High Performance Reading (do this every day)

Summary

Reading is the simplest, most cost-effective way of acquiring skills fast in life. In this video, I share the High-performance reading framework that I've honed throughout the years to master complicated subjects fast. Being consistent and deliberate about your reading is the ultimate competitive edge in a world full of distracted people.

Transcript

Should you read books at all? How many books should you read a year, if you want to maximize your learning? How can you actually implement reading in your daily routine, and how much is too much? What's good reading, what's bad reading? This video is going to teach you how to look at reading as a secret lever in your business, and how to make it as effective as possible, because I know a lot of folks that read a lot, but have very little to show for it. And conversely, those that do not read at all, but on the other hand, have massive results. So how to strike the perfect balance? Let's watch it.

[INTRO] I am the CEO and founder of master, which is a high performance training company. We help entrepreneurs and business leaders scale the businesses by teaching them 8 core high performance skill that allows them to operate at peak potential.

Now, before we get in, remember, subscribe, we release a few juicy videos every week to help people like you, scale their businesses and accelerate their careers with predictability and reliability, by harnessing the power of complexity science, behavioral science, and neuroscience.

So today, I want to talk about how I think about reading as an entrepreneur, and how to make the most of it, because there's two schools of thought: those that swear by reading and those that say that reading is not necessary at all. That the only thing that matters, is trying new things. And make sure that over time you select the things that work best, which is sensible advice, but it can be severely misguided.

So if you think about it, this "reading Yes, or reading no" is akin to the prototypical difference between strategy and execution. Strategy is all about drafting plans, creating goal setting exercises that can illuminate the path ahead. But they're useless without actually doing it, right? And execution is all about doing trying stuff and getting feedback from the marketplace. But if you do not know what you're executing on, then most of that execution is fruitless.

There's no thing more dumb that running enthusiastically in the wrong direction, you need to know where do you want to go. So to me reading provides that direction. Reading is what tells me what should I be focusing on. But I do a kind of reading that does probably different to what you may have read or listen about this. And I think is very, very, very effective.

So Please steal this framework. And let me know what results do you get. So first of all, I read two kinds of books, nonfiction, and biographies. That's the only thing I read. When I was a kid from the age of five to the age of 20. I was a very devout reader, I would read everything nonfiction fiction biographies. But over time, I realized that if I wanted to have an edge, I needed to implement practical knowledge and that practical knowledge will come from nonfiction books.

So I stopped reading fiction when I was about 20 years old. And since then, I've always read nonfiction and biographies and I read nonfiction and biographies of different times of the day. So nonfiction every at the beginning of the day, 20 minutes every day, to start the day and biographies.

I read it at the end of the day, right before going to bed, also 15-20 minutes or half an hour, right? Why do I read nonfiction, because it's going to give me the solution to the problems that I am facing in my life and business. If I have a sales problem, I will read sales books, if I have a funnel problem, I will read funnel books. If I have a brand problem, I will read branding books, and the moment that I'm able to link a problem with a specific information that I'm gathering. That's when the connection is made. And I am able to understand exactly what should be the key next steps that I should be doing to fix the problem. And then biographies. I read that at night because it provide inspiration. It showed me how all the people before me had probably worse odds than I have now came from different origin, phased different riddles and challenges, and were able to overcome them. And this is what I read: nonfiction in the morning and biographies at night. And why do I do this this way because it is very effective because it is context-based.

It is connected with my work and my life. If I am reading about a problem that I'm facing about the challenges that I need to overcome, I automatically link that to the situation, the context and not only that helps retention I am able to remember it much better, but it also allows me to execute better. I can advance and graduate to high level problems that very important as an entrepreneur, it also allows me to understand that all of the problems that I believe may be super hard or those challenges that seem insurmountable, they're really not that important if you have the correct information.

So if I haven't been able to so something that I've been battling with for quite some time is because either I don't really know what the problem is about, or I don't have the correct information to deal with it. And both circumstances are very easy to solve.

Idea #2. And this is really something that I don't see many people doing is active reading. So it's connected to idea #1, most people just read it and don't think about what they have read, they just power through marshall through all of those books, they read 50-70-80 books a year, they do not make the conscious effort to link the new information, they get in to the information they already have in their brains, and don't have note taking systems or zettlekasten or some sort of system that may allow them to fixate that knowledge.

So most of that knowledge gets lost, they read it, and then they forget it because #1 they don't want to do the work.

And #2 they do not make the conscious effort of thinking about what they just read. So if I'm going to spend 20 minutes reading, at least five minutes, at the end of the 20 minutes will be devoted to thinking what is it that I just learned? How does it relate to the things that I already know? And does it actually contradict it or it goes in the same direction.

When you learn how to approach a situation from different perspectives, you very quickly are able to develop a functional framework, especially if you then execute on that framework and test if real life if reality actually correlates with what you just read. So this is super important. Don't sleep on this tip, make active reading, devote time to thinking after you have read. And it is not complicated at all. It's just sitting after you've done reading, sitting and thinking about how would you just read about branding, storytelling or funnel building or sales or operations, whatever it is that you just read about, or in my case psychology or science, behavioral science, complexity science? How does that relate with things that I already know.

And #3, I like to be as slow reader. And instead of trying to crank in as many books as possible, I try to really read this slowly, although my reading speed, it's around 500 words per minute, which is quite fast, I like to reread. Right? So I like to think of books as the destination of a person's life. If I am willing to devote time of my life to read about someone else, or the work of someone else, it can be a biography or a nonfiction book, I must pay respect to that thing.

So there is no use to just go through it very fast, without understanding and paying respect to what it is that I'm reading. So I like to do what I call deliberate reading, or slow reading, even though my reading speed is very high. I like to re-read passages I like to re-read read chapters or re-read. I like to re-read books, really in order to really internalize the teachings of those books, right?

So first idea, understand what it is that you're reading, why do you read it? And what's the context for you reading it, right? So be deliberate about what you do? Then do active reading, takes notes, think about what to just read, think about: How does it connect with the things you already knew about this same subject? And how can you update the frameworks that you have in your head, and finally, read slow or read in a way that you can really pay respect to the information that you read.

And I've been doing this for years at this point. And let me tell you, it has really been one of the driving forces in my life because that's really where I have gotten most of my high quality information that I like to run my life with and all these books that you see here that as you might imagine, this is not a fake background, right? So these books, whatever books that I can pick up, it has really have a massive impact in my life. So I just picked "As curvas do tempo" it is biography by Oscar Niemeyer who was my favorite architect really.

When I was an architect and I, I went to live in Brazil. I became absolutely fascinated with Oscar Niemeyer's example, and this is a fantastic book about his personal philosophy, his ideas, how he saw the world, how he saw architecture, and this was really important to me in 2012-2013 when I was exiting my architectural school, but I was deeply in love with the Architectural profession, right? So the way I have been taught architecture to me, was suboptimal.

And him was a great example of what good architecture actually look like, for instance, right? And the best books, those that I have read more than once they normally come here, they come in a physical format. Those books are more like working books, working products, I like to read them and my Kindle in this case, right. So I may have the same book in different formats for different purposes, right? So if I'm going to be highlighting, I will use the Kindle. If I want to have like a piece on my physical library, then I will buy it again.

And if I want to have like a special edition, well, I would buy it again, like Nassim Taleb books, or Benjamin Graham, the intelligent investor. So what I'm trying to say with this video is that I believe reading is one of the most important things you can do for your career.

If you manage to make it a habit, it will pay off dividends, because it will train your mind to learn your things fast. It will help you focus, it will help you find quality thinking time, and it will make you wise over time.

So please let me know in the comments, if you read how much you read, how do you read if this is useful? If you have had results implementing this framework, I would love to see that you start doing these things and have real results and fall in love with reading even more, which will probably happen and if you want to have a proven framework on performance, which of course I built both by reading hundreds of books on neuropsychology, behavioral science, complexity, science, scientific management, but also in my career, like proven, testing all those frameworks.

This is how I became a private equity real estate director in 30 months starting from architects, right? By applying all the knowledge that I got from reading books and papers and stuff. Well then apply for the Selfmastered Performance Accelerator. We have incredible people from around the world building fantastic stuff. We have accelerated dozens of people at this point and I really want you to be part of what we're building if you happen to need our services.