Steve Siebold is the author of How Rich People Think, in which he explains that he was a broke university student who didn’t know how he was going to pay for college. His career as a millionaire, and later as a writer, began with an interview with a very rich man.
Siebold tells how, at that moment, he decided he wanted to be rich. But he realised that he wouldn’t find the keys to wealth in his university business classes, where the professors themselves often spoke badly of great entrepreneurs and used the word “luck” to explain the success of the richest people.
That led Siebold to follow the path that Napoleon Hill took in his day, and he ended up interviewing more than 1,200 of the richest people in the world, looking for the common pattern that took them all to wealth.
And the truth is that there are many differences between the rich and the poor, just as the rich think in one way and everyone else in a very different one.
But over his years of research, he clearly observed one thing that all the rich people he interviewed had in common, just as he found that most poor people have something else in common.
Practically all millionaires have educated themselves through reading. Siebold discovered something that by now shouldn’t be a secret to us: you can recognise the home of any multimillionaire businessperson by a room with an extensive library, holding the books they have used to acquire the knowledge they’ve applied to their personal development, their industry and their company.
But not just any kind of reading will do.
Siebold found a common pattern: most of these multimillionaires spent their reading time on productive reading. That means books that teach you to improve in every area and, above all, lots of biographies of great people, because there’s no better way to become great than to imitate the greats.
The rich spent more time reading than watching television. In fact, according to Siebold, 80% of the rich watch no more than an hour of television a day, and it’s often the news rather than entertainment programmes.
Siebold believes this small difference is decisive for success, because he also found that more than 80% of the poor and middle class watch television for more than an hour a day, often junk TV.
It’s not that poverty is linked to the number of hours we spend watching television, but not wasting time on TV and being a voracious reader are very much associated with people’s wealth.
Siebold says many people console themselves by saying that they do read, but often what they read is novels and entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that kind of reading should come once you’ve finished your productive reading.
It’s not surprising, considering that Warren Buffett says he spends 80% of his working day reading, and the other 20% applying all the knowledge he has already acquired.
Siebold’s study would seem to confirm the old saying:
“Wealth is measured by the size of your library; poverty by the size of your television.”
And reading isn’t just the habit of reading: it brings with it the habit of discovering and learning, curiosity, and the different points of view of hundreds of authors. That’s why it’s said that voracious readers tend to gain the experience of a thousand lives, while everyone else often struggles to understand the meaning of their own.
Featured image: Warren LeMay from Cincinnati, OH, United States, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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