, it's not so intimidating if you have that understanding of what has happened over the last 4,000 years. Next number three, books are simple to create. Not easy, but they're simple to create. Thus, they're accessible to almost any creator.

You can today sit down and with nothing but a 58-cent composition book and a couple of pens from a free giveaway, write a book. Throughout human history, the vast majority of books have been simply written down in a notebook. There was no skill with Adobe Premiere Pro. There was no skill with Audacity.

There was no skill needed with a desktop publishing program. You needed a pen and a paper and you could write a book. And the vast majority of books in human history have been written in exactly that way, with somebody with a pen and a paper. And so what this means is you can have access to the minds of people that you'll never gain access to with modern media, normal, common, ordinary people who simply had the self-discipline and wisdom to sit down and write.

When I was a kid, one of the jobs that I had, I actually typed an autobiography for a friend of ours and he sat down and he wrote it. He retired from his work. He was a teacher. He sat down with a stack of yellow legal pads and he wrote his book.

And this is how most books have been written throughout history. I just finished reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder series to my children. And I read the previous series. I hadn't read the final book in the series called The First Four Years when I was a kid. And I was reading in the introduction of it that that book was published posthumously.

But Laura had sat down, she had these orange colored notebooks and she wrote the books just with a pen and paper. And so that means that throughout history, since the invention of written language, of the printed word, since the invention of vocabulary, of the alphabet, you have access to simple ordinary people.

And then throughout history, there have been people who have verbalized and spoken their books to a scribe. For example, one of the most important writers of the New Testament is the Apostle Paul. The Apostle Paul wrote all of his letters by dictating them to a scribe. And yet you have this treasure trove of history in printed form that's 2,000 years old.

So that's an incredible thing. Books can be... so you have access to almost any creator. And even still today, I get all kinds of wacky, random books from normal people. The vast majority of books aren't bestsellers. And so books give you the access to normal people, which really helps when you're looking at your ability to understand life.

Number four, one of the most important things, books can be consumed in a non-linear format, which means you can consume them in a fast and effective way. What's wrong with this podcast right now? One of the things that's wrong with it is there's no way for you to listen to the end of my show without listening to me go word by word.

Now I teased you a little bit a few minutes ago. I told you some of the things that I'm going to talk about because I'm trying to get you to stay listening, but you don't have any way to reliably skip ahead. I've got this show packed so full of pithy information that you know if you just skip 30 minutes in, you're going to miss a whole bunch of really good stuff.

So you have to sit here and listen word by word, sentence by sentence. And it's the same thing with other forms, video, audio. Those forms of information can only be consumed in a linear format. Otherwise you might miss something important, but that's not true for books. I was recently asked by a listener to give my comments on what books they should read.

And my answer was, it's not a matter of a book or a handful of books. What you do is you read all the books. I have for years read a couple of hundred books per year. Now when I write that, I put read in quotes because I'm not sitting, I don't sit there and read from the introduction to the end, but I have legitimately for years read a couple of hundred books per year.

Because you can do that with books. And as we get to it, we talk about how to read a book. You can do that especially with certain genres of books, certain types of books as they apply to your life. You don't need to sit there and spend the 15 hours on a book in order to consume it cover to cover.

You can look at it and today I can read any financial book in about 15 minutes. And then I could give a lecture on it. And I'll talk about where that skill comes from. But that's only possible with books because of the physical format of a printed book where you can sit and you can do a quick overview of it and get the main ideas very, very quickly.

And here I should note we're talking about nonfiction books. That means that your ability to consume is so much bigger. Your ability to learn is so much bigger than anything else. Half of my audiences right now listening to me speak at 2x speed. That's great. But you can read at 15x speed.

That's wonderful. You can't skim anything else other than the written printed text. Now there are downsides of books, but only a few. The biggest one is storability. Where do you put them? That's a downside, but that can be solved with digital books. I created a show on Radical Personal Finance talking about how I digitized my entire library.

As I record this show, I'm looking at the screen of my laptop and I have my current library with 2,261 books in it, all accessible right here in front of me. And that's powerful. That gives me a tremendous tool because now, and in fact it's much better than having it all in a home library, now I have access to it wherever I am.

If a listener calls, and a lot of times on a Q&A show, somebody calls and asks me a question, sometimes I don't know it. And so while I'm starting my answer, I grab my library, I think of the book where I know the answer is, and I immediately go there.

And it's invisible to you. But so there are benefits to a digital library. You can solve the downside of the storability. The only real downside of reading a book is the inability to multitask. You can multitask and run, jog, drive, walk the dog, whatever you're doing, doing tedio repetitive tasks while you're listening to my words.

It's a wonderful benefit of podcasts and audio books, et cetera. But you can't multitask when reading. That's the only downside that I know of to reading. So let's talk about how to read. And the first thing that you need to know in how to read is not decoding the text, but knowing how to choose the books that you're going to read.

Now one element is, of course, in choosing the books to read, knowing what your reading level is. If I give my six-year-old an advanced 800-page book on tax planning, he can't even scratch the surface of it. That does him no good. So yes, there is an element of skill.

But the most important thing about reading is to read the right books, to select the books that you're reading based upon your goals. Only a tiny percentage of the population reads. I've heard statistics that two-thirds of high school graduates, after they graduate from high school, never read another book in their life.

Half of college graduates never read another book in their life. I don't know if those things are true or not. I don't doubt them. I do know that the vast majority of people never read much, and if they do read, they read a couple of books a year. So the first thing is reading any book is going to help you.

But if you really want to turbocharge your results, you filter what you read based upon what you want to accomplish. So you start by making a list of your personal goals. Those of you who started following me on Instagram know I've been doing a goal series where I'm teaching on Instagram how to set and achieve goals.

And it starts very simply. Go Instagram.com/JoshuaSheets. Follow me there, Joshua Sheets, S-H-E-A-T-S. But it starts very, very simply. It starts with a blank sheet of paper, ideally a notebook, and a pen. And you write at the top, "Today's date," and you write, "I write Joshua's goals," and then you make a list and you start writing.

And you write down what your goals are. That's where you start. You don't need any other prompts other than that. Now, if you want more prompts, we can give them to you, but just write down what your goals are. And here's the thing. They're your goals. They're not my goals, and their goals can be anything you want them to be.

Now, if you do nothing more than sit down with a piece of paper and write down what your goals are, you will automatically move yourself from the bottom 80% of society to the top 20% of society, because you're going to become somebody who's actually going after something, somebody who actually has a goal, somebody who's actually making progress.

You don't actually have to do anything that I'm telling you the rest of this show. If you just do that, it'll transform your life, because now you'll have an idea of what you're looking for. But of course, you can turbocharge your results if you go a step farther. So after you start to get a clear idea of what your goals are, whether you write them down one day or you write them down every day for a month or whatever you do, then the next thing is you start to make a plan.

You say, "How can I achieve this goal? What do I want to do, and how can I actually achieve this goal?" When you start to make plans, you start to see how you can accomplish goals. Now, in your plans, the next step is you say, "What skills do I need to develop in order to achieve this particular goal?" When you get to the skills, you get to your reading list.

Let me give you an example. Let's say that you say, "I hear Joshua every day. He says, 'Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to helping you build a rich and meaningful life now while providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and ..." I just messed up my own line.

Anyway, financial freedom in 10 years or less. You'd think I could get that right. Financial freedom in 10 years or less. You know what? I would like to be financially free in 10 years or less. How can I do that? Well, you think. One good question would be, "Why am I not financially free yet?" Ask yourself that question and start writing answers to that.

Perhaps you answer that question, you say, "Well, I'm a bad money manager. I don't manage my money well." You know that. If you stink at managing money, you already know that. What you do is you convert it into a skill. I need to become more skilled at managing my money.

I need to become more skilled at managing my money. Now that you have a skill, you think about a reading list. How can I learn to be more skilled at managing my money? You start looking for books that will help you to become more skilled at managing your money.

Now, perhaps your answer is, "Why am I not financially free yet?" is, "I don't have a plan." So you think, "How can I develop the skill of building a plan for financial freedom?" Start looking for a book on that. Or maybe you say, "You know what? I just don't believe good things about money.

I have limiting beliefs on money." So you look for a book that will help you develop the skills of developing new beliefs about money. Or maybe you say, "I'm not financially free because I'm just not earning enough. I make a low income. I'm not earning much money." Well, what skills do you need?

I need to earn more money, which means I need to develop a financially valuable skill. I need to do a better job at my—better work at my job. So how can I do better work at my job? Maybe I'll take a book on how to be a better employee.

Maybe I'll take a book on how to work harder. Maybe I'll take a book at how to be a better salesman. Something. Maybe you look and say, "Why am I not financially free yet? Because I'm paying too much in tax." Well, now the skill is I need to become a skilled tax planner so that I can reduce my tax bill.

Now we know what you need to read. Or maybe I don't know how to invest my money, so now I need to get a book on investing my money. The magic of reading is when you read books that will help you develop the skills and knowledge that you need to achieve your goals.

The people who do that get on the fast track. The people who read randomly are in the top 20%. But the people who read to their skills that they need to accomplish their goals are the ones who are in the top 4%, which is the top 20% of the top 20%, which is where 67% of the income, 67% of the wealth always comes.

Right now, if you turn off this podcast and you just take that idea and you start with goals and then you ask yourself, "What skills do I need to develop to achieve these goals?" and then you start reading books to help you acquire those skills, you can be on the fast track.

So you must read the right books. And the right books are not the books that have influenced another person the most. Those may be good books, but the right books are the books that help you acquire the skills that you need to achieve your goals. Now there is benefit in reading other books.

There is benefit in exposing yourself to other things. That's a benefit. I do think you should read widely, but you don't have to. The biggest benefit from reading widely is a diversity of ideas and a diversity of perspectives that you can start to develop. Your basic tools here are a library and/or a bookstore.

Because what will happen is your Amazon recommendations are going to be curated to the things that you're searching for. But a library and a bookstore allow you to go in and simply browse. Libraries are the best because you can take all the books home. I was a homeschooler when I was a kid and homeschoolers max out their library card every single week.

They always limited us to, I think it was 50 books. And so whenever I went to the library, I would take a duffel bag and I would get 50 books. Now I didn't read 50 books in a week cover to cover, but I did read 50 books in a week cover to cover.

It wasn't word by word, but it was enough to expose me to ideas. And one of the wonderful things about that is when you can walk into a library and you know you can have 50 books from there, you just wander the aisles and anything that looks interesting or sounds interesting, you grab it.

So that's where you read 10 books on architectural design. I read books on flying helicopters and sailing and hunting and anything that piqued my interest. Read books on automotive repair, et cetera. And what those things do is they expose you to ideas. The thing that I have seen most stark recently when mentoring a young man that I've known for a very long time is how unimaginative he is about life.

He's not a reader by the way, but the reason he's unimaginative is he has no exposure. He's lived such a sheltered life and never been exposed to the opportunities that are out there in the world that he can't imagine anything other than doing the same work that his dad has done his entire life.

That is ineffably sad. Get yourself a library card, get a duffel bag, go to the library and check out 50 books. Won't cost you a dime. You don't need a plan. You don't need to do anything except wander the aisles and grab things that look interesting. Take them home, spend 15 or 20 minutes flipping through them, stop and read a page here and there if something grabs your interest.

Do that every week for a year and you'll have now a little bit of diversity in your thinking, a little bit of diversity in your ideas. That's the kind of diversity that matters. Diversity is a strength when it's a diversity of ideas and perspectives. That's the diversity that you need in your brain.

Now to the process of reading. The first thing that you need is the ability to decode language. That's step one. To begin at the beginning, if you don't have the ability to read, you need to learn. You need, in English, you need phonics. You need the ability to sound out the letters in order to become a skilled reader.

English is a weird language because it's a Germanic language with a Latin vocabulary. It's a Germanic language with a Latin vocabulary. That's why it is challenging to learn. But there are only, what is it, 70, 80 basic sounds in the English language and then various combinations that make those sounds.

Anybody can be taught to read within a few months if you sit down and you work your way through a good phonics program. Many people have that basic scenario, where they have that basic understanding, but they struggle to figure out, "Well, I don't read quickly. I read really slowly." In my experience, your reading speed itself is going to be based on two things.

Number one, your experience reading, the amount of time that you've actually spent decoding the letters and sounds of words. And number two, your familiarity with the topic at hand and your grasp of its vocabulary of words and vocabulary of ideas. The first one is the important one to start with, the actual ability that you have to decode the letters.

What I would recommend to you is what I recommend to children, what I did when I was a child, is simply this. Find words that are part of books and stories that you like to read. Now I think this is less of a problem than it was in the past because for all of the downsides of digital consumption, I think the modern person is reading many more words on a daily basis than the average person 50 years ago.

You can't flip through your social media streams without reading constantly. And so I think, although I can't prove it, I think there's probably actually an increase in the number of words being read and consumed today versus the past. But the key is to find something that you like reading.

And for here, I would recommend to you fiction. A good fictional story, a good story will grab you in a way that nonfiction won't. Now for reading to your goals, to your skills, you're going to need to read nonfiction. But for reading for your basic ability to read, read fiction.

And so figure out the kinds of stories that you like and start reading them. Now that may be dragon stories, it may be romance stories, it may be detective adventure stories, I don't know. But figure out what stories you like to read and start reading them. A few dozen novels under your belt over the next year will massively improve your ability to decode the sounds of the language that you're reading.

So if you're not a reader, don't try to start necessarily with Joshua's hardcore books, start with some novels and develop the love of reading a novel. Now once you have a base in a certain, and you have a basic level of ability to read, if you can read a couple of paragraphs out of a novel smoothly without struggling, now you're ready to go to that other discussion of reading speed.

A note on speed reading, I don't speed read in the sense of processing words any faster than other people. There are people who do that, they seem to, their brains seem to work in a different way. I don't have any particular skill. I've read some books on speed reading, I've tried some of the techniques, I never found those particular strategies that were taught in the speed reading books to be helpful to me.

I don't think that speed reading is necessarily a key skill that is necessary. At least if it is, I developed it organically, not with practicing some kind of technique. What I have learned for myself is that my reading speed is going to be based on my familiarity with the topic and my grasp of its vocabulary.

The reason I can read a financial book in 15 minutes is that I know the language and I know the vocabulary, the vocabulary of the words and the ideas. I'm not stymied when I read qualified plan. I know what a qualified plan means. That has a specific technical definition that I understand and so when I read the words qualified plan, I don't say, "Huh, what is that?" I know what a mutual fund is.

I know what a closed-end mutual fund is. I know what an open-end mutual fund is. I know what a guaranteed investment contract is. I have a grasp of all of these basic ideas. But if you don't have that grasp of the ideas, when you read that word, it won't put a picture in your head.

The information won't flow into its proper category. Based on reading syntopically over the years in the world of finance, I have mental cubbyholes for most concepts. Now every now and then a new concept will come along and that's extremely valuable, but I have enough familiarity with the subject to know where those concepts are and when they see them, they jump up on the page at me.

I've described that. For example, the best, I did a show on the math, the shockingly simple math of early retirement, best blog that Mr. Money Mustache ever wrote, Jacob Lund Fisker with his book Early Retirement Extreme. When I ran across that concept, it was a fundamentally new idea for me.

I didn't have a cubbyhole for it. And so immediately it just blew off the page and I said, that's a new idea. And the same thing will happen with you, with your field of interest. Now if I go and read a book, a medical textbook, or even just a popular level, not a professional level, a popular level book on health, I struggle sometimes because I don't have the concept.

For example, I don't know what an amino acid actually is. I know what the word is. I know what it means. People throw it around, but I don't know what an amino acid actually is. And I don't understand how an amino acid works. I understand what an endowment life insurance contract is and how it works, but I don't know what an amino acid is.

I know it's important. I know it has some function, but I don't have the vocabulary for it. So when I read a book on health and nutrition, I struggle much more. I can't read one of those books in 15 minutes because I don't have all the cubbyholes. Now that's not to say I shouldn't do it, but I'm pointing out that it's based upon your familiarity with the concepts.

Now if you're reading to your business, say you're reading about marketing, you're going to have a mental map of all of the concepts of your trade. And so you're going to be consuming books on marketing and you're always looking for new idea, new idea. You don't need the old ideas.

You will recognize the basic application of certain ideas. When I read personal finance books, I've got decades, meaning I've been reading them for decades, but I've got decades and decades worth of the concepts built up. So I've read the books from the 50s. I've read the books from the 70s.

I've read the books of the 90s. And so I can see how the concepts are just a slight change, a slight adjustment. Yeah, that tax rule no longer applies, but here's this other one, et cetera. And so on a popular level, over time you'll build the skill and the knowledge of the vocabulary that should be encouraging to you because what it means is you can get better.

And then once you're better, you can stay current on a subject without investing that much time. You might go at a deeper level. I have complex books on estate planning. When I read those, I cannot read them quickly. I have to go slowly because I didn't work for years and years in the field of estate planning.

I have to stop and think, okay, all right. Is this a lead trust or an annuity trust? Okay, it's a charitable lead trust. That means that this is left and I have all these mental triggers to bring out the definition, but I'm not conversant in it in the same way I am at the popular level.

So there's always a growth in your reading skills. So don't worry about reading quickly. Worry first about reading the right books. And if you're reading the right books that are going to give you the skills that you need towards your job and you've chosen those books carefully, then it's worth it to work your way through them slowly, systematically, little by little.

It's worth it to take them a few pages at a day and to grapple with the concepts because they're to your goals. If they're not to your goals, don't bother reading them if they're hard. If it's not going to help you, just get rid of it. There's no reason to waste the time.

The next big challenge we have to work out is having time to read. Many people say, "I don't have time to read." Well, that's of course a stupid and erroneous excuse. Of course you have time to read. You have 24 hours in your day. I have 24 hours in my day.

We all have exactly the same time. So you have time to do anything that you want to do. So it's a stupid and wrong excuse. Of course you have time to read. The accurate statement would be, "I haven't made time to read." Or "I haven't decided to dedicate time to reading." "I haven't chosen to read." Those are all accurate statements if you're struggling with, "When should I read?" But you do have to decide, "When are you going to read?" I just say, "Read whenever you want, but make time to read." What I do is I read in the morning.

And I find that that works effectively for me because I can get up, I can read, my brain is calm, I'm focused, and that's my time of thinking. Most of the time I try to get up long before my children do. These days I don't set alarm clocks because my biggest challenge in the past has been not getting enough sleep.

You get super excited and get up early and then all of a sudden my body gets run down because I don't get enough sleep. So as long as I can discipline myself to get to bed on time, then I know that when my body is done sleeping, I will wake up in the morning.

Especially that's important if you're a parent. You know as well as I know that you don't get the same quantity or quality of sleep that you got when you weren't a parent. When you could just go to bed, and I always went to bed, slept, and woke up. Of course now at this point, you've got the baby waking up, sometimes your children wake up, and so your sleep is much lower quality.

So I don't set an alarm clock. I just simply allow my body to be done sleeping when I'm done sleeping. But still usually I've gotten to a point where as long as I go to bed at the proper time, I wake up early in the morning, 5 o'clock, 4.30, something like that.

And then I try to have that hour, hour and a half of reading, quietness, journaling, thinking, praying, studying, etc. that comes in the morning. For some people that doesn't work. Some people read at night. Some people read on their lunch break. Doesn't matter when you read. It simply matters that you read.

The key is to figure out a trigger that's going to cause you to read. So for me, if I take out my phone and I go on social media in the morning, I'm going to lose all my reading time. But if I leave my phone in airplane mode, so there's no notifications, nothing comes in, and I start with a cup of coffee and a book and a notebook, then I'm in a situation where I can really make progress.

Then I'm in a situation where I can improve things and I'm not distracted by those things that seem easier than reading. And then once I actually start the process of reading, I make progress very, very quickly. We've talked about reading to your goals and reading to develop the skills that you need to reach your goals.

Next, you have to get a book that you want to read. So you have to choose that. Now you can choose that a number of different ways. The first thing and most important thing is simply to start. If you said, "I want to get a book on learning how to make money, how to earn more," you can just go to Amazon and type "how to earn more money" or go to your local bookstore and pick any book.

Because in the beginning, your ability to grow will be so huge that any book that you can get your hands on will help you. Realistically, you're going to find a handful of ideas in any book because you're only going to be able to implement a handful of ideas in any book.

That's not to say that a book is not full of dozens and dozens and dozens of good ideas, but very rarely do we ever have the ability to mine any one book for dozens and dozens of ideas. We just can't do that many things at once. So it doesn't really matter what book it is because you're just going to need a couple of ideas from that book.

The process of improvement, the process of reaching goals is an iterative process. You don't start with the perfect plan and then execute it. You start with the plan that you've got and you incrementally iterate. You incrementally make progress and improvements with one idea here, one idea there, one piece of knowledge here, one piece of knowledge there.

If you think that somehow there's one magical book that's going to solve your problems, you're mistaken. If I gave you that magical book that could solve all your problems, if I gave you Joshua's book on financial manual that's going to solve all your problems, you could not possibly gain all the things from it because you're not at a place where you can gain all the things from it.

There are beginner ideas, there are intermediate ideas, and there are expert level of ideas that come in books. But you will not see the expert or intermediate ideas until you've passed through the beginning stages. Years ago I played basketball briefly in high school. The problem with my choosing to play basketball briefly in high school was that I didn't play basketball before deciding to ever go and play basketball in high school.

And so I went and I tried out for the basketball tryouts and they were shooting layups. And to my shame or whatever, you can laugh at me, I had never shot a layup. I didn't know how to shoot a layup. Here I was at 16, 17 years old, I was a senior in high school playing basketball my first year and I didn't know how to shoot a layup.

And so the assistant coach took me to the side of the court and taught me how to shoot a layup. Now the question is, would there have been any use whatsoever in trying to teach the 17 year old Joshua some intricate advanced basketball concept? I don't know what those advanced concepts are, it's not my interest.

But there would have been no point. What you need is, hey, let's see if you can shoot the ball. Let's teach you how to shoot a layup. You need the basics. And so the same thing happens in every other industry, every other skill area. You have to learn the basics.

I cannot see basketball strategy. Now I learned a lot in my first year of playing, I won an only year of playing. But prior to that, I didn't know what a zone defense was. I didn't know what a man-to-man defense was because I hadn't been playing. I never watched basketball, never played basketball, just decided to play my senior year.

That's the way it is in life. You wind up putting yourself in situations and you can't see what's happening. So in finance, when you become an expert, you can see what's happening. You can see the commonality, you can see the threads, but you won't see those at the beginning.

So you have to build your way to it. So for that reason, it almost doesn't matter what book you read because any book is going to have a few concepts in it that you can take and apply to your life. So get a book that you want to read, choose a book, any book, then make it yours.

One of the major mistakes that people make is they don't make their books theirs. And this is where I don't like libraries. You are choosing to read this book for a reason. The reason you're choosing to read this book, nonfiction book, I always get novels from libraries, there's no point in having novels, no point in paying for them unless you just want to for convenience, but for nonfiction books, you're choosing to read this book because it's going to give you knowledge and ideas that you can use to develop your skills, which will lead to your accomplishing your goals.

The only way that will happen is if you can transfer that knowledge and those skills from the book into your life. You need to take what's in that book and you need to get it into your brain and into your body. And this is going to require from you work.

You're going to have to grapple with the ideas and the concepts in the book. We're not reading fiction. It's not a nice story that's going to make you feel good when you're done with it. We're reading to accomplish your goals. So you have to make it yours. And to do that, you're going to destroy the book.

Now that destruction is going to result in you actually grasping the concepts, but you've got to transfer the ideas from that book into your head. And in so doing, you are going to destroy that book for anyone else. That book must become yours. So should you get books from the library?

Sure, but not serious books. You should use the library for browsing, for exposure, et cetera. But if you get a book from the library and you're flipping your way through it and you say, "You know what? This book is really good," immediately buy that book or just go pay the library for it.

If it's that good, just destroy it and say, "Sorry, I lost it. Here's $25," and buy the book. Buy the book because it would be a poor use of time and money for you to consume that book and not to make it yours. You'll only get a little bit out of it.

Make the book yours. You don't have to read all the books you buy. That's the other thing. But you do have to buy the books you're going to really learn from. They need to be yours. Books have never been cheaper than they are today, especially the used book marketplace.

The greatest boon to readers right now is Amazon used books. Almost any book you go on, it'll be one penny plus $3.49 shipping. You can get any book in the world for basically four bucks, five books. If the used market has the book for 30 bucks, get it anyway because now you know it's a good book.

But almost any book for four, three, four, five books. So make it yours. First thing you do when you get a book, you take a big juicy pen, you write your name inside the front of it, and you write the date that you read it. Month and year. Why?

Well, first, don't lend out your books. If you want to lend a book to somebody, buy another copy and give it to them, ship it to them. But don't lend out your books. You will never get them back and the people will never read your books. They don't do it.

If somebody doesn't care enough about a subject to take your recommendation to buy the book themselves, they're not going to do anything with it. But if you still feel guilty and you want to actually help them in some way, then give them the book. But don't lend out your books.

This is your book. It has your name on it. Write your name and the date so that you can have an idea of when you read that book. Now when you go to read, here's what you do. You first need to have the tools of reading. And the tools of reading are most importantly a pen.

You have to have a pen when you're reading. Secondly, a highlighter. A highlighter is good. Third, a ruler. Now throughout my lifetime what I've always liked is blue pens and yellow highlighters. I like yellow highlighters because they allow you to highlight the things that you want to highlight without being so disruptive to the reading experience like pink and green and blue.

I have over the last few years stopped using highlighters and gone exclusively to pens. And the reason is that I scan all my books now. So if I read a physical book, I begin with a pen and when I scan it, one of the things that's important is of course you can scan the book in color.

So I sometimes scan books in color and the color scan version will show the highlighter, it'll show the yellow and the blue, etc. The problem is it's not as easy to read a color scan because the paper will always have that slight off-white tint to it. So it shows up but it's not quite as nice.

Whereas when I scan books, I put it on to black and white. And when you put a scanner on to a black and white setting, then it turns everything to black and white which means that you lose your yellow highlighting. You don't lose green and blue and pink highlighting but it becomes dark and it's hard to read it.

So because I now scan, I've stopped using highlighters in favor of pens. So I underline, that's what the ruler is for, I make notes, etc. so that all those notes will remain once I scan the book. So you can consider doing that as well. But you've got to have those tools of reading.

You've got to write the book. You've got to write in the book because you're going to engage with the arguments of the author. And as you're consuming a book, the book may have 300 pages, there's only going to be a few key ideas and so you've got to actually be able to engage with those ideas.

Make sure you have the tools of reading ready. Now this point, you have chosen a book that is going to help you develop a skill that you need to acquire in order for you to achieve your goals, which means that you have an interest in this book. You've acquired the book, it's in your hands and you've got the tools of reading.

Quick comment on digital books. I like digital books. I read a lot of digital books now because of my internationally mobile lifestyle. I can't get Amazon deliveries. I can't get books as easily and so digital books are a great boon. Digital books are nice but they're not so good because they have that problem of linearity.

You have to read them from the front to the back. It's hard to scan a digital book. They do have a place but the best is, especially if you're a beginning reader, start with the physical book. Your first action is to pre-read the book. Now for a pre-reading, I'm going to here refer you briefly to a couple of pages in Mortimer Adler's classic book called How to Read a Book and of course I'm riffing on his title.

But How to Read a Book is a good book but it's very important for academic, philosophical books, deeper books, the great books, the great history of ideas, etc. It's not so important for what we're talking about necessarily. It's a good book that you should probably read but it's beyond what's necessary for most of what we're talking about.

But in that book, Adler talks about the different levels of reading. Now since I have my copy and since I read it carefully, I can go right to the levels of reading and I can use his four levels. I've got with my marginalia, I have those levels clearly outlined.

So I can, without re-reading the book, I can immediately know I'm going to talk about these four levels of reading. I know right where to go and my system of marginalia, which I'll talk to you about in a moment, is going to clearly show me what I need. So here are the four levels of reading.

Number one, the first level of reading is called elementary reading. Other names might be rudimentary reading, basic reading, or initial reading. Any one of these terms serves to suggest that as one masters this level, one passes from non-literacy to at least beginning literacy. In mastering this level, one learns the rudiments of the art of reading, receives basic training in reading, and acquires initial reading skills.

We prefer the name elementary reading, however, because this level of reading is ordinarily learned in elementary school. So this is the level of reading which most people read, elementary reading. They learn how to understand the concepts of word formation. They learn some basic vocabulary, but they don't learn how to deal with the ideas in books and thus, once they finish school and do the required reading, they're done.

They leave. Now, the second level of reading, Adler calls inspectional reading. And inspectional reading is characterized by its special emphasis on time. When reading at this level, the student is allowed a set time to complete an assigned amount of reading. He might be allowed 15 minutes to read this book, for instance, or even a book twice as long.

Hence, another way to describe this level of reading is to say that its aim is to get the most out of a book within a given time, usually a relatively short time and always, by definition, too short a time to get out of the book everything that can be gotten.

Still, another name for this level might be skimming or pre-reading. However, we do not mean the kind of skimming that is characterized by casual or random browsing through a book. Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically. We're going to talk about that more in a moment. Third, the third level of reading we will call analytical reading.

It is both a more complex and a more systematic activity than either of the two levels of reading discussed so far. Depending on the difficulty of the text to be read, it makes more or less heavy demands on the reader. Analytical reading is thorough reading, complete reading, or good reading, the best reading you can do.

If inspectional reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given a limited time, then analytical reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given unlimited time. That's analytical reading. Analytical reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding. And then number four, the fourth and highest level of reading we will call syntopical reading.

It is the most complex and systematic type of reading of all. It makes very heavy demands on the reader, even if the materials he is reading are themselves relatively easy and unsophisticated. Another name for this level might be comparative reading. When reading syntopically, the reader reads many books, not just one, and places them in relation to one another and to a subject about which they all revolve.

But mere comparison of texts is not enough. Syntopical reading involves more. With the help of the books read, the syntopical reader is able to construct an analysis of the subject that may not be in any of the books. It is obvious, therefore, that syntopical reading is the most active and effortful kind of reading.

Syntopical reading is what you do to the most important components of your goals. This will usually relate to your career, to the most important things in your personal life, etc. That's where you read syntopically. With me, as a career, as a financial advisor and a financial planner, I have to read syntopically because I have to have at least a basic familiarity with all of the concepts that will affect my chosen career and industry.

It's the same for you. If you're involved in marketing, in order for you to advance in your career, you must read syntopically so that you have an understanding of everything related to marketing. There's no excuse for you not to do that. If you are engaged in really any activity, anything that you really care about in your personal life, you have to read syntopically.

But we're not going to focus on that. We're going to focus on pre-reading or inspectional reading. So when you start with a book, here is what you do. And I'm going to read here from Adler, Chapter 4, the second level of reading, inspectional reading. Inspectional reading is a true level of reading.

It is quite distinct from the level that precedes it, elementary reading, and from the one that follows it in natural sequence, analytical reading. But as we noted in Chapter 2, the levels of reading are cumulative. Thus, elementary reading is contained in inspectional reading, as indeed, inspectional reading is contained in analytical reading and analytical reading in syntopical reading.

Practically, this means you cannot read on the inspectional level unless you can read effectively on the elementary level. You must be able to read an author's text more or less steadily, without having to stop to look up the meaning of many words, and without stumbling over the grammar and syntax.

You must be able to make sense of a majority of the sentences and paragraphs, although not necessarily the best sense of all of them. What then is involved in inspectional reading? How do you go about doing it? The first thing to realize is that there are two types of inspectional reading.

They are aspects of a single skill, but the beginning reader is well advised to consider them as two different steps or activities. The experienced reader learns to perform both steps simultaneously, but for the moment we will treat them as if they were quite distinct. Inspectional reading 1. Systematic skimming or pre-reading.

And there are two. I'll give you just a moment. And I'll insert this here. So whenever an author says there are two types of reading, especially this, you know, in Adler's book, and by the way at the end I will share with you some, a way that you can get some information.

I'll show you some pictures of even just my reading of Adler's book so you can see how I do it in hopes that that might inspire you or help you in some way. I always enjoy looking at other people's marginalia. But the, whenever an author says there are two types, I immediately, with my pen, write two types of inspectional reading.

Then I look forward and I find the categories and I write them right where it was introduced. So I have a note in my handwriting, two types of inspectional reading. Number one, systematic skimming or pre-reading. And number two, superficial reading. That allows me to properly organize the ideas as I progress.

The author may say there are two types, introduce the first type and go on for 10 pages. And which type, I'm going to forget about the fact that he said there was a second type. But if I immediately look forward 10 pages and see the two types listed, then I can go ahead and write them in the margin.

Now the conventions of writing have changed over the last 50 years. Adler's book is typical of what was written 50 years ago, where there's much more prose, there's much more story in the prose, and much less outlining. Today, most non-fiction books are outlined even in their basic presentation. So there would immediately be, in general, in today's style of writing, is that there are two types.

There would immediately be a space, and number one, systematic skimming or pre-reading. Number two, superficial reading. But if that's not there, you still need to grasp the ideas. And one of the things that I do that I think you should do as well is you should work on your taxonomy of ideas.

Now I don't know how much of this is related to my brain specifically versus all brains. My brain is uniquely skilled at the taxonomy of ideas. I don't know how common that skill is, but it's a unique skill that I have, and it's basically my core unique ability is the taxonomy of ideas.

But that taxonomy is developed through engaging with work. So what I do is when I read, I draw pictures, and I understand the elements. I write in outline form. Once I learn something, I immediately classify it in my head. So I always think, ever since reading Adler's book when I was younger, I always think in the four levels of reading.

And I think at what level am I actually reading right now? And I mentally classify from now on all reading in that way. And then I always have that breakdown. And although I don't often remember everything, I remember where to go to get the breakdown. So I know inspectional reading has two types.

I can immediately go to the book. I have it listed there in outline form. These are the two types of inspectional reading, et cetera. Make your notes that help your brain to work the way that your brain works. Let's talk about systematic skimming or pre-reading. Let us return to the basic situation to which we've referred before.

There is a book or other reading matter, and here is your mind. What is the first thing that you do? Let us assume two further elements in the situation, elements that are quite common. First, you do not know whether you want to read the book. You do not know whether it deserves an analytical reading, but you suspect that it does, or at least that it contains both information and insights that would be valuable to you if you could dig them out.

Second, let us assume, and this is very often the case, that you have only a limited time in which to find all this out. In this case, what you must do is skim the book, or as some prefer to say, pre-read it. Skimming or pre-reading is the first sub-level of inspectional reading.

Your main aim is to discover whether the book requires a more careful reading. Secondly, skimming can tell you lots of other things about the book, even if you decide not to read it again with more care. Giving a book this kind of quick once-over is a threshing process that helps you to separate the chaff from the real kernels of nourishment.

You may discover that what you get from skimming is all the book is worth to you for the time being. It may never be worth more. But you will know at least what the author's main contention is, as well as what kind of book he has written, so the time you have spent looking through the book will not have been wasted.

I'm going to pause here to insert my commentary on this idea. When you're reading syntopically on something that's very important to your area of skill development and advancement, skimming is an incredibly important tool, and you should not feel the burden to need to read analytically all the books that you buy.

I don't. What I do is I get any book that's related to my major core areas of focus. I don't think twice about it. I don't count the cost. I simply get the book. If it's related to my core areas of interest, my core goals, my wealth goals, my health goals, my personal goals, my family goals, I don't think twice.

I buy the book. And this is most important for me in the topic of financial planning. I buy almost all the books that I come across in the topic of financial planning that pique my interest, because the cost of actually purchasing those books as compared to the benefit is just utterly insignificant compared to the benefit.

But I don't read all of those books analytically. There's no reason for me to. What I do is I read it in a skimming fashion so that I know the points that are in it so that it's cataloged in my brain. Case in point. Last week I read a book on Roth IRAs.

And the two, I stumbled across the book on Amazon, was talking about, was looking around on Amazon, looking at all of the financial books, et cetera, seeing what Amazon popped up for me, browsing to see what was available. And I stumbled across a title on Roth IRAs. The title of that book was called Roths for the Rich, How to Fund Your Roth with Over $100,000 Each Year.

Well, of course, with that title, I immediately think, I think I know how this guy's going to do it. But I'm not sure, so I bought the book. I just bought it and immediately. Now when I skim that book, I have a deep knowledge of Roth IRAs, but I'm only looking for the question to one answer.

I'm looking to know the answer of how did he get $100,000 in there and is there something that I can use to, is there something that I can use that I don't know about? Is there a key thing that I don't know about? While I'm skimming the book, I stumbled across one other idea that I had not previously thought about and it made me question my previous opinions on Roth IRAs.

But I didn't read the whole book. The only two things that I needed to know from that book was number one, the new idea that I stumbled across, and number two, how did he get $100,000 into the Roth IRA? I didn't read the book analytically and I don't need to read the book analytically.

Now that I know the two ideas in that book, it's pigeonholed in my head what the book contains and I'll just simply keep it in my library as a reference book. So the next time that I read, sorry, the next time I write or speak on the topic of Roth IRAs, I have it as a reference book.

And if I have a question on Roth IRAs that relates to either of those two concepts, I know where to go to get the answer. I spent seven, eight minutes on the book, read it, done. It's categorized, it's pigeonholed. It's all I need from the book. And so that's one of the key values is as you develop it, you know what the author's point is and if it fits into that nice little cubbyhole in your brain, you know where it is, you know you can go and get it and you can access the information whenever you need it.

So it's entirely fine to read on that level as you advance in your career. Now you can't read on that level in everything. That would be silly. But you can read on that level in the things that are important to you. Now continuing on with how to actually skim the book.

The habit of skimming should not take much time to acquire. Here are some suggestions about how to do it. One, look at the title page and if the book has one, add its preface. Read each quickly. Note especially the subtitles or other indications of the scope or aim of the book or of the author's special angle on his subject.

Before completing this step, you should have a good idea of the subject and if you wish, you may pause for a moment to place the book in the appropriate category in your mind. What pigeonhole that already contains other books does this one belong in? Two, study the table of contents to obtain a general sense of the book's structure.

Use it as you would a road map before taking a trip. It is astonishing how many people never even glance at a book's table of contents unless they wish to look something up in it. In fact, many authors spend a considerable amount of time in creating the table of contents and it is sad to think their efforts are often wasted.

It used to be a common practice, especially in expository works, but sometimes even in novels and poems, to write very full tables of contents, with the chapters or parts broken down into many subtitles indicative of the topics covered. Milton, for example, wrote more or less lengthy headings, or arguments as he called them, for each book of Paradise Lost.

Gibbon published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with an extensive analytical table of contents for each chapter. Such summaries are no longer common, although occasionally you do still come across an analytical table of contents. One reason for the decline of the practice may be that people are not so likely to read tables of contents as they once were.

Also, publishers have come to feel that a less revealing table of contents is more seductive than a completely frank and open one. Publishers they feel will be attracted to a book with more or less mysterious chapter titles. They will want to read the book to find out what the chapters are about.

Even so, a table of contents can be valuable and you should read it carefully before going on to the rest of the book. At this point you might turn back to the table of contents of this book if you have not already read it. We tried to make it as full and informative as we could.

Examining it should give you a good idea of what we are trying to do. 3. Check the index if the book has one. Most expository works do. Make a quick estimate of the range of topics covered and of the kinds of books and authors referred to. When you see terms listed that seem crucial, look up at least some of the passages cited.

The passages you read may contain the crux, the point on which the book hinges, or the new departure which is the key to the author's approach and attitude. As in the case of the table of contents, you might at this point check the index of this book. You will recognize as crucial some terms that have already been discussed.

Can you identify, for example, by the number of references under them any others that also seem important? 4. If the book is a new one with a dust jacket, read the publisher's blurb. Some people have the impression that the blurb is never anything but sheer puffery. But this is quite often not true, especially in the case of expository works.

The blurbs of many of these books are written by the authors themselves, admittedly with the help of the publisher's public relations department. It is not uncommon for authors to try to summarize as accurately as they can the main points in their book. These efforts should not go unnoticed. Of course, if the blurb is nothing but a puff for the book, you will ordinarily be able to discover this at a glance.

But that in itself can tell you something about the work. Perhaps the book does not say anything of importance, and that is why the blurb does not say anything either. Upon completing these first four steps, you may already have enough information about the book to know that you want to read it more carefully, or that you do not want or need to read it at all.

In either case, you may put it aside for the moment. If you do not do so, you are now ready to skim the book properly speaking. 5. From your general and still rather vague knowledge of the book's contents, look now at the chapters that seem to be pivotal to its argument.

If these chapters have summary statements in their opening or closing pages, as they often do, read these statements carefully. 6. Finally turn the pages, dipping in here and there, reading a paragraph or two, sometimes several pages in sequence. Never more than that. 7. Thumb through the book in this way, always looking for signs of the main contention, listening for the basic pulse beat of the matter.

Above all, do not fail to read the last two or three pages, or, if these are an epilogue, the last few pages of the main part of the book. 8. Few authors are able to resist the temptation to sum up what they think is new and important about their work in these pages.

You do not want to miss this. Even though, as sometimes happens, the author himself may be wrong in his judgments. So that's how you basically skim or pre-read a book. If you're interested in more, go and buy and read Mortimer Adler's book called How to Read a Book. But when you pre-read a book, you can get an idea of the basic concepts, and you can see if this book is worth your further reading.

That's the basic goal. There are only a small percentage of books that are worth your reading cover to cover. Only a small number. Those books are the ones that are going to make the most impact in your skill development towards your goals. And they're books that are going to be clearly written, and often what I find is they're books that are going to be filled with lots and lots of introspection or lots of important ideas.

Just because a book is not worth reading analytically, that doesn't mean it's not worth reading at all. That's one of the key things that I've always struggled to say to somebody, "What book should you read?" Because usually it's not a book. It's usually these seven books, or these three books.

And yet I can't do that without context. You make a book reading list of 200 books. How do you do that? I've got 2,200 books in my library, so what do you do? What I find is that even when I inspection, even when I skim a book, it usually will spark ideas that will then go off of other ideas.

So let's assume now that in pre-reading the book, you have decided that this book is worth actually reading on an analytical level. What do you do? Well, after pre-reading it, you have an idea of what's in the book, and now you're equipped to go and start from the beginning and read it in the order that the author intends you to read it.

And in this case, the most important thing is to start dealing with the author's ideas. So I do that with a pen. Here we come to marginalia. Marginalia is simply the term that refers to a reader's margin notes, how you interact with the book. And the important thing, although many of us enjoy looking at other people's marginalia to understand how they do it, the important thing is for you to figure out your own system.

So I'll give you a few highlights of what I do, but it doesn't really matter what I do. What matters is what you do. The first thing is I personally am very prone to extensive highlighting and extensive underlining, which means that I read, when I read analytically, I read very slowly.

Not that I form the words slowly, but I engage with the concepts. So I'll do something where, especially if it's a good book, it's one that's worth reading on a deep level, I'll often read a page and then I'll frequently highlight two-thirds of the page. But while I'm highlighting it, I'm re-reading it and really thinking about the concept.

So I'll linger on a page for several minutes while really engaging with it. Because once I've engaged with it once, I don't usually need to ever engage with it again. The reason that I note and do extensive highlighting and underlining is so, first, to give me time to think about it, and also so that if I need to come back in the book in the future, I can pick it up and in just a couple of minutes refresh all of the ideas.

If I grasp a book that I have read extensively, that I've highlighted, that I've marked, I can grab it for about three or four minutes, look at it, and then all of the ideas quickly come back to the forefront of my mind. I don't need to go back and look through it again.

I just need to look at my highlights and I've grasped all the important points. So that's one of my goals in highlighting and underlining. I'll do a couple different things. So when I used to highlight everything, I would highlight extensively because highlighting was simple and allowed me to read things.

Since I've stopped highlighting because I now know that I'm probably going to wind up scanning the book after I'm done with it, then I've switched to just simply underlining and I underline a few sentences here and there. Always use a ruler and then make sure that it's nice and neat.

Or I will make notes on the side. I'll put a bracket on the side of an important paragraph. I'll star an important paragraph. That's one of the things that I do in my personal system of marginalia. Another thing that I do is I outline the book while I'm reading it.

If the author writes one, two, and three and I'm in a section where it's numbered, I'll go ahead and I'll either just circle the one, two, three or I'll write my own one, two, three. So that way I can come back and I see one, two, three. Here are the three points.

And if the one, two, three are mixed up in a lot of words, then I'll just underline the key thing and at the bottom of the page I'll write one, two, three and then the key points. Because what I'm looking for is to have the ideas classified in my head.

So that's one of the keys. I'm not always reading to actions, although that's an important component of reading. Often I'm reading to ideas. And so I need those ideas to be classified in my head. So the act of noticing the author's outline and then reproducing my version of the author's outline helps me to stick those ideas in my head so that I can then articulate them to somebody else in the future.

I can then teach them to somebody else or I can always have this as a framework to go back to. When I think about ideas, I'm always thinking about principles and frameworks. Do we have a good principle to start from and do we have a framework that works? And then I go and take that principle and framework, apply it to the world, notice where it works, notice where it doesn't work.

And if it doesn't work, come back and say, "Well, can we upgrade the framework in some way?" And to me that seems a much better way to live, to start with a framework of ideas and see if that framework holds true as it's tested by evidence than to start with nothing and always just say, "Oh, whatever.

Hey, whatever goes, man." So those frameworks come from putting things together over time. Next, if I disagree with the author, I will go ahead and argue with them in the text. One of the most important things when you're having a conversation with the author is to make it a two-way conversation.

You need to write that in the book. You need to write whatever it is. Sometimes my notes are about things I need to pay attention to. I just randomly as I'm sitting here looking at my copy of Adler's books, sitting here on my screen as I record this, I'll just give you an example.

On page 24, there's a section called "Stages of Learning to Read" and there's this paragraph here. "General reading readiness is assessed," talking about teaching language and reading to children. "General reading readiness is assessed by tests and is also estimated by teachers who are often skilled at discerning just when a pupil is ready to learn to read." Then this sentence is, or this next section is underlined.

I'll tell you when I stop. "The important thing to remember is that jumping the gun is usually self-defeating. The child who is not yet ready to read is frustrated if attempts are made to teach him, and he may carry over his dislike for the experience into his later school career and even into adult life.

Delaying the beginning of reading instruction beyond the reading readiness stage is not nearly so serious," here I stopped underlining, but I'll finish the sentence, "despite the feelings of parents who may fear that their child is backward or is not keeping up with his peers." Then I have all that underlined, then a big note next to it.

I need to pay attention to this. The reason is because given my personality and given my desire for my children to succeed and given how important reading is to me, it's very obvious that I could become an overbearing parent and I could try to push my children into something that I want them to experience, which has been very helpful to me, but I might push them before they're ready.

Noticing that that's a big danger zone, I have it underlined in a big note. I need to pay attention to this, exclamation point. I don't want to make that mistake. That's my way of saying, "hey, this applies to me. This hurts. This is a really, really big deal." I'll give you another example where I ask myself questions to engage with the author.

On page 28, I see the author says, "this of course should not be the case," talking about higher levels of reading and higher education and has been making a point about reading in schools. So I underlined this paragraph. "This of course should not be the case. A good liberal arts high school, if it does nothing else, ought to produce graduates who are competent analytical readers.

A good college, if it does nothing else, ought to produce competent syntopical readers. A college degree ought to represent general competence in reading such that a graduate could read any kind of material for general readers and be able to undertake independent research on almost any subject, for that is what syntopical reading, among other things, enables you to do.

Often however," and I ended my underlining there, "often however, three or four years of graduate study are required before students attain this level of reading ability, and they do not always attain it even then." And so I have beside that sentence a big star, and I have, "home education goals?

Is this a proper and worthy goal?" Meaning that of course I'm thinking about my children. I want my children to have very high quality educations. I want them to understand, so is this my goal? Is this an appropriate goal for me to have when I'm laying out their curriculum for their studies?

So those are some examples of my things to do. Now once you get past that, let me focus now on actions. The next piece of marginalia, and this is not in a book like, necessarily in this kind of book, but in the kind of books that you'll probably be reading for your goals, it's important that you focus on actions that you can take, because only action is ultimately going to change something for you.

You can set a goal. That's good. Right? That's automatically going to start moving you in directions because of the actions you'll take based upon having that goal. Once you set a goal, you make a plan. That's good, but you still haven't done anything when you made a plan. Then you said, "What skills do I need to develop?" Good.

So then you took the action of buying a book, but now in order for you to work all the way back to that goal achievement, you have to put into action something specific to help you learn the skill. And so one of the things I'm always looking for is what action do I need to take based upon what I am reading.

So I use when I'm reading simple check boxes, and I write a little square box, a check box next to something when I say, "This is something the author is saying. This is something I need to do." Sometimes it's a book I need to read. The author alludes to this certain book, and I say, "You know what?

For my goals, I need that book." I put a little check box next to it. And then what I do is I put an index in the back of the book or the front, doesn't matter, and I go to the back of the book or the front of the book, and I write a little check box, and I write, "Page 53, by the Secrets of Success." I don't know if that's a book name, but by this book.

And then I put a check box next to it. Or if they have a website to visit, I put a little check box, make a list, check, check, check, all the things I need to do. Or do this journaling exercise. I go ahead and put a check box next to it.

And I'm creating an action list for myself based upon what I'm reading. Because the only way I'm going to build that skill is to actually do it. So I'm engaging with it, and I'm building that action list. That way, when I arrive at the end of the book, I have my to-do list right there at the beginning of the book.

Now, once I arrive at the end of the book, I go through those things, I see what seems relevant. If something doesn't seem relevant, just cross it off. "No, I'm not going to do that. I don't need to read Secrets of Success, whatever." But if something does seem relevant, then now it goes on to my action list for my other task management list.

And it comes from the book. And then as I do it, I check it off and go from there. That's a really important thing to do. Another thing that I do, and that's probably the most crucial thing, is to make sure you're taking action. So if it's a book on investing, and the author's telling you how to become an investment, then lay it out.

Lay out how to do it. I will also often reproduce, depending on the book, reproduce some of the basic concepts or action lists or outlines of the book into the front or back cover, so that I can really have an idea of how to do this going forward. So in my copy of Adler's book, the most important topics for me, which were the levels of reading, are right there inside the front cover.

If it's a more action-oriented book about follow this process for learning how to be a successful real estate investor, I'll write my action plan right there. If I've set a goal as a result of the book, maybe I read John Shobbs, Building Wealth One House at a Time, and I just said, "You know what?

I can grab the idea of buying a house every year." So I write to the front, "My goal is to buy a house every single year for this number of years at this value with these levels of rents to build this certain financial freedom plan." And I lay it out there.

It's one of the reasons why I don't ever like anyone to look at my books. I get very nervous about somebody seeing my books, because they're very personal. I've made myself vulnerable. So another reason why you never lend your books out. I've made myself vulnerable. I've argued with them, with the book.

And especially when you're reading in things that are, it's one thing if you're reading, well, a book like Adler's book, I don't care. I've published that on the internet of my books, because it's not personal to me. But if I'm reading a book on money, and I'm setting financial goals, I might not yet have the confidence to say to somebody that I've set a goal of earning a million dollars a year, right?

You set a goal. I'm going to earn a million dollars a year, but you're earning $40,000 a year. You don't know how you're going to do that. And most of your friends, when you're earning $40,000 a year, most of your friends will laugh at you if you tell them you're earning a million dollars a year.

So you don't ever tell anybody about your goals to earn a million dollars a year when you're surrounded by people who are earning $40,000 per year. Yeah, when you're talking with people who are earning a million dollars a year, it's fine to share those goals. But you don't do that when you're earning $40,000 a year, because they'll ridicule you.

They'll laugh at you. They'll try to pull you back down to their level. But you can write it in your books. You can engage with that. But I wouldn't want someone to know that. So I'm pretty sensitive about people seeing my books, which is another benefit of having them scanned in terms of privacy of the ideas.

There are also books that you read where you're really wrestling with a topic. Maybe you're reading a book on weight loss, and you're fat. And you're just wrestling with the psychology of it. And you take a moment, and you pour out your heart on the back page. You're like, "Why am I so fat?

Why is it that nothing works? I don't actually believe this guy, that he knows what it's like, etc." Well, that stuff's really personal. Or maybe you're wrestling with a spiritual crisis, and you're thinking to yourself, "I don't know if I believe in God. I'm not sure." And you're reading a book, and my note in the margin is, "I don't know if I actually believe in God." And all of a sudden, that would be the kind of thing where you don't need to talk about that to everybody.

You just choose carefully the people that you talk to. And so when you're dealing with some aspect of your theology, or your worldview, or your politics, and you're reading a book that you disagree with politically, but you write, "Good point. This guy's got a good point." So I get nervous about being exposed like that until I've had time to really think something through.

But I do engage with them in that way. Next thing that I do when I'm reading is I always focus on the vocabulary that I am learning from a book. Back to that skill of reading. One of the skills of reading that you need to develop is learning vocabulary.

And if you're not reading books that stretch your vocabulary, you're probably not being stretched intellectually. And this is where, I don't know whether it's good or bad, I try not to assign judgment on things that don't have to be judged, but we certainly have regressed in the level of vocabulary that we use in the written word.

If you go back and you read a book, you read Adler's book, or you read a book from 50 years ago, you'll find all kinds of words that you don't know today. And it'll expand your vocabulary. And when I read old books that were intended for lay audiences, oftentimes I'm just sitting there puzzling with a dictionary.

Now is this a good thing or a bad thing? The good thing about writing with a simpler vocabulary in the modern world is perhaps you can reach more people. One of the key things that people who write sales copy professionally, copywriters, try to focus on is always keeping their language very simple.

They don't generally ever want to be past the fifth grade level. Interestingly, how I saw this work out in politics was during the 2016 presidential election, I read a piece of analysis and it was talking about then candidate Donald Trump, how simplistically he spoke. The simple, elementary, juvenile, ignorant, was what the author criticized, level of speech that he as a political candidate was employing.

And I thought to myself, you know what? And then after President Trump won the election, I thought that is exactly one of the reasons that he won, is especially if you understand that the copywriters will take their copy, they'll run it through an automated program which will assign a grade level.

And if they find that there is something past grade five, they go back, they strip out complex words, they make things simpler, shorter, etc. to cut down the grade level. And so the same thing applies from the level of political candidate. The challenge I've always had is do I do that?

Do I speak with a small vocabulary, small words, etc.? Or do I enjoy the richness of the English language? Do I enjoy the richness of intellectual ideas and learning how to weave those ideas together in a tapestry that not only indicates meaning but also conveys beauty? Sentence that I've just created there is a complex sentence with a metaphor, a visual metaphor and complex words.

And yet that's what I like. And so I want to read books that expand that and I want to be careful depending on the context to use simpler words, simpler grammar, more elementary syntax when I'm in those contexts. But I still want to read reading at a level that stretches me out.

And so when I'm reading books, I want to be reading and learning new vocabulary. So whenever I find a word that I don't know or a word that I think I know but you know it's been a long time since I've looked that up, then I always circle it and then I write at the top of the page, I write the word and the definition.

I write the word and the definition right away. I used to not do that because I used to have to go and look up a word in a dictionary. But since the advent of online dictionaries, especially the dictionary that's available through a digital device which is probably sitting right next to me, now I have a wonderful ability to just simply look up the word right away.

And so it's super easy to do that. So as an example on page 98 of How to Read a Book, Adler writes this sentence. He says, "If language were a pure and perfect medium for thought, these steps would not be separate. If every word had only one meaning, if words could not be used ambiguously, if in short each word was an ideal term, language would be a diaphanous medium." I don't know what the word diaphanous is.

So I circled it, diaphanous, looked it up and wrote at the top of the page, diaphanous, very sheer and light, almost completely transparent or translucent. So now I know what he's talking about. Meaning would be clearer, language would be a diaphanous medium, a more clear medium, a more able to be understood more easily.

So then what I do is I write the word at the beginning of the book. So I have on the front page, new vocabulary and then a list whenever I learn a new word, I write it at the front of the book. So that way I can refer to the book and find all of those new vocabulary words.

So my list at the beginning of How to Read a Book, vocabulary, desideratum, page X, abecedarian, page XI, carp, page XXIX, interstitial, page XXXIX, perspicuous, page XXIV, oratory, page XXIV, oratorical, chronotopic, individuous, diaphanous, verbalism, tautology, ledger domain, inveterate, sine qua non, admixture, buskin, oblation. Those are my vocabulary words from this particular book.

Not all of them were words that I necessarily didn't know. For example, the word carp, I mean, a carp on somebody. I knew the word, but I wanted to just make sure that I understood the full context. And so whenever I even do that, I want to make sure that I learn it.

And then ideally, I would love to tell you that I put those words into a study system of some kind. And every day I wake up and I study my vocabulary cards. I don't. I should. Maybe I'll add that at some point in the future. I don't. Usually though, once I see them once, I'm pretty good to go.

And then the challenge is it's just not always worth memorizing all that stuff because unfortunately in today's world, there's not, when you use complex vocabulary, people think you're showing off instead of, unless you're with a very select group of friends where you would actually speak like that. I mean, the word desideratum, the sentence was, however, certain things have not changed in the last 30 years.

One constant is that to achieve all the purposes of reading, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different appropriate speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed. So desideratum means something wanted or needed, but I can't imagine the context where I could use that word without being laughed out of the room.

So why bother to learn it? It doesn't really make any sense. It's unfortunately, that kind of environment is a bygone era and anybody, if I ever use that word, nobody would understand it. And then you've basically taken away the whole use of language when nobody understands it. So we're going to regress to a fifth grade level of speech in all of our interactions and I've basically resigned myself to that.

A couple of more things and then we will be done for today. Vocabulary building, we've talked about. One thing you can do is dog ear the pages. If you are looking to, you think about how you want to have the book. If you're looking to have the book and it be a reference manual for you, you can consider just dog earing the third of your pages or whatever that you want to refer to.

Some people use post-it notes. I have sometimes dog eared pages. The problem is now that I've taken to scanning the books, I don't do that. A lot of times if there's a page that has a really important point or idea, I'll put a big star at the top, etc.

So exclamation points, underlines, squiggly lines, lots of writing. You develop your own system of symbols, etc. But you do want to engage with the book. Second to last final step, follow the references. One of the most important things to do is follow the references. And here you follow the bibliography and you follow the books that were written.

And this is how you start to gain comprehensive knowledge in a subject. When you read a book, a well-written book, notice you've probably culled out nine books to choose this one book to read. But a well-written book is going to reference and allude to other books, which you will probably need to go ahead and get or find a summary or some way to engage with those books.

So you study the bibliography and in general most books that are worth reading will stimulate you to read three or four or five other books, which is one area where this process is ultimately unsustainable. If every book you read inspires you to read five other books and you get those five books and of course those five books all inspire you to read five other books, you're quickly at a point of unsustainability, which is why those of us who are readers have houses full of books that we've never read.

We will never read and yet we feel a little bit guilty about having bought them and not read them. I've given up the guilt. I realize that the fact that I know a book is on my shelf and I know what's in it, even just with a quick skim, is enough.

I know if I'm in that situation where I can go and get that book. And I go back in my head and I find that idea and sometimes I'll just go and pick a book up because I want to read in a certain topic for a little bit. Not going to become deeply knowledgeable in that area, just want to read in it for a little bit.

I've given up the guilt over buying books that I don't read or that I don't read thoroughly and I think you should too. But you do want to make sure that you understand what are the books in a certain area that are really influential. I've been talking a lot about money and kind of success in the examples I've given you.

I've not talked about philosophy or theology or some of these more less mainstream subjects. I've kept it on pertinent examples. But at the end of the day, you're always going to go back to Napoleon Hill when you're reading about success. So you'll see Napoleon Hill referenced everywhere. So you're going to have to go back to Napoleon Hill.

And so when you get there by the bibliography, once you've read Napoleon Hill, what will happen is all of the later success literature will just instantly unfold to you. And it's just like a cascade where you see, "Oh, this idea is just a restatement of this idea and there's this basic core repertoire of these 25 major ideas in this genre and everybody's just restating these 25 ideas." And then in time, when you do that syntopically on an area that you care about, that's what allows you to then read faster and faster and faster, which is why today when I talk about money or I read a money book, that's what I do.

I go to the bookstore, give me 10 money books, give me five minutes with each book and I can categorize them all because there are only so many concepts. Now the individual stories will be impactful to different people and I'm not denying the power of a new book. That's why new books are great.

Books will grab different people at different times. One person will relate to one story, another person will relate to another story. And so that's why it's valuable to have an author write new books on these certain things. But once you've read the whole slew of early retirement books that have been coming out recently, and I've read a few of them, I should read and review more.

Stuff bores me, which is why I don't do it much. But at the end of the day, if you just read early retirement extreme by Fisker, you don't need to read any of those other books because Fisker covered the basic concepts, he laid out the math and he described the vocabulary of it.

And now everything after that is just simply permutations on an idea, reworking through things etc. Now that's not to say that individuals can't add certain things to it. That's why you still read the books, you still have an idea because you're looking as they're a unique flavor. And it's not to say there won't be individual applications to it.

So somebody can take and write a book on how to become financially independent with real estate, somebody can write how to become financially independent with stocks etc. But once you've grasped the basic ideas, then you don't need to read carefully every single book because it's just going to be a repackaging of the core ideas of the field.

And so that's where you get to and you should have a goal of getting to that. You get there by following the bibliography and following the references. In my approach to reading, I don't think there's one book that's going to answer all your questions. I think there are very few categories of things to read in that are going to bring a major change to your life.

It's actually a very short list. It's not that much. Most people will have goals related to their business, their career. Most people have some goals related to their finances. Most people will have some goals related to their family or relationships. Most people have some goals related to their physical health, their fitness.

And most people have some goals related to their spiritual experience, their spiritual life or their intellectual life. That's really about it. And so in those key areas, there are only some basic applications that you do. Now the most interesting one to me is business and career and finance. But that's the areas that are most extensive in terms of things you look at.

I guess we could talk about philosophy and spirituality is extremely extensive as well. But once you master some of those basic subjects, you don't have to keep on going, keep on going. But most likely don't expect any one book to solve all of your answers. Expect to read some good books and to have those stimulate other books.

But expect that in time you can't just read one book. What you'll probably do is read all the books. And so I've created a list of books to start with, which I'll tell you how to get that list in just a moment. But don't expect any one book to do anything other than to give you some new ideas.

As you're reading, think about what's written in the book and deal with what's written in the book. But don't expect what's written in the book in any one book to change your life. I don't know of any one book that has ever changed my life. What I do know is that reading all the books has changed my life.

I'm aware that may sound overwhelming to you. I get that. And I get that in today's world we're supposed to make things sound easy. But you know what? I don't think it is easy. It's not easy. But it is doable. And if you develop the skills little by little and expect to read all the books, in time you'll develop your own application of those things.

There are places for different types of reading. And that's where the most important thing is simply to read. What I find at this point, one of the most important things for me is to read widely rather than deeply in everything. So I read widely. And that allows ideas to just rattle off of each other sometimes.

I read the weirdest books. I would be so embarrassed if my reading lists were published to the internet because nobody would understand it except me. I read weird books. I read weird books and I usually go for, I read the ones written by the popular ones because I need to, but I usually go for the most esoteric books because often what I find is the ideas in them can rattle and bounce off and mate with some of the other ideas in my head and allow me to have a unique perspective on something or allow something to really sink in deeply.

And I think the same would probably be true for you. When you read widely, you gain access to different ways of looking at the world. And that helps to keep your creativity alive. It helps you to look at things differently. And what I have noticed is for me, that helps me to be a better financial advisor.

It helps me to be a better teacher and to have more effective examples that help more people. And so don't be scared to indulge your esoteric interests. There's value in those things. Which brings me to my closing. If you are now, you're still here, one hour and 38 minutes into this podcast episode, you are very deeply interested in improving your life and in learning the skills that you need.

Reading and these skills that we've talked about today are foundational skills for your success and for your expertise. You will not be able to move yourself into a very high income position unless you master an area of your career, your business, et cetera. You won't do it. The fastest way for you to get there is through reading.

So you've gotten to this point. So what I have done is I have created a recommended reading list. And as with all lists, a recommended reading list is not something where you should read every book on the list. It's a list where you should read a handful of the books on the list that speak to something that you need right now.

Filter books based upon how they speak to you right now. But if you would like to get Joshua's recommended reading list and you would like to get it so that you can understand and have some creative fodder for useful and valuable influences that you can invite into your life, teachers, leaders, mentors, et cetera, go to radicalbooklist.com and enter your email address there and I will email you my reading list.

Go to radicalbooklist.com. Again, radicalbooklist.com. And this is a selection of books that is very tightly curated. This is just simply my opinions, but I will tell you about the book, why the book has helped and influenced me deeply, and you can then take that book and read it and experience a similar transformation.

So in closing today, go to radicalbooklist.com, put your email address there and I will email you my recommended reading list. In addition, if I can get it done in the next hour or two, I will create a short presentation where I will walk you through and give you a video of my copy of Adler's book, How to Read a Book, that I've been referencing here on my screen.

So I'll show you it and do a short little presentation on that and send you that video as well. So go to radicalbooklist.com to sign up to get a copy of my book list and that short presentation. Again, radicalbooklist.com. The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new.

You could do a classic herb roasted turkey or spice it up and make turkey tacos. Serve up a go-to shrimp cocktail or use simple truth wild caught shrimp for your first Cajun risotto. Make creamy mac and cheese or a spinach artichoke fondue from our selection of Murray's cheese. No matter how you shop, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace all your holiday traditions.

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