I'm Cal Newport and I want to talk to you for a moment about reading. As a professor and writer, reading is an important part of my life. My goal is to read five books every month and to hold myself accountable on the first episode of my podcast, Deep Questions each month, I actually go through the five books I read that month before.

You can actually go back and see what I have been reading. Now people often wonder how do I do this? Five books seems like a lot to get through in a month, but I don't actually think it is. So I want to share my secrets to how I get through so many titles.

So quickly, I'm going to have five reasons to share with you. Four are small. The fifth is going to be the big critical one. Now before we get into those five reasons, let's briefly answer the question of why this even matters. Why bother reading so many books? Well I am convinced that if you do intellectual work, so if one of the primary ways you make money is by creating value with your brain, alchemizing dollars out of the stuff of thoughts, reading is critical to you.

Why because reading is to your brain what exercise is to your body. To work with books means you are grappling with complex ideas, trying to make connections between different types of theories or ways of seeing the world. It helps your ability to empathetically put yourself into other people's shoes and understand life through other people's eyes.

All of this is critical. It's calisthenics for the gray matter up here. It is a huge competitive advantage if you work in knowledge work. You need to work out your brain. Reading is one of the best workouts that we know about. I mean I find it to be surprising the degree to which we obsess so much about physical health and we get into minutia about different exercise routines or supplements or exactly how you eat and yet we barely think at all about how to keep our brain operating at its full capacity even though for most of us we depend way more for our livelihood on our brain than we do these days on our body.

So I care about getting the most out of our brain. Reading is a fantastic way to do this. Alright five books a month. Five ways to help you get there. Number one choose more interesting books. Now I think this is something that trips people up. They think about what book should I be reading.

What book is going to impress other people if they heard I read it. This is a quick way to get stuck. To hit a dead end on some giant tome and just give up on reading altogether for a while. Choose a wide variety of books. Switch between novels that are just absolutely fun and you're lost in with nonfiction books that are just hitting a sweet spot.

Mix in some deeper books or some more interesting books. Big variety. Different difficulties. Different styles. Also mix between audio and written. I think that's absolutely fine. Find what genre of books you can listen to well that are compelling on audio. Some are better in your ear than they are on the page and always have one of those going.

That's one or two books a month already happening just in your spare time. So mix it up. In the month that we're in right now and I'm recording this for example. I read Lost Moon. This is just a nonfiction account of the Apollo 13 disaster. It reads like a thriller.

It's just a fun book. It's easy to get lost in and you could just go down a rabbit hole and get lost in it. At the same time I also read a much more dense biography of Daniel Boone. I was just curious about that point of American history. You mix it up.

Alright that's number one. Number two. Schedule reading sessions like you schedule exercise. So give them respect in your schedule. Hey, you know what? I'm going to get home from work at this point. I'm going to put aside a half hour I want to read today. For tonight between dinner and when we put on a show I'm going to have a reading session.

Sunday morning before we get out of the house I want to put aside an hour to read. Start actually putting reading on your calendar just like you would with exercise. Very few people tackle physical exercise with the mindset of if I have time and I'm in the mood I'll do it.

As we know from long experience that means you will do exactly zero hours of exercise. The same is true for reading. If you're just saying, hey, if I have a lot of time and I'm in the mood to read then I'll do it. You're not going to find that time.

Pages will not get turned. So treat the activity with respect. Actually schedule time. Number three. Put rituals around reading that makes it more enjoyable. I like for example if it's a Friday night, it's the end of a long week to have a drink with a book and just sort of get lost in my study, just lost in a book and enjoy a little bit of bourbon.

There's something to that. I also like leveraging during the nice weather months my porch. I have a nice porch. I have an outdoor couch on it. There's some columns that frame a bunch of plants in front of me. It's all very verdant. It's all very scenic. I like going out there and reading.

If I'm reading a demanding book, I like to have something like tea or coffee with me. If I'm reading a fun book like a novel, I like to have some crackers to chew on. That's an old habit from my childhood. But nice rituals surrounding the reading makes you more likely to do it.

Number four. Do closing pushes. This is a big part of my secret to getting through all five books each month. When you're just working on a book or two in the background and you get close to finishing one, and by close I mean you're at that last 100 pages, you have some momentum, you've been working on this book for a while and you can see the finish line in the hazy distance.

You say, you know what? Let's just get this done. I'm going to put aside two and a half hours. I'm going to hold myself up and I'm just going to go, go, go. I'm going to the coffee shop, you know, hold my calls, two hours. I'm going to push final sprint.

Let's get to the finish line. That really helps. So instead of just petering off or trailing off as you get towards the end of a book, this allows you to actually push to get done. This brings us to the fifth idea for reading more each month. The most important of the five ideas I talk about in this video, and that is to take everything interesting off your phone.

This is my secret weapon. Perhaps the most important secret weapon I have to support my reading life is the fact that I have never had a social media account. The effect of this is that my phone is not very interesting. There's not much for me to look at on my phone that is going to distract me.

So what do I do when I'm bored? I'm at the table, I'm just sitting around the house waiting for someone to come over. I've woken up early before my kids and I don't know what to do with myself. I read. Reading becomes my default activity when I don't have something else to do.

Now remember when Apple first introduced a few years ago that screen time feature, when it revealed to people how much time they were actually spending on their phone and everyone was surprised they were seeing two hours, three hours, four hours a day they were looking on their phone. That is a lot of time.

We underestimate how much time we spend looking at those little glowing pieces of glass. Imagine how much reading you get done if that two, three, four hours a day was diverted towards pages in a book. Tell you what, five books a month no longer looks all that difficult. So take everything interesting off your phone.

Take off the social media apps, take off the YouTube apps. When you feel that itch of boredom or you have that downtime, just have a book nearby. Retrain yourself to make reading your default activity. Even if you do nothing else I advise in this video, that alone is going to skyrocket the amount of books you get through each month.

Oh, by the way, there's a side benefit to that as well because now that time that used to be spent on your phone is going somewhere not just more productive, but you are avoiding the anxiety, the stress, the addictive emotional manipulation that these apps are inflicting upon you every minute that you're looking at them.

So you gain a positive over here because you're going deep in a book, doing cognitive calisthenics, building up that competitive advantage against everyone else who makes a living with their brain while at the same time avoiding a major source of negativity. The difference between two hours spent on Twitter versus two hours spent grappling with Thoreau on the quality of your life is significant.

It's worth at least trying. All right, so five books a month is not actually that crazy of a goal if you come at it the right way. So let's just go down my five tips real quick. Choose better books, schedule reading time like you would exercise, have good rituals surrounding your reading, do big closing pushes when you get within 100 pages of finishing a book and most importantly, make your phone boring so that reading can once again become your default leisure activity when bored.

The reading life is a deep life. The reading life is a good life. I recommend it. Give it a try. (upbeat music)