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.