Remember that space in your house where dust now collects? There sit a bunch of books sad and forlorn, their pages yellowing with age, their words going unread. How many times have you purchased a book from a store either because you liked the back cover summary or because someone else recommended it to you – only to have it half-read and shoved on a shelf for “later”.
If you’re fooling yourself into thinking that you “don’t have time” to read a book because you’re busy, think again. According to this guy called Charles Chu who is part of the website Better Humans, you have more time than you can even imagine – in fact, according to him, you have so much time that you can cover, on an average, at least 200 books in one year!
If the likes of Richard Branson, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Barack Obama, among others, can have successful careers and still have time to read, an average Joe can definitely put some time aside and get educated from the pages of a tome.
Now, Chu says that an average book has 50,000 words. Sound like a lot, doesn’t it? The average person is said to be able to read between 200-400 words per minute. That means –
200 books * 50,000 words is 10 million words
10 million words @400 words/minute is 25,000 minutes
25,000 minutes is 417 hours.
So you mean to say, you don’t have just 417 hours to spare in the whole year? If you still say no, then how about cutting back, just a little, on some not-so-purposeful activities like –
Social Media – You don’t have to be on your phone and computer switching between platforms to check out other people’s updates and personal notifications.
Television – In any case, you spend most of your time watching commercials and spacing out in front of the television.
Wasting Time – How many minutes do you spend staring into space for absolutely no reason?
