How I Read 100 Books in 2024
Books are one of the most effective ways to build the knowledge that powers your personal brand. So, how are you building regular reading into your routine?
I truly believe that one of the single most effective ways to achieve your personal brand and personal goals is through reading. Your skills start with knowledge. Through books, you can learn from others who have already walked the path your personal brand wants to.
Last year, I shared my method for achieving my personal challenge of reading 100 books a year. It was the latest chapter in my journey from “not a reader” to reading pretty prolifically.
What I didn’t expect was that my one-year 100-books reading challenge would turn into another year of reading 100 books. I shouldn’t have been surprised. It’s how my initial challenge of reading a book a week several years ago evolved into an ongoing habit.
My reading method builds a habit that becomes hard to break even after I reach my reading goals. Speaking of reading goals, the number of books you aim to read is only a vanity metric. But for me, having a goal simply keeps me accountable for the habit. You might read one book and learn and action more than I do from 100.
Books have become the unexpected central theme of my own personal brand. As my husband says, if I were stuck on a desert island, all I would need would be my books and tea.
In this blog, I’m sharing updates to my reading motivation and processes. While I’ve found that the 10Ms of the method I first shared have stayed true, the details have evolved to new, exciting levels.
1. Motivation
Any habit is hard to create if you don’t know your motivation for doing it in the first place.
In my adult years, I’ve been almost unwaveringly committed to non-fiction. I wanted to build my knowledge practically. However, this year, this motivation evolved to not just building my knowledge, but building my skills. Because, knowledge is only power for your personal brand if it’s put into action.
In his book The Diary of a CEO, Bartlett's first of his 33 laws of business and life presents five buckets that are the sum of your professional potential - which you must fill in the right order:
What you know (your knowledge)
What you can do (your skills)
Who you know (your network)
What you have (your resources)
What the world thinks of you (your reputation)
The five buckets are interconnected. Importantly, you cannot pour from empty buckets.
The investment in your knowledge bucket is the highest-yielding investment you make for your personal brand. Your applied knowledge becomes your skills. And your skills cascade into all remaining buckets.
You have less control over your network, resources and reputation of your personal brand, than your knowledge and skills. Your first two buckets, unlike the others, can’t easily be taken away from you. Bartlett says:
“Those who hoard gold have riches for a moment. Those who hoard knowledge and skills have riches for a lifetime.”
So, this year, my focus has shifted more than ever from simply collecting knowledge to using it to develop the skills of my personal brand.
While I love supercharging my skills, I’m still motivated by reading’s calming effects, too. University of Sussex research has shown reading reduces stress by 68% - outperforming even a cup of tea, music and walking. Plus, it only takes 6 minutes to see results.
2. Meaningful Themes
This has been my biggest shift in 2024. While I still believe in having meaningful themes to motivate my reading, my themes changed in a big way this year. Instead of reading 100 non-fiction books, I committed to reading one classic literature book a week and one non-fiction - getting the best of both worlds. Non-fiction allows me to learn from the experiences of great minds in a practical way. At the same time, fiction books are said to improve your empathy and emotional intelligence, as they create neurological pathways relating to characters, their environment and experiences.
I also read one single significant book across the whole year - more on this soon.
3. Momentum
I always have my next read ready to go. This reduces potential decision fatigue and creates a chain effect for the habit. I talked about the idea of ‘chain-smoking’ in my recent blog about my new 10 favourite productivity hacks.
In his book Show Your Work, Austin Kleon describes the value of being a ‘chain smoker’. It’s his mindset to never lose momentum between projects. Instead of sitting in the relief and excitement of finishing one project, you can use the momentum to immediately light up another project. Once you start a chain, you don’t want to quit.
An aspiring comedian once asked Jerry Seinfeld for advice. Seinfield said that the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes, and the way to create better jokes was to write every day.
Seinfeld suggested having a big wall calendar with the whole year on one page. He then said to get a big red marker, and for every day you write, to put an X over that day. The chain grows every day, and you’ll like seeing it. Your job is to not break the chain. I don’t personally keep a physical calendar, as reading daily comes naturally to me now. But, if it was a habit I was trying to create, this would be my go-to approach.
4. Make it Manageable
The last time I shared my 10Ms for reading, this was everyone’s favourite tip. Set the pace based on your reading goal by calculating how many pages you have to read each day.
I take my yearly goal and divide it into a weekly goal. I then divide the total number of pages of the book into the number of days I need to finish the book in. This gives me a daily reading goal. This way I break a big reading goal into bite-sized pieces. Some days will be lighter than others, some more challenging.
You might even like to set yourself an extra large reading challenge across the entire year. Alongside my regular reading themes, this year, I read the Bible cover to cover for the first time. This was only possible for me by reducing this task into more manageable weekly reading goals.
5. Make it Mobile
Last year, I shared that I had been reading books on my phone for the last couple of years, which was surprisingly so much easier than it sounds. This year, thanks to a much-appreciated gift from my husband, I’ve returned to reading on my iPad.
While I love physical books more, eBooks save me space, time and money. If you also read on an iPad, most reading apps can be synced to your phone. So, you can pick up your book instead of scrolling social media next time you’re out and about looking to kill time.
If you’re struggling to let go of the idea of physical books, consider some advice from Marie Kondo - tidying sensation and best-selling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy.
Kondo advocates for discarding books that you’ve read or that are no longer serving you. It’s a tough one for people who like to keep large, impressive libraries, often filled with the books they wish they had read or never plan to read again.
Kondo argues that the books, once read or moved on from, have already served their purpose. Your job is to take the lesson from it and start to apply it, rather than hang on to the book. By discarding anything that no longer ‘sparks joy’, you’re left with only a ‘hall of fame’ of books.
In Japan, there is a saying, ‘Words make our reality’. Surrounding yourself with only the most special books will help make you the person you aspire to be. I only keep physical books with extra special aesthetic appeal - books designed to be works of art, more than words to learn.
Years ago, I also inadvertently started building a ‘hall of fame’ of books with my husband. We unexpectedly stumbled upon a chance to invest in a classic literature library. The iconic library which I only read this year.
6. Money-conscious Choices
For the first time last year, I started using an app for my local library and haven’t looked back since. This has saved me significantly on what I used to invest in books. However, the options are still sometimes limited. There are also usually waiting periods for the best books. So, I’d still be open to returning to subscription services for books one day, too.
7. Make Highlights
Even when I’m tempted to make the switch to physical books, my need to make highlights stops me. Unless it’s a textbook, I don’t mark physical books. I love the idea of passing it on, allowing the next reader to decide what’s most important to them. But I highlight my heart out in my e-books.
For me, not highlighting is reading passively. This isn’t much better than not reading at all, which I’ll discuss more in the next tip. I only highlight non-fiction business books - where this is something I can more likely take action on.
Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte shares his ‘CODE’ formula. It’s a personal knowledge management framework:
Capture
Organise
Distil
Express
Forte argues that usually the information you need most doesn’t come to you when you most need it. So, you have to build a personal knowledge management (PKM) system for the benefit of your future self.
8. Make Sense
My weekly book review blogs and book of the month blogs, videos and podcast episodes are the ‘express’ component of my CODE formula. It requires me to have done the work of ‘organising’ and ‘distilling’ too. It means I have to make sense of the book in a meaningful way. For me, I focus less on breaking down every aspect of the book and more on what gems most resonated with me.
This process also helps me move from passive to active reading. The Learning Pyramid, developed by the National Training Laboratory, ranks learning from passive to active learning. And applies a retention rate across all key learning types. Reading is highly passive at a 10% retention rate, with only lectures scoring lower at 5%. The highest-ranking retention rates come from teaching at 90%. Doing scores 75% and discussion, 50%.
So, whether it’s joining a book club or creating your content, how are you making your reading active?
9. Mornings
Some people are morning people. Some are night people.
Until I started to value my sleep health, I used to think I was both. I loved extra early mornings and very late nights. Not a great combination. Now, I’ve fully embraced my morning person mode.
Research into human sleep patterns supports the idea of you being either a “lark” or an “owl”. Larks go to bed early and wake up early. Their peak performance is in the morning. Owls go to bed late and wake up late and their peak performance is in the evening and night. These differences are influenced by environment, lifestyle factors or genetics.
Circadian rhythms are internal biological clocks that regulate various bodily functions, including sleep-wake cycles. Often, people tell me they fall asleep a few pages into reading, so they struggle to create the habit. When I read later at night, this is me too. When I read in the morning, this is rarely the case. So, ask yourself, what is your best reading time? This doesn’t mean you can’t read at the opposite end of your preference, too. But, perhaps you can use your less optimal time to read a different kind of book or break down an extra large reading challenge into more manageable pieces. This is how I read the Bible.
10. Mute
In his book Keep Going, Austin Kleon says:
“Airplane mode is not just a setting on your phone: It can be a whole way of life.”
Positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi popularised the concept of ‘flow’. This mental state is achieved when you’re completely immersed in an activity. It’s said to take anywhere between 10-20 minutes to enter. It can last for 30 minutes or even hours.
To help maintain my flow state, I leave my phone in flight mode for my morning reading. I sit back and relax, enjoying the distraction-free bliss before the rest of the world wakes up.
If you love reading as much as I do, or prefer someone else to simply share top takeaways for you, check out my weekly book review blogs.