The Closet Shelf I Called My Library: The Art of Exceptional Reading

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I was earning $11.09 an hour in a call center cubicle when my coworker Arnold walked in and slapped a CD set on my desk.

"Paul," he said, "you've got to listen to these."

It was The Art of Exceptional Living by Jim Rohn, a multimillionaire from Idaho. I'd never heard of him. I'd never heard of personal development, either.

I played those CDs on the drive between my cubicle and our 1984 single-wide trailer, back and forth, day after day. Here was a wealthy, funny, healthy man telling me how his most successful friends lived. And one thing he said stuck with me. They read. Read, read, read. They're so curious, he said. They just have to know.

Then he gave a piece of advice I took literally. Walk into a wealthy person's home, he said, and you'll usually find a library. And if you don't have a room big enough to call a library, clean off a shelf.

So I did. I bought books at thrift stores, stacked them on the little closet shelf in our trailer, and called it my library.

Years later I recorded a full training on everything what that shelf taught me. It's called The Art of Exceptional Reading. Watch it here, or keep scrolling for the short version and my top 10 book list.

Here's the funny part. I had a business degree. I studied hard and got good grades. As far as I was concerned, I'd already read every book I needed to read.

That degree was earning me $11.09 an hour.

Jim had a line for that: "Formal education will make you a living. Self-education can make you a fortune."

I was dumb enough, or humble enough, to believe him. I started reading every day and never stopped. About ten years later I was completely financially free, and today I work because I want to, not because I have to. Reading didn't do all of that by itself. But I can't picture any of it happening without that closet shelf.

When someone tells me they don't like to read, or they're not a good reader, I ask how they read.

Most of the time, the answer is some variation of this.

Lying in bed, in the morning or at night.

(or some other haphazard method.)

That beats not reading. But it's passive reading, and passive reading is hard to fall in love with.

Mortimer Adler explains the difference in How to Read a Book (one of the books Jim recommended) with a baseball game. The author is the pitcher. You're the catcher. The author can throw a perfect strike, but if the catcher isn't paying attention, the ball clips the edge of the glove and rolls away. Reading only works when both of you are in the game.

I love audiobooks too. But the late Bob Proctor taught me something at a seminar in San Diego that changed how I use them. When a line in an audio program sends your mind off on a tangent, the recording keeps going without you. With a book, you can stop, chase the thought as far as you want, and pick up right where you left off. You don't miss a thing.

There's a bigger reason I read every day, and it took me years to understand it.

Jim Rohn talked about a study of prison inmates that found a strong link between a small vocabulary and crime. That didn't make sense to me until I studied neuro-linguistic programming, and learned that each of us carries a map of the world inside our heads. The map isn't the world. But the richer your map, the more choices you can see when life gets hard.

If you don't read, the only thing building your map is your own experience, and one person's experience is small. Books let you borrow everyone else's. The people who made it, the people who didn't, and the people who started with a lot less than you.

So the next time the voice in your head says "That's too big. I can't do that," you'll have an answer ready: someone who did something bigger.

That's what books have been for me. Windows. Each good one lets a little more light into the house. (I told the story of the first window that opened for me in The Pair of Glasses That Changed My Life.)

Here's the routine I'd hand you if you want to fall in love with reading.

1. Give it 30 minutes, every day. Make it sacred time. Time invested in you that you don't skip.
2. Sit at a desk. Upright and ready to learn, not curled up in bed.
3. Turn on a good light so your eyes aren't fighting the page.
4. Read with a pen or a highlighter. Underline what hits you. Write in the margins. Adler says to mark up your books, and he's right. It's your book.
5. Come to terms with the author. If a word or an idea doesn't make sense, stop and look it up before moving on. Otherwise you're dropping the ball.
6. Ask "so what?" Is this true? Where have I seen it in my own life? Where would I disagree? That's how an idea moves off the page and into what you believe.
7. Run your finger under the line. I picked this up from Evelyn Wood's speed reading book. It made me faster, but the real win was focus.
8. Say it back in your own words. I use voice dictation on my phone to summarize what I just read. If I can't explain it, I didn't catch it.
9. Put on some classical music if it helps you settle in.
10. Share what you learn. Talk it over with a friend, join a group, or teach one idea you picked up that day. When people thank you for a good idea, you'll want to go find another one.

One of the first business opportunities I joined handed me a recommended reading list, and I'm so thankful it did. Many of the books below were on it. Reading them one by one felt like water to my dehydrated soul.

If you're wondering where to begin, start at number one and see if you can get through all ten.

The thing that kept me reading more than anything else was other people. When books started changing my life, I started a daily mastermind and invited people to study one book with me. Knowing they'd show up made me read ahead, and their ideas made every book better.

We've kept that going for about 14 years. Today it's the Grow Rich Mastermind, live every weekday at 9 AM Eastern, with a replay if you miss it.

If you'd like a group to read with, grab my free Grow Rich Mastermind Collection and join us here. It comes with restored audio editions of Think and Grow Rich, The Science of Getting Rich and more. Pull up a chair, and bring a pen.