On Reading And Diminishing Returns

I have been thinking about setting a minimum amount of daily reading. It’s easy enough to read as much as I want, so long as I finish at least one chapter, but a persistent feeling weighs on my mind: that I am not doing enough with my time. Following the principle I learned from The ONE Thing—that one activity should receive intense focus—and coupled with my inability to think of anything else productive to do right now, I’ve concluded that I must read a lot. I need to read enough to ensure my rate is at least on par with most successful people in this country.

The question is: how much would that be? Some research suggests that reading ten books per year would put me in the 80th percentile of readers, but that is surely not enough. If I want to be in the 80th percentile of readers who are highly successful in life, I’d likely need to be closer to twenty books. Given my current circumstances—being terribly behind in life and intent on catching up and getting ahead—I decided on at least thirty books. This is an easy enough target since reading is my main activity.

Some quick calculations yield that thirty pages per day would put me where I want to be in terms of reading volume. I will likely read more than this, but it is nice to have a concrete figure that assures me I have at least done enough.

The idea of diminishing returns has been drilled into my head because I have spent so many hours playing Dark Souls and Elden Ring. In those games, your character’s stats have soft caps where investing further won’t give you as much value as previous investments. The idea, then, is to build oneself up first in a general sense, investing a little into everything while it yields strong returns. Then, once everything has been decently built up, further investment is placed into the area one wishes to specialize in.

I have spent much of my life conversing with a combination of highly successful and utterly worthless people. The intense contrast—seeing someone complain that their life is over for one reason or another, then seeing another person exclaim that high quality is actually the norm—is a little mind-bending. I have chosen not to give up on life, I know that. But success, in my view, must be total. There are no half-successes in my mind. I am not the sort that settles.

The result is that I must find a way to utilize my time well, such that I build myself up in every aspect without overinvesting into one area so much that I prematurely lean into specialization. The nice thing about reading is that it is almost always productive, so long as I pick the right books.