Entrepreneur Books: Why Reading One a Week is the Ultimate Cheat Code
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Warren Buffett reads about 500 pages every single day, while Bill Gates clocks in about 50 books per year, or an average of 1 book per week. And let's not forget that Mark Cuban averages over 3 hours of reading every day.
These men aren't just successful business owners; they are billionaires who attribute their success to one common theme: reading extensively.
What's truly interesting is that 25% of Americans have not read even 1 book over the last year, and the average American only reads about 12 books a year. In contrast, top entrepreneurs read an average of 50–60 books in a single year.
Is there any chance that this could be an accident? Or could it be that reading one book each week gives the reader an unfair advantage — or a cheat code? Could this help a person reach their goals at a much faster pace than someone who is not able to read as many books?
It turns out to be the latter — and in this article, we are also going to explain exactly why reading at least one entrepreneurship book every week is the highest-ROI (return on investment) habit you can establish. We are also going to explain how to accomplish this, along with the books that have the highest likelihood of getting you the greatest return on your investment in reading them.
Would you like to write a book that will be read by other entrepreneurs? Contact us through WhatsApp or visit us at Rolling Authors to learn more about how we can help you write and publish your own book in an organized manner and give you the opportunity to showcase your knowledge and experience.
Table of Contents
Warren Buffett reads over 80% of his time (500–1,000 pages per day); when asked what he attributes his success to, Warren pointed to a pile of books and replied, "Read 500 pages a day and that's how you will have knowledge, just like compound interest in money!"
Bill Gates reads approximately 50 books per year. Like Warren Buffett, Bill devotes specific blocks of time for deep reading and takes hand-written notes.
Mark Cuban spends over 3 hours a day reading for his competitive edge.
Elon Musk simply reads books in order to learn how to build rockets.
The evidence is overwhelming that there is a linear correlation between successful people and a minimum of 30 minutes per day of reading. Statistically, 88% of individuals who achieve success in finance have been shown to read.
Reading fundamentally alters the way the brain operates:
Increased Ability to Remember: Market data, customer feedback, and competitive intelligence are all vital for entrepreneurs. Reading is crucial in remembering those types of things.
Increased Communication Skills: Reading develops vocabulary, and an entrepreneur's capacity for articulating sophisticated concepts is essential for making pitches, persuading people, and negotiating.
Improved Strategic Decision-Making: Mental models allow you to make better decisions and solve problems faster by using memories from other experiences.
Increased Empathy: Reading has been found to help people gain a better understanding of other people's feelings, which is vital when working with teams, meeting customer needs, and building relationships with partners.
Stress Relief: Reading has been shown to help reduce stress levels at a significantly higher rate than listening to music or exercising.
The Compound Effect: The advantages of reading accumulate over time as well. If you read only one book, your vocabulary will grow by approximately 0.5%, but if you read 50 books, your vocabulary will increase by approximately 25%, providing you with a competitive advantage that cannot be overcome in five years.
Return on Investment: How Reading Books Produces Real Business Results
Direct Business Impact
Lead Generation: Books can act as credibility markers that can help you turn prospects into customers. If one insight from a book results in closing one additional $50,000 customer, you will realize a 2,500% return on investment.
Solving Problems Faster: Suppose reading helps you save 40 hours of trial and error on a problem that would normally cost you $200 per hour. Reading a book will produce a value of $8,000 for your company.
The network effect occurs when one relationship forged through book clubs results in a partnership worth $100,000 for a cost of $20. The return on investment (ROI) in this example is infinite.
The number of strategies available to you depends upon the number of books you read per year. As an example, if someone reads 50 or more books a year while their competition reads five or fewer, they have a strategic advantage of having had exposure to 10 times the number of strategies as their competitors. If you were to have a 10% increase in revenue due to having superior strategic positioning from reading 50 books a year, this would result in an additional $100,000 in revenue for a $1,000,000 company.
The value from reading one book per week would conservatively be at least $110,000. This total reflects an investment of $1,000 for reading 52 books ($20 × 52), resulting in a return on investment of 110x, conservatively.
Speed reading generally will not improve comprehension when reading faster than your natural pace.
The following is the actual math:
Average book: 275 pages.
The average speed at which most people read is 200 to 250 words per minute.
It will take you approximately 5.6 hours to read a book of 275 pages.
In order to read one book per week, you will need to spend approximately 48 minutes a day reading that book.
There you have it. You are required to do less than 1 hour of reading per day, and no special abilities are needed. Just the ability to be consistent will suffice.
Time for reading does exist. However, the way that people allocate the use of time differs. The average person spends over 2 hours per day on social media and 1 to 2 hours watching television; however, they feel like they don't have enough time to read for 45 to 60 minutes per day.
Here is the Successful Entrepreneur Reading System:
Reading Needs to Be Essential: Allocate 60 minutes a day in your schedule for Reading Time. You should treat this time like it's an important board meeting.
Choose the Right Time in Your Day to Read: Read in the morning (6AM–7AM), read before bed (10PM–11PM), or read during your commute (reading at least 20 pages every day).
Connect Reading to What You Normally Do Every Day: Read while drinking your morning coffee, read 20 pages during lunch, and read as a part of your bedtime routine.
Reduce the Barriers to Reading: Keep books located throughout your house, use the Kindle app when traveling, and delete any apps on your phone that distract or limit your ability to read.
Track What You Are Reading and Use Gamification to Keep You Engaged: Use Goodreads to track what you read, and share your reading list with your friends so they know you are accountable to read.
What Kind of Books To Read
All business owners should read books that fall into these 5 categories:
(1) Business Principles (20%) – how to manage your finances, market your products, sell, operate your business, and think strategically about the long-term future of your business.
(2) Industry Information (25%) – how to become the go-to authority in your industry.
(3) Leadership and Management (20%) – how to develop high-performing teams, lead teams effectively, make the most of employee training, and encourage continuous development among employees.
(4) New Ideas and Business Strategy (20%) – how to stay ahead of your competition; how to think strategically about your business.
(5) Mindset and Personal Growth (15%) – mental toughness and personal productivity.
⇒ 20 of the Most Essential Entrepreneurial Books
Fundamentals of Business
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
Rework by Jason Fried
Leadership & Management
5. Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
6. Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
7. Radical Candor by Kim Scott
8. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Strategy & Innovation
9. Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim & Mauborgne
10. The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
11. Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
12. Playing to Win by Lafley & Martin
Sales & Marketing
13. Influence by Robert Cialdini
14. Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath
15. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
Mindset & Personal Growth
16. Atomic Habits by James Clear
17. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
18. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
19. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Finance & Scaling
20. The Outsiders by William Thorndike
How to Get the Most Value From Every Book
Before You Read: Set your intention. Skim. Make a list of 3 questions you need the author to answer for you.
While You Read: Take notes. Create connections in your head. Think about what you read after each chapter.
After You Read: Create a one-page summary of the book. Teach someone else what you learned. Set a date to implement specific action items on your calendar.
Read annually at least ten or twenty "core" books that have a significant impact on you.
Failure to Apply What You Read (At Least Once): Once you've applied a single insight from one book, you will experience much greater benefit than if you fail to implement anything you read from ten other books.
Not Reading Outside Your Industry: Much of the most innovative information you can find will be outside of your primary industry. Therefore, try to read at least 25% of your books outside of your industry.
Following Bestsellers Instead of Reading What You Need: Read for your specific needs rather than what is listed as a "bestseller."
Not Re-Reading Foundational Books Enough: You are a different entrepreneur than you were last year. Because of this fact, you will gain new insights when you re-read core books every year.
Reading Passively: Utilize the Active Reading System for maximum benefit. Always question, annotate, and note how you will utilize the information in your life.
Not Establishing a Reading System: If you read ruthlessly and without establishing a routine for doing so, you will also have results that reflect the random and sporadic nature of your reading.
The Compound Effect: How the Compound Effect Works
YEAR 1: 52 Books – Your knowledge of the basic concepts will be internalized.
YEAR 2: 104 Books – You will now begin to see connections in what you read.
YEAR 3: 156 Books – You will develop expertise across many other disciplines.
YEAR 5: 260 Books – You will achieve the top 1% of knowledge that exists across all fields.
YEAR 10: 520 Books – You will now have developed an unfair advantage based upon your knowledge and gain access to much of what is considered to be groundbreaking insight. Extensive relationships between your areas of expertise will also emerge.
Charlie Munger used his lifelong experience of reading across many disciplines to create his "latticework of mental models." This is the true power of compounding.
Do you want to become a reading entrepreneur?
Reading one new book a week should be viewed as a necessary part of running your business, rather than simply a bonus for personal growth.
When your competitors are busy checking their Instagram feeds, you are busy absorbing the main ideas and lessons from successful entrepreneurs around the world.
It's very simple to demonstrate how many insights you will take from reading 52 books in a year. If you have between five and ten actionable takeaways from the 52 books (based on your own experience), that's going to be at least 260–520 new strategies and concepts that you can put to use immediately.
Let's use the following example — your competition reads only 5–10 books a year, but because you're potentially using 50 times the amount of new information through reading, there is an unequal advantage to you.
Now let's take it a step further — what if you could put your knowledge into a book so that other entrepreneurs would read, implement, and learn from at least 1–2 things that they could use to either grow their businesses or create new opportunities in their industries?
Simon Sinek began by reading a great deal and then putting that into his first book, Start with Why. Brené Brown conducted extensive research and then wrote a bestselling book, Dare to Lead. Therefore, every great entrepreneur's book was created by someone who had valuable experience that they wanted to share.
You also possess that same type of experience.
Next Steps – Write YOUR Book
Rolling Authors helps entrepreneurs turn their knowledge and expertise into books that can provide authority, create leads, and provide many more opportunities in business.
Our Process:
✅ Strategy Session – Identify the specific insights you possess and your positioning
✅ Interviewing – Get the details of your frameworks
✅ Writing – Craft your book in your own voice
✅ Publishing Assistance – Help determine the best publishing option for your needs
✅ Launch Strategy – Maximize the impact of the book and create business opportunities for yourself
Why do entrepreneurs choose Rolling Authors?
Entrepreneur focused: We know the goal of your business is to grow.
Fast execution: You can go from the idea stage to a completed manuscript in 4–6 months.
You write in your own style and voice: We take what you have in your head and put it into words as you would say them to someone else.
Using your book for growth: We can help you use your book to grow your business.
Proven results: Our clients get speaking gigs, capital, and grow their companies faster.
Investing in your authority: Think about it:
A single speaking engagement will typically pay for the entire project.
A single high-value client will likely justify your writing expense.
A single partnership opportunity can greatly multiply your ROI.
A single media appearance can exponentially increase your visibility.
The REAL question: What are the consequences of NOT writing a book?
Your competitors will publish their books before you, and they will be the established experts in their field.
All of your ideas will remain locked away in your brain.
You may miss out on opportunities in favor of "published authors."
Please visit our website today to schedule a consultation with us and learn how we can help you write your book that will one day impact other entrepreneurs.
Don't forget: You are reading this because someone else had the courage to write it. Now it's your turn!
The entrepreneurs who read 52 books a year are not only consumers of knowledge; they are contributors of knowledge! Join the ranks of successful entrepreneurs!
Rolling Authors assists those who are starting their own businesses to create an authoritative written asset that supports their lead generation and scaling of the new business. We realize that every entrepreneur has interesting and unique perspectives, so we will help you express your perspective in writing.
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