365 books in 1 year. How did I do it? Here's the answer. Hey, everyone. This is Jay Shetty and welcome back to my YouTube channel. So many of you have been asking me, Jay, how do you read so many books? How do you get through them? What's your strategy? What's your approach? Do you even sleep? The answer to all those questions is in this video. Now, how many of you have a stack of books that's taller than you that you really want to read this year, this month, this week and it you really wanna read this year, this month, this week and it just keeps growing? And you keep looking at your schedule and thinking, I've got less time this week than I had last week. And maybe you're thinking I don't even know where to start. Reading is super important.

I found it really fulfilling in my life and really useful and insightful as well. I wanna share with you what some of the most successful people in the world think about books. Warren Buffett says that he spends 5 to 6 hours a day reading 5 newspapers. Bill Gates reads about 50 books a year mainly business, health, engineering, diseases. Mark Zuckerberg says that he reads books to learn and educate himself about different cultures and backgrounds. Oprah calls reading her personal path to freedom. Mark Cuban says that he reads to learn about new industries. Now this is gonna tell me how old you are.

If you remember the Britannica encyclopedia, Elon Musk said that he read that by the time he was 9 in total. And this is my favorite one Phil Knight the CEO of Nike said that he kept his library so sacred that when people entered it they had to take off their shoes and bow down. So there's plenty of good reasons why you should read but you really need to know your own. That's my number one tip. You need to know why you're going to read a book. Is it because you want to be entertained and have an escape? Is it because you want to learn new information and grow? Is it because you wanna find new ideas about how to improve your life? The closer you get clarity on your vision for why you're reading a book, the more likely you're gonna be a successful reader. Now before we go into how I read a book a day for 365 days, I wanna talk to you about the biggest mistakes we make as readers. One of the biggest mistakes we make make is that we think that books need to be read cover to cover whether they're this size or this size.

Now the interesting thing is that not all books are written in that way. It's kind kind of like saying when you go shopping for your groceries that you need to walk through every aisle to just find the things you needed. This is taking way too long. You never do that. You take a list, you go to the specific aisles and you grab what you need. Books are no different. You can find especially with non fiction books which is what I'm talking about today. You can find what you need much quicker and make it much more useful than going through every single page.

The get through to the last page and every page is a struggle and feels heavier than the last one and the words seem to like get smaller every single time and your eyes are getting tired. It means you're relying on your willpower and you're not quite making it through. But really we should be relying on our love power. If there's something you really love, something that you're excited to learn, something that you're energized when you hear about, speak about or read about that's where you wanna throw your energy. Don't just read a book because someone told you to. Don't just read a book because it was number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Read a book because you're passionate about that subject. Okay.

So those are the biggest mistakes. I'm now going to show you how I read a book a day for 1 whole year. Now I'm not gonna be teaching you a new technique that's gonna take you a year to learn before you even start reading or something that you need to practice. I'm gonna share really practical simple tips on how to read more, faster, better. So the first thing I do before I start reading a book is I find the TED talk. I find the YouTube video that's going to tell me all about that person's big idea. What I'm trying to do here is grasp the concept of the book as quick as possible. It allows me to understand the essential principles, the underlying thought behind the book from the author without having to invest a week or a month or however long it takes to actually finish a book for you or maybe never.

So being able to watch that TED talk, watch that YouTube video allows you to figure out whether you even feel that that topic is compelling. Whether you feel attracted to that subject or whether you feel you understood it from the talk and might not even need to read the book. Basically my point is that talk should let you know whether that book is worth reading for you. It should inspire you to wanna go and order it straight away. If it doesn't, it's probably a good idea to skip. No, I'm not gonna read this. And you don't lose anything. You've just watched a 15 minute talk and learnt loads of new stuff.

So I'm gonna talk to you through a book that I read last year. It's called The Organized Mind. This could be any book. I'm just using this as an example because it has some highlights in it. The first thing I do when I get a book after I've watched the YouTube video or a TED talk, I highlight the sections that I really find interesting. Most books today, self development books, personal growth books all split up into parts. Here you can see part 1, part 2, etcetera, etcetera. And the first thing I do is I highlight the sections in that book that stick out to me straight away.

It's like going through a menu and saying I really like the sound of that. I'd love to taste it. I really like the sound of that. That's what I want to learn about and that requires you to be really conscious of what you're willing to gain from the book. So as you can see here what I've highlighted in part 1 is too much information too many decisions. I want to improve my decision making so I've highlighted them. In part 2, I've highlighted organizing our social world. I'm super interested about how humans connect and so I've also circled that bit.

Here, I'm making a selection of the parts of the book that I want to read. I always recommend reading chapter 1. The author has put so much energy into that chapter that you definitely should have missed it. But after that make sure you're highlighting the spaces that you're really gonna dive into. I recommend highlighting 1 to 2 chapters from each part. Now you may be thinking do I start from the introduction? Some introductions actually teach you how to read the book. If an author's done that that's incredible make sure you read that introduction. Apart from that you can start at chapter 1 and then make your way through.

Let's do this. So now you've circled the chapters of interest, you can dive straight into them. And as you get into them, I'm gonna give you a few quick tips on how you can make that process faster and more useful. Now, if you're someone who loves audiobook, there's these really cool apps that actually speed up how quick you can hear. Now if you're a reader like me there's a way of doing that too. When you're reading as simple as it sounds it works. You can use your finger as a guide. The more you speed up your finger times 1 times 2 times 3 the quicker you'll be able to read.

It's the same thing audiobook apps are using right now. You listen at speed 1 and then move to speed 2 and move to speed 3. You're simply using your finger as the ability to start reading faster. It actually does work. The other thing you can do is focus on the most important words in the sentence. We've all seen those examples where you could actually read words and paragraphs where all the letters and all the words are jumbled up because our brain is able to process the bigger picture quicker. What I recommend is focus in on the more stronger words in a sentence. Hence, if a sentence has 12 words you can read the most important 4 to 6 words and still extrapolate the same meaning.

Even inside a chapter you can skip to subheadings and divisions that you find fascinating. We have this fix station on reading every word, finishing every book and finishing every page. The reality is most of us never let that happen. The tips I'm giving you are gonna help you read a book within 2 hours or a day and help you decide whether you want to read the book cover to cover. Now imagine if you spent a month or 2 months reading a book and afterwards felt well what did I gain from that? What did I learn from that? If anything. But what if you read it in 2 hours and then had the opportunity to decide to read the whole thing? I guarantee you when you do it in this way you'll be able to read books that you really really value. Another way to speed up the reading process is read the first three lines and last three lines of paragraphs that you think you might be interested in. If you're not sure when you do that you'll be able to quickly contextualize whether that has insights that you really want to know.

Authors place a lot of emphasis in starting and ending paragraphs with key information. You'll be able to grab it and decide if you want to read the rest. The interesting thing is when we read, even though it feels like we're flowing across the words, it's not true. Our eyes are actually doing a stop start motion and when our eyes stop we're able to grab information and when they start we move to the next. So that loses a bit of time. Now when you're trying to look at the most important words you're able to grasp 90% of the meaning which is looking at 30% of the words. It also stops your eyes from having to constantly do a stop start motion trying to make it flow when actually you're jumping to the most important words in the sentence. Try it out with 3 or 5 sentences and see if it works for you.

Now not all these tools are gonna work for you straight away. Some of the more simple ones you can put into practice right away. I also make sure that after a chapter I write down what I call the three s formula. I write down a story that really inspired me or moved me. I write down a statistic that I thought blew my mind. And the third thing I do is I make a note something I want to share with someone else. That's a great way of getting more out of a book. Now if you're not inspired by a book drop it.

Finishing a book is nowhere near as important as actually learning from it and gaining from it. Our success metrics for reading books is how many we've finished versus how much we've actually learned. So try out whichever of these tips that work for you. Make sure you start off by watching that TED talk, watching that YouTube video to grab the essence of the book. The second thing you want to do is highlight the key chapters and areas that you really want to dive into. Remember, it's just like going shopping. You don't need to go through every aisle to get what you want. Remember, you can grab as much information as you need just from the first three lines and the last three lines of every paragraph to decipher whether it's relevant to what you're reading for and remember when you're reading if something's not inspiring you it's not motivating you you're not learning from it.

Don't drag yourself through it. Find the next book and get working. Now some of the best books that I recommend are books that I've read cover to cover. This includes everything from the 4 hour work week through to start with why all the way through to thinking fast and slow. But when I first read these books I read them in 2 hours and then made the decision whether I wanted to finish them or not. I hope that some of these tips have helped. I can't wait to see what you put down in the comments. Let me know what you're struggling with and I'll try and answer your questions.

I am so grateful that you're watching my videos right now and I hope that you're going to go on and watch so many more but before you do that make sure you subscribe to this channel so that you can find out about the videos as soon as they launch. Press the like button and leave a comment and let's keep making wisdom go viral together.